Chapter 2 - The Audit of a Marriage
By nine o'clock the following morning, the sky over Baltimore had turned a greasy, sulfurous grey. The humidity was ninety percent, and the rain hung in the air like a heavy curtain.
I sat at the dining table in my own home—a three-bedroom split-level in Ellicott City that Ryan and I had bought eight years ago. The house was deathly quiet. The grandfather clock in the foyer ticked with a dry, mechanical rhythm that felt like a pulse in an empty room.
I had spent two hours searching Ryan’s home office on the second floor.
On the surface, his desk was an altar to orderly success. A high-end iMac sat beside two leather-bound planners, a brass lamp, and framed photos of us from our vacation to Maine three summers ago. In the photo, Ryan was laughing, his arm draped over my shoulder, his bright blue eyes crinkling at the corners. He looked like the man I had fallen in love with at a USO charity run in 2011—a man who cried at weddings and fixed my father’s lawnmower without being asked.
Now, looking at that photo, I felt an intense, physical nausea.
I pulled out the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. It was locked with a heavy cylinder deadbolt.
Instead of searching for a key, I walked down to the garage, retrieved my tactical pry bar, brought it back upstairs, and jammed the steel wedge into the frame. With one sharp, violent thrust of my body weight, the lock snapped with a sound like a pistol shot.
The drawer popped open.
Inside were four black plastic hard drives, three thick manila folders marked Vance Logistics LLC, and a red leather notebook bound with an elastic strap.
I opened the red notebook first.
It wasn't a diary. It was an inventory.
Page after page was filled with Ryan’s precise, narrow handwriting. But it didn't list computer equipment or client billings. It listed shipping container serial numbers, dates, berth assignments at the Port of Baltimore, and dollar amounts written in code.
July 14, 2021 — Bay 4 — Pier 9 — $45,000 (Cleared) October 3, 2021 — Bay 12 — Pier 3 — $60,000 (Cleared) March 22, 2022 — Bay 2 — Pier 7 — $110,000 (Hold - G. V. cleared)
G. V. Garrett Vance.
I sat back in the office chair, the red notebook heavy in my hands.
My husband wasn't a software consultant. Or rather, his software company was a ghost—a clean, tax-paying shell used to route money through municipal contract bids. His real business was logistics manipulation. He was using access codes and port schedules to bypass customs inspections for specialized cargo coming through the Patapsco River shipping channels.
And Garrett was using his position in the State Attorney's office to clear the legal red tape whenever an inspection flag was raised.
I opened the second manila folder. It contained bank statements from a private institution in the Cayman Islands under the name Nightingale Maritime Holdings.
The final balance recorded three weeks ago was $4.8 million.
My phone rang on the desk, shattering the silence. The caller ID showed Johns Hopkins Bayview.
"Hello?" I answered instantly.
"Lieutenant Colonel Reed?" It was the floor nurse. "Your mother is awake and stable, but there is a gentleman here from the Baltimore County Police Department—Detective Vance."
"Detective who?" I stood up so fast my chair rattled against the floorboards.
"Detective Thomas Vance," the nurse said, sounding confused. "He says he's Ryan Vance's cousin. He has a court order to secure your mother's personal effects from her home for the assault investigation."
"Do not let him near her!" I shouted into the receiver. "Do not hand over a single item! I am twenty minutes away!"
I slammed the phone down, grabbed my coat, and bolted down the stairs.
As I opened the front door to head for my car, a white delivery van pulled into my driveway, blocking my sedan completely.
The driver’s side door opened, and a broad-shouldered man in a grey mechanic's jumpsuit stepped out. He was carrying a clipboard, but his right hand was tucked deep inside the front pocket of his jacket.
"Mrs. Vance?" he asked, his voice low and gravelly.
"I am Lieutenant Colonel Reed," I said, stepping onto the porch, my hand dropping instinctively to the holster at my hip—though I was currently off-duty and unarmed. "You're blocking my driveway."
"I have a delivery from your husband's office," the man said. He didn't look at my face; his eyes were scanning the quiet suburban street behind me. "He said you’d be expecting the red book."
The red notebook was currently tucked into the waistband of my trousers beneath my jacket.
"My husband is in police custody," I said, taking two steps back toward the door frame. "And you have three seconds to get that vehicle off my property before I flag the base patrol down the street."
The man didn't move. A thin, grim smile touched his lips.
"Garrett told him you'd be difficult," he said softly. "The old lady didn't talk, Kelsey. But if you start reading things you don't understand, people are going to get hurt. Real hurt."
Before he could take another step toward the porch, a dark grey Ford Explorer pulled up onto the curb behind the van with its sirens blaring once—a short, sharp YELP.
Detective Miller—the lead investigator from the Catonsville precinct—stepped out, his badge gleaming on his belt.
"Is there a problem here, Colonel?" Miller called out, his hand hovering over his sidearm.
The man in the mechanic’s jumpsuit didn't hesitate. He spun around, jumped back into the white van, slammed the door, and threw the vehicle into reverse, tearing over my lawn and spraying mud across the sidewalk as he sped away into the traffic.
Detective Miller didn't pursue. He walked up my driveway, his boots crunching on the wet gravel, his eyes fixed on me.
May you like
"Who was that?" Miller asked.
"That," I said, pulling the red notebook from my waistband and holding it out to him, "was the reason my husband tried to murder my mother last night. And you need to look at this before Garrett Vance wipes the court server clean."
