He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 183

Chapter 183

Zara’s POV

The control had been an illusion.

I understood this at two-seventeen in the morning, sitting in my office with the screen in front of me and the unknown caller’s voice still sitting in my ear from the call that had ended forty minutes age, running the calculation I should have run before I scheduled the photographs for six a.m.

The calculation was simple.

I had released ma fabricated story.

Fabricated stories required infrastructure…. accounts, devices, methods of distribution that existed somewhere and had been created by someone and left traces….

I had believed I was motivated enough to build it correctly.

Someone else was apparently motivated enough to find it.

The comments questioning the photographs’ origin had multiplied. Someone with a following had posted a side-by-side comparison of the cropped versions and what appeared to be an uncropped original…. I didn’t know where they had found the uncropped original, which was itself information about how quickly this had moved beyond my management.

Another account had screenshotted the manufactured timeline and circled three timestamp inconsistencies.

I refreshed.

Three thousand notes.

I put the phone face down.

Picked it up again.

The unknown caller had said: Mutual interest.

Had said: I think we should meet….

Had not said who they were, what they wanted beyond the oblique reference to Maya’s position, or how they had obtained the information that the shooter was dead and had been planning to talk to the police before he stopped being available to talk to

anyone.

That last part….

I kept returning to that last part.

The shooter had been out of the country

I had believed out of the country was safe…. not permanently safe, not immune from extradition or investigation…

Apparently out of the country was not where he was anymore.

Not hiding, the caller had said.

Gone.

I paced to the window.

I thought about Mason.

About the corridor at the hospital where I had overheard him and he had stepped forward with his slow smile and his how about

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We work together….

I had said no.

I had said no because I didn’t trust him and because working with Mason Hargrove was the kind of choice that traded one problem for a larger one.

I had been correct about that

But the unknown caller on the phone forty minutes ago was not Mason.

The unknown caller had resources Mason might not have…..

The unknown caller knew that the shooter was dead, although I didn’t hire him to shoot….

The unknown caller had intervened… their word, with all of its implications, before the shooter’s evidence reached anyone official.

Whoever this was, they were not operating at Mason’s level

They were operating at a level I hadn’t mapped.

My phone vibrated.

I looked at it.

Unknown number… the same configuration as the call, the same untraceable quality.

A message.

A single photograph.

I opened it.

The image was clear.

A man…

I recognised him from the one photograph I had been shown when the arrangement was being made, the photograph that had

been intended to establish identity and had been destroyed after I confirmed it. The face. The build.

Marcus Webb.

Lying on the ground.

Not asleep.

I pressed my back against the window.

The phone was in my hand.

The photograph was on the screen

The second message arrived before I had fully processed the first…

He was planning to talk to the police. He had enough evidence to prove you were the one who hired him.

I read it.

My hands were not steady….

I had not noticed them becoming unsteady and now they were and there was nothing to do about it except hold the phone tighter, which I did, which helped with neither the steadiness nor the information on the screen.

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Marcus Webb was dead.

Someone had killed Marcus Webb before he could talk to the police.

Someone who had known he was going to talk to the police

Someone who had access to that information and the resources to act on it and who had then sent me a photograph of the result at two in the morning.

The third message arrived…..

Don’t worry. I haven’t given the evidence to the police… yet. If you want to keep your secret buried, come and meet me alone.

I stood at the window for a long time.

I ran the calculation.

Not quickly…. there was no benefit to speed here, and speed was how you made the wrong decision when the right decision required more information than you currently had. I ran it the way I ran everything important, which was from the outside in. What did I know. What did I not know. What were the possible configurations of what I didn’t know. Which configuration was most consistent with the evidence.

What I knew:

Marcus Webb was dead.

The unknown caller had advance knowledge of his death or had caused it.

The unknown caller had evidence connecting me to Marcus Webb…. the payment, presumably, or the communication, or the testimony Marcus had apparently been preparing to give before he was no longer in a position to give it.

The unknown caller had chosen not to take this evidence to the police but to me.

Which meant they wanted something from me

Which meant the evidence was the instrument of leverage rather than the thing itself.

Which meant, for whatever it was worth, that going to the police with what I knew about the caller was not the move they feared from me…. because going to the police would require explaining how I knew the shooter was dead, which would require explaining how I came to be in contact with someone who had that information, which would confirm exactly what Reeves had been working toward for weeks.

The unknown caller had constructed a situation in which my options were limited to two.

Meet them.

Or don’t meet them and wait for the evidence to reach the people it was intended to eventually reach.

I picked up the phone…..

Opened the message thread.

Looked at the photograph one more time

Marcus Webb, who had brought a weapon to a wedding when I had contracted him for disruption.

Marcus Webb, who was now in a photograph on my phone.

I typed one word

Looked at it on the screen.

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Where?

Sent it.

The reply came in under thirty seconds.

Which told me they had been waiting…..

Which told me they had known I would send it.

An address. A time…. tomorrow evening, eight o’clock. A single instruction: Come alone. If you bring anyone, the evidence goes to Reeves before you reach the car park.

I looked at the address

A restaurant I didn’t recognise….. not this city, a location forty minutes out. The kind of place chosen for distance from the things that mattered, where two people could have a conversation in a room where no one was watching for either of them.

Eight o’clock.

Eighteen hours.

I put the phone down.

Sat in the office chair.

P

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Chapter 194

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