I've been doing this work eight years. Before that I spent two tours carrying a rifle for the Canadian Forces. I have caught forty-seven people on bondsmen contracts. I have done twelve private recovery jobs where the paperwork was tighter. I know what a fugitive sounds like. I know the three things they do. They run. They lie. They beg.
She hasn't done any of them. She has asked me not to kill her.
That isn't what a fugitive says.
That's what prey says.
I sit down across from her on the stool and leave the cuff on her. I take my field jacket off and hang it on the peg by the door. I want her to see I am not in a hurry. I am not going to hit her.
"Who do you think sent me?"
Her eyes go to the cuff. Back to my face. "Marcius Voclain."
Right name. My client used it openly in the contract. That proves nothing.
"Why do you think he sent me?"
She takes a breath. It catches. She lets it out. "Because I found a set of flagged transfers in one of his portfolios. Because I told one person at the firm I was going to the RCMP with it. Because that person is dead. The police called it a suicide. It wasn't."
I keep my face still.
The file on my phone says Hazel Mercier is a thirty-one-year-old woman with an untreated psychotic disorder. It says she disappeared from her uncle's private equity firm with proprietary client data during a break from reality. It says the family wants her recovered safely and her laptop secured before she publishes information that will ruin innocent investors.
None of this is true.
"What's on the laptop?"
"Ledger reconstructions. The shell layer. I mapped three years of placement and layering across four accounts. It's in the woodpile. Third row from the bottom, behind the split cedar. Cooler bag inside a plastic bag inside a ziplock."
I say nothing but snort a little.
"I didn't know where else to put it," she says. "It's not funny. I was tired."
"It's a little funny."
She looks at me.
I take the phone out of my jacket. I open the file. I read her the name the client gave me. The birthday. The diagnosis. The family.
She is shaking her head by the second line. "That's not me. I've never seen a therapist. My uncle is in Winnipeg. We don't speak. My birthday is in April." She is talking faster now, the wordscoming in a rush. "He'd need to build that file. He'd have to have someone write it. And you believed it."
"It came with two notarized documents and a court filing. It checked on three databases. I don't take family contracts without paper."
"Then the paper is fake."
"I know."
She stops.
"I know," I say again.
She puts her free hand over her mouth. Her eyes fill but don't spill. She gets them back.
Here is where I am supposed to feel the contract click over into something else. It doesn't click. It has already clicked. It clicked four minutes ago when she asked me a question I have never been asked by a person I was paid to recover. Her hair is badly dyed at the roots. Her wrist in my cuff is so thin my thumb and middle finger would close around it with ease. Her free hand is pressed flat on the table. The nail beds are pale.
I stand up. I take the key out of my pocket. I unlock the cuff from her wrist. The metal comes off. I drop it on the table.
She stares at her own wrist like she's surprised it's hers.
