Chapter 5 - The Invoice
A sudden ringing in my ears drowned out the beeping monitors of the hallway.
"Apex Cold Storage?" I asked, my mouth dry. "That's impossible. Apex is a regional service contractor. We fix industrial walk-ins and supermarket freezers. We don't do logistics."
"Well, someone driving a white Ford Transit with an Apex logo spent six hours sitting at the corner of Oak and Elm today," Vance said, pulling a folded photocopy from her pocket. "Traffic camera caught it twice. Once at 8:00 AM, and again right before you arrived and jumped the fence."
"I took my own truck," I said, pointing toward the parking lot. "My personal Dodge Ram. I came straight from the job site at the grocery depot in Henderson when Sarah missed the third pickup call."
"We checked your GPS logs. Your truck checks out," Vance said, her eyes drilling into mine. "Which means someone you work with was watching that house. Did Sarah ever mention any problems with your company?"
"We’ve been divorced for five years, Detective. She didn't care where I worked as long as the child support cleared on the first of the month."
"Then why did we find three invoices from Apex Cold Storage inside the leather notebook in her basement?"
My chest tightened. "What kind of invoices?"
"Serial numbers for industrial vacuum pump valves and eight commercial freon condensers," Vance said quietly. "Shipped directly to a storage locker off Highway 9. The account was opened under your name, Mark."
"I never ordered equipment to a private locker!" I snapped, my voice rising enough that an orderly glanced over. "Apex doesn't allow personal drop-offs. Everything goes through the central yard in Newark!"
Inside the ER room, the heart monitor hooked to Emily gave a sudden, rapid spike in tone.
I turned around.
Emily wasn’t sitting on the bed anymore.
She was standing on her trembling legs, pointing a shaking finger toward the glass doors leading to the emergency room ambulance bay.
A tall man in a navy blue mechanic’s jacket was standing on the other side of the double doors, peering inside. Across the left breast of his jacket was the bright blue embroidered logo: APEX INDUSTRIAL.
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The man looked directly at Emily, tapped his wristwatch, and slipped backward into the darkness of the parking structure.
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