Chapter 2 - The Restaurant Locked Itself
The kitchen disappeared into darkness.
Jack shouted.
“Dad!”
Mark pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight.
The beam caught Lucy trying to stand.
Her legs folded under her.
Jack dropped beside her and tore the tape from her mouth.
Lucy gasped.
“Back door.”
“What?” Mark asked.
“Diane’s locking the building.”
A metal crash echoed from the dining room.
The security shutter had reached the floor.
Diane’s voice came from somewhere near the kitchen exit.
“You don’t understand what she did.”
Mark swung the flashlight.
Diane was gone.
“Diane!”
No answer.
Lucy grabbed his sleeve.
“Don’t follow her.”
Mark stared at the woman he had once been married to for fourteen years.
“You’re alive.”
She looked at him with exhausted disbelief.
“That’s what you have?”
“I thought you left.”
“You thought I left Jack?”
Mark had no answer.
That silence cut deeper than shouting.
Jack started working at the knots around Lucy’s wrists.
“Mom, where were you?”
Lucy touched his hair.
“Trying to get back to you.”
“For seven months?”
Her eyes filled.
“Yes.”
A door slammed somewhere in the restaurant.
Mark finally moved.
“We need police.”
“No.”
He stared at Lucy.
“No?”
“Not until we know which police.”
Jack looked between them.
“What does that mean?”
Lucy lowered her voice.
“It means the first officer who helped Diane was wearing a badge.”
Mark felt the floor drop beneath him.
“What officer?”
Lucy pulled her hands free as the last knot loosened.
“Seven months ago, the night everybody says I disappeared, I came here to confront Diane.”
“About what?”
“She was stealing from the restaurant.”
Mark frowned.
“This restaurant was hers before we met.”
“No. The building was hers. The business wasn’t.”
Lucy’s voice trembled.
“She was running cash through fake catering invoices and using your construction company’s vendor accounts to hide it.”
Mark stopped breathing.
“My company?”
“You signed whatever she put in front of you.”
He remembered invoices.
Permits.
Supplier forms.
Diane always said she was helping with bookkeeping because Lucy had “made such a mess” during the divorce.
Lucy continued.
“When I found the transfers, I made copies. Diane asked me to meet her here. I thought she wanted to settle it quietly.”
“What happened?”
“A police cruiser was waiting behind the restaurant.”
Jack whispered, “They took you?”
Lucy nodded.
“One officer handcuffed me. Diane said I was unstable and had threatened her.”
Mark’s jaw tightened.
“Name.”
Lucy looked toward the dark doorway.
“Detective Aaron Pike.”
Mark knew the name.
Pike had handled Lucy’s missing-person report.
The same detective who told Mark, three weeks after she vanished, that Lucy had purchased a bus ticket to Arizona.
Then a red emergency light flickered on above the kitchen door.
A figure stood beneath it.
Detective Pike.
Gun in hand.
— — —
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