The Last Thing He Told Me

“And you were right,” Jules says. “It does say Lady Paul on the side.”

She doesn’t say what it is, of course. She doesn’t say it’s a piggy bank that she is at our house to retrieve—Bailey’s piggy bank—though it would sound pretty innocuous if she did say that out loud.

I hadn’t imagined it. The small note on the bottom of the last page of Owen’s will, listing the conservator, L. Paul. It was also the name on the side of the blue piggy bank in Bailey’s room—LADY PAUL, written in black, beneath the bow. The same blue piggy bank Owen had taken when we evacuated, the one I found him with at the hotel bar in the middle of the night. I chocked it up to his being sentimental. But I was wrong. He had taken the piggy bank because it was something he needed to keep safe.

“But there is a bit of an issue,” Jules says. “I can’t open it.”

“What do you mean you can’t open it?” I say. “Just smash it with a hammer.”

“No, you don’t understand, there’s a safe inside the piggy bank,” she says. “And the thing’s made of steel. I’m going to have to find someone who can crack a safe. Any ideas?”

“Not off the top of my head,” I say.

“K, I’ll deal with it,” Jules says, “but have you checked your newsfeed? They indicted Jordan Maverick.”

Jordan is the COO of The Shop, Avett’s number two and Owen’s counterpart on the business side of the firm. He was newly divorced and had been spending a little bit of time at our place. I invited Jules over for dinner, hoping they’d hit it off. They didn’t. She thought he was boring. I thought there were worse things to be—or maybe I just didn’t see him that way.

“For the record,” she says. “No more setups.”

“Understood,” I say.

At a different moment this would have been all the encouragement I needed to ask her about her colleague Max, to make a joke about whether he was the other reason she wasn’t interested in setups. But, in this moment, all it does is remind me that Max has an inside source. One that can potentially help us in regard to Owen.

“Has Max heard anything beyond Jordan?” I ask. “Has he heard anything about Owen?”

Bailey tilts he

r head, toward me.

“Not specifically,” she says. “But his source over at the FBI did say the software just became functional.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

Except I can guess what that means. It means Owen probably thought he was out of the woods. He probably thought any contingency plan he needed to create could be put on the backburner again. It means that when Jules called Owen and said they were coming in, he couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe that this close to being safe, he was about to be caught.

“Max is texting me,” Jules says. “I’ll call you after I find a safecracker, okay?”

“I bet those are some words you thought you’d never say.”

She laughs. “No kidding.”

I say goodbye and turn to Bailey. “That was Jules,” I say. “I’m having her look into something at the house.”

She nods. She doesn’t ask if I have anything to report on her father. She knows I’d tell her if I did.

“Any progress?” I say.

“I’m on H,” she says. “No hits yet.”

“H is progress.”

“Yeah. Unless he’s not on the list.”

My phone rings again. I think it’s going to be Jules calling back, but the number is one I don’t recognize—one with a 512 area code. Texas.

“Who’s that?” she says.

I shake my head that I don’t know. Then I accept the call. The woman on the other end of the line is already talking to me. She is midway through a sentence that, apparently, she thought I was there to hear.