Chapter 59 Hailey
Hailey
She couldn’t bear to listen to Mack’s conversation with Tilda.
The desperate questions, the sad pauses, the stunted language of loss—it was a pit Hailey could not afford to fall into.
She was standing in the dining room window, looking out at the driveway zigzagged with tire marks, when the landline rang.
The unfamiliar sound coming up through the wall made her jump; she had to sprint down to Mack’s office to find the handset.
It was Colin, from National City Bank. He wanted to talk about some unusual activity: an international wire transfer for—Colin lightly cleared his throat—ten million dollars had come through to Hailey and Mack’s checking account in the last several hours, but it had been refused clearance on anti-money-laundering regulations.
Hailey heard Colin take a deep breath, and then, like he was reading from a script, he assured her that this was standard practice for such a large amount.
Colin would need them to come into the branch, if that might be possible, to arrange proper documentation for this payment and the smaller payments that had already been cleared from Sunshine Enterprises.
Once this had been done, he said, they could ask the sender in—he coughed—Liberia to resend the money.
By the time he’d finished, Colin had lost his polish and sounded as freaked out as Hailey felt.
They set up a meeting for three o’clock the following day.
Hailey would have to tell Mack, and soon: she could hear his footsteps, the tap of Gulliver’s nails behind him.
Mack came into the room holding out his phone, and for a minute she thought he wanted her to speak to Tilda.
But no, he was showing her an email. His hand was shaking so badly that Hailey could barely focus her eyes on the screen.
She caught the subject line first because it was in all caps: I WILL DESTROY YOU.
When she took the phone from him, she saw that the email had been sent from Mack’s address.
He’d cc’d himself, too, but the primary addressee was Richard Ashman @ Ashman Dental.
“What is this?”
“An email from me that I didn’t write,” Mack said. “Someone’s trying to set me up. Make it look like I have a motive to kill this guy.”
“But Richard Ashman is fine.” Hailey’s voice cracked as her eyes flew over the rambling threats that Mack had supposedly sent to this man and his family. “You said he was fine.”
“He was,” Mack told her. “This morning he was. But I’ve . . . now he knows who I am. He called the police on me, so the police know who I am.”
“So?”
“So now if anything happens to Richard Ashman—”
“Why would anything happen to him?” But even before she finished the sentence, Hailey had worked it out.
“The voice on the phone said there are others,” Mack said in a whisper. “Others like us. That if I didn’t do it, someone else would.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Yeah.” Mack looked utterly defeated. “I do.”