Chapter 5 - The Missing Woman, the Blue Notebook, and a Secret Buried Beneath the Tower
Dileia had never known a twenty-minute drive could feel longer than a lifetime. Julian sat beside her in the back of the car while Holloway coordinated with the police and the neighborhood search volunteers.
“Tell me she's alive,” Dileia said.
“I won't lie to you,” Julian answered. “But we're going to find her.”
The distinction mattered. Dileia hated it and needed it at the same time.
Security footage from the street showed Ruth leaving the apartment alone, wearing her lavender cardigan and carrying a cloth grocery bag. A man approached her at the corner. He did not grab her. He showed her something on his phone, and she followed him into a gray sedan.
Dileia stared at the image until it blurred. “She thought he knew Tommy.”
Holloway paused the footage. The man wore a delivery company jacket. His face was partly concealed, but the logo on the van parked nearby belonged to Meridian Harbor Services.
The ghost company was real enough to own a vehicle.
Police issued an alert. Julian offered the footage and financial records to a detective named Elena Brooks, who accepted the evidence without promising him special treatment. She knew his reputation and made it clear that cooperation did not erase his past.
“I'm not asking you to erase anything,” Julian replied. “I'm asking you to find an elderly woman.”
Dileia heard the strain beneath his calm voice.
At midnight, Ruth's cloth bag was found on a bench near the lakefront. Inside were a package of crackers, a folded bus map, and a small photograph of Tommy as a boy. On the back, Ruth had written an address in shaky pencil: 18 Bellweather Lane.
The address belonged to a church-run day center Ruth had visited years earlier. Dileia remembered Tommy saying his mother sometimes went there when she became confused.
Brooks sent officers. Dileia insisted on coming but agreed to wait outside while they checked the building.
Ruth was found in a quiet reading room, unharmed. The man in the delivery jacket had brought her there and disappeared. Staff believed he was a relative; he had said she needed a safe place to rest.
When Dileia hugged her, Ruth whispered, “He wanted the blue book, sweetheart. I told him Tommy hid it where the lights go out.”
Dileia closed her eyes. Relief came first. Then anger so fierce it made her shake.
At the hospital, a doctor confirmed Ruth had no injuries but recommended observation after the stressful night. Julian arranged transportation, then waited outside the examination room rather than intruding.
“You didn't have to stay,” Dileia said when she found him.
“Yes,” he said. “I did.”
The next day, Dileia returned to the old electrical room with Brooks's authorization and a forensic technician. The building plans showed a redundant emergency-lighting circuit behind the cabinets. Tommy had installed it during his final months of work.
A technician removed a service panel. Behind it sat a sealed metal box wrapped in waterproof tape. Inside was a blue notebook and a flash drive.
The notebook was not an ordinary ledger. Tommy had recorded dates, circuit failures, suspicious nighttime deliveries, and names of people who visited the basement. He had written that he feared the room was being used to conceal records of payments to shell companies.
One entry made Dileia grip the edge of the table.
“Met J.T. about security problem. He said he would investigate.”
Julian read it and frowned. “I never met your husband.”
Dileia searched his face. “Are you sure?”
“I would remember.”
The initials appeared three more times. Then Tommy had written, “J.T. not Julian? Ask again.”
Holloway leaned closer. “Your brother's name was Jonathan Thorne.”
Julian went still.
Jonathan had disappeared from Chicago five years earlier after an attempt to seize control of the family businesses. Julian believed he had fled overseas.
But the flash drive contained recent scans of shipping manifests and a photograph of a man standing beside a Meridian vehicle. He wore sunglasses and a beard. Dileia did not recognize him.
Julian did.
“My brother,” he said.
The room seemed to tilt.
May you like
Jonathan was not merely back.
He had never truly left.
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