He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 167

Chapter 187

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Chapter 167

Maya’s POV

The drive took twenty minutes.

I spent them looking out the passenger window at a city…. A woman at a bus stop scrolling her phone with the absorbed intensity that meant she had found something. Two men outside a coffee shop, one showing the other something on his screen, the other leaning in.

The story was moving.

I sat in the back of the car and let it move and tried to organise what I had read into something I could bring into a room with clear eyes

By the time we arrived, I had not fully managed it.

Reeves was already in the conference room.

The table had been cleared of everything except folders….

“Thank you for coming,” Reeves said.

I sat down across from him.

“Show me,” I said.

He opened the first folder

The documents inside were a mixture of types… official forms, handwritten notes, printed correspondence from an era when printed correspondence was still the primary format. All of it connected to an investigation I knew had existed because I had been told it existed, had been told it had been closed with a finding of natural causes, had spent years accepting the closure because no one had given me a reason not to.

I started reading

Witness statements first. Three of them, from people who had been present at the building the week before my father died. I read each one and noticed what Reeves had already noticed…. the dates were consistent, the names were present, but the substance of each statement had sections that ended abruptly, conclusions that didn’t follow from their preceding sentences, the textual signature of something that had been edited down to its least useful form.

“These are incomplete,” I said.

“Yes,” he said

“Who edited them?”

“The lead investigator at the time signed off on the final versions.” He paused. “The lead investigator retired two months after the case was closed. He died four years ago. We can’t question him, but we can look at what his retirement package included, which is an unusual thing for a public servant at his grade to have received.”

I looked at the statements….

“Someone paid him,” I said.

“Someone paid him,” he confirmed. “We can demonstrate the payment. We can’t yet demonstrate who authorised it. That’s one of the threads we’re currently pulling.”

The second folder was thicker.

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Financial records, but not the kind Carter had been finding older, the records from the period immediately surrounding my father’s death, the kind that existed in the margin between what was officially documented and what was recoverable if you knew where to look and had the institutional access to look there.

Reeves walked me through it section by section.

The corporate network that connected several of the phantom account movements. The way certain transfers had been structured in the days surrounding the meeting between the three families. The gap in the company’s financial documentation during the week after my father died…. not an audit gap, the kind of gap that appeared when records were removed rather than when they were never created.

“How recent is this?” I said, pointing at a transaction date.

“Nine years,” he said.

Nine years.

My father had been dead for nine years.

“How long has this been sitting in a file?” I said.

“The original materials were in storage,” he said. “Archived. Not actively investigated. When I inherited the file and read it, the financial inconsistencies were present but not connected to anything current.” He looked at me.” The files released last night changed that. Some of what was released crosses into the same corporate network. The cross-reference made the connections visible in a way they hadn’t been when I was looking at the historical

material in isolation.”

Daniel Cole.

The man who had been holding Selina’s secrets for eighteen months and had released everything last night after she pulled a gun on him…

In trying to destroy Selina, he had also given Reeves the thread that connected the past to the present.

I thought about the note in the flowers.

You forgot we were supposed to meet up.

Victor Ashworth, sittingere in this city, waiting for me to arrive at a restaurant I had stood him up for

because a

un had been fired in a garden first.

“There’s something else,” Reeves said.

He closed the second folder.

Reached for a third, thinner one, that had been sitting slightly apart from the others.

“This came from the recovered portion of the file,” he said. “”The section that was removed from the active record. We were able to retrieve it through a forensic recovery process that took three weeks, which is why I’ve had it in hand but haven’t been able to act on it until I could understand what I was looking at.”

He opened it….

One document. A single page, from the archive rather than print quality…..

He placed it in front of me.

“Your father arranged a private meeting,” he said. “In the two weeks before he died. Not the meeting we already know about…. not the three-patriarch meeting. A separate one, one on one, arranged through a channel that didn’t appear in the official record.” He paused. “We found evidence of the meeting. We found the location and the

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date. What we didn’t have for a long time was the name of the person he met with.”

I looked at the document.

At the top of the page……

Two names.

My father’s.

And one other.

I read it.

The room was very quiet.

I read the name twice. Then a third time, not because it was unclear… the recovery process had preserved it legibly, the letters crisp enough to be unmistakable but because the mind did that with certain information. Returned to it. Made you look again to confirm that what you had seen on the first reading was what was actually there.

Victor Ashworth.

I sat back in the chair.

The folder in front of me. The recovered document. My father’s name and Victor Ashworth’s name on a building access log from two weeks before Edwin Hargrove died.

Victor Ashworth, who had parked in my space and told me I looked exactly like my father.

Victor Ashworth, who had told me he would only explain if had dinner with him

Victor Ashworth, who had sent flowers to a hospital room with a note that said you forgot we were supposed to meet up.

Victor Ashworth, who had known about the dinner and arranged it and waited at a restaurant I had never arrived at because a shot had been fired in a garden first.

He had been waiting

Not because he had appeared from nowhere….. because he had been in my father’s life nine years ago, had met

discussed in that meeting

with him privately two weeks before he died, and

had been carry had

behe years ago, had met

across nine years, waiting for the right moment or the right person to bring it to.

The flowers were not a coincidence.

The car park was not a coincidence

He had found me deliberately.

He had found me because I was Edwin Hargrove’s daughter and because he had been waiting for someone to come looking for what he knew.

“You know this name,” Reeves said.

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” I said.

“How?”

I told him. The car park. The Bentley. The dinner I hadn’t attended. The flowers. The note. Carter’s identification

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of Victor Ashworth as a former legal adviser connected to the phantom account structure.

Reeves listened without interrupting, making notes in the small, precise handwriting I had come to recognise across several conversations

When I finished, he was quiet for a moment.

“He’s been trying to reach you,” he said.

“Since before the wedding,” I said. “He engineered the car park. He knew my schedule well enough to be in my building on the right day. He gave me a location and a time and I agreed to go and then the wedding happened.”

“And then he sent flowers to the hospital.”

“To let me know he was still here,” I said. “Still waiting.”

Reeves looked at the document.

“Your father trusted him enough to meet with him privately,” he said. “Two weeks before a meeting with Thomas Hargrove and Richard Voss that occurred two days before his death.” He held my gaze. “That makes Ashworth either a conspirator in whatever happened, or the person your father brought his concerns to when he understood what he was standing in the middle of.”

“Or both,” I said.

“Or both,” he agreed. “Which is why I need you to make contact with him.”

I looked at the document.

At

my father’s name in an access log from nine years ago.

At the name beside it.

“He’s been trying to get me to that meeting for weeks,” I said.”

“I know,” Reeves said. “Now I need you to take it”