THE LAST WITNESS
Marcus Webb
A good detective is someone who has made peace with the fact that most of what they do is look for what people are hiding. Including themselves.
Webb || Alliance || Truth || Investigation
He was already there when she arrived at the conservatory, standing on the path with his hands in his coat pockets and the collar turned up against the wind, looking at the glass structure with the expression of a man thinking about something other than horticulture. The Lincoln Park Conservatory was one of Sara’s favorite places in the city — the Victorian greenhouse that had been here since 1895, full of ferns and palms and the specific tropical warmth of a building designed to be elsewhere, to be somewhere more generous than Illinois. She walked toward Webb and he watched her approach with the grey eyes that were doing their professional thing — taking in information, organizing it, deciding something. “You talked to Delaney,” he said. She stopped beside him. “This morning,” she said. “Briefly. He’ll have called someone.” “Yes,” he said. “He called the Superintendent’s office. Twenty minutes after your meeting, per his phone record.” She looked at him. “You have his phone records.” “I’ve had his phone records for three months,” Webb said. He reached into his pocket and produced a folder — thin, folded, the kind of thing you could carry without it being visible. He held it out. She opened it. The top sheet was a summary of Delaney’s recent calls, with three numbers highlighted. One of them she recognized immediately: the law firm of Cole and Associates, which was the firm where James worked. “When did that call happen?” she said. Her voice was absolutely steady. “The fourteenth,” Webb said. “One day before Thomas Greer was attacked.” She closed the folder. She pressed her thumb against the bridge of her nose for a moment. “James,” she said. “Or his father,” Webb said. “Henry Cole is a principal at that firm.” “Yes,” she said. “He is.” She looked at the conservatory glass, at the ferns visible inside, at the warm yellow light that was doing its best in the November grey. “You’ve been building this case for three months,” she said. “Independently.” “Not entirely,” he said. “Thomas Greer and I were in contact. He was building his case. I was building mine from the police side. We were feeding each other information through a channel we trusted.” “What channel?” “A federal contact,” he said. “FBI. There’s a federal investigation that parallels this one. Has been for four years. The US Attorney’s office has been looking at Henry Cole’s network since a financial whistleblower came forward in 2020. The problem is the evidence has always been thin — the money movement was sophisticated enough that making criminal charges stick required testimony from someone inside, or physical evidence that couldn’t be explained away.” “Greer found Noah Banks,” she said. Webb looked at her. “You found Banks,” he said. “You went to Stateville.” “Yes,” she said. “How—” “I’ve been watching you,” he said. “Since the night in the alley. Not because I thought you were a suspect — I never thought you were a suspect, for the record. Because I thought you were someone who was going to start pulling at threads whether or not I was with you, and I wanted to be close enough to intervene if things went badly.” She looked at him. “You could have told me,” she said. “Three days ago.” “I needed to know who else knew you were pulling at threads,” he said. “Delaney. Your therapist — Petra Ross, who has been working as an informal informant for Delaney’s network for two years, which I know because we got her phone records last month. And whoever made that call to your phone at three a.m. on Thursday.” She went still. “You know about that call.” “I’ve been monitoring the numbers associated with the case,” he said. “The call came from a prepaid device. I haven’t traced the origin yet. Do you know who it was?” “No,” she said. “But they knew about the connection between 2009 and the current situation. They told me Delaney arranged the attack. They said someone in the DA’s office was compromised.” “They’re right about both things,” Webb said. “Your supervisor, ADA Hartwell, has been taking money from the Cole network for four years. He wouldn’t have known about you specifically, but if you’d brought any of this through official channels, it would have been managed before it went anywhere.” She thought about the gap in her memory. “The night I was in the alley,” she said. “The memory gap. The three phone calls.” “The calls were made from your phone,” Webb said. “But the SIM card in your phone was temporarily swapped. It’s a sophisticated hack — it requires physical access to the phone for about thirty seconds. The calls Greer received that night that appeared to come from your number were made from a device that was cloned to your number. Greer called back because he thought it was you. Whoever answered told him to come to the alley.” She stared at him. “They lured him,” she said. “Using my number.” “Yes,” he said. “And they placed the memory gap — which isn’t a gap, exactly, it’s a real experience you had — by dosing you. We think a sedative was added to something you consumed. You were at a restaurant that night.” She thought. “James and I went out for dinner,” she said. “Early. Before he went to his work dinner.” “What did you eat and drink?” “Sparkling water,” she said. “Just water. I’m pregnant.” “Sparkling water is easy to dose,” Webb said. “A benzodiazepine in a small enough dose to produce procedural amnesia without full unconsciousness. You would have appeared normal. You would have gone about your evening, made phone calls you don’t remember, been in the parking garage — which is five minutes from your apartment — at 11:14 without knowing why you were there. It would have worn off by the time you found Greer in the alley, which is why you were lucid for the emergency call.” She felt the specific cold of understanding something enormous. “James is the one who had physical access to my phone,” she said. Webb was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know if it was James directly,” he said. “It could have been a third party, acting on instruction. I don’t want to—” “Don’t manage me,” she said, sharply. “You’ve been doing this for seven years. You know what proximity means in a conspiracy case.” He looked at her. He had the expression of someone delivering something he had been building toward and was not looking forward to. “James Cole has been receiving payments from his father’s network,” he said. “Disbursed as consulting fees through a subsidiary company. They started eight months ago. When you were six months pregnant.” She looked at the conservatory. At the warm yellow light inside the glass. The ferns. The palms, doing their tropical best in an Illinois November. “Okay,” she said. Her voice was entirely steady. She was the most functional she had ever been in a moment of personal disaster, which was something she noted about herself without pride — it was simply who she was, the person who got clearer as the situation got worse. “What do we have,” she said. “And what do we need.” They sat on a bench in the November park and talked for an hour, two people building a legal strategy in the cold, going through what was there and what was missing and what still needed to be done. By the time they were done, she had a plan. It was not a complete plan. It had three significant gaps that required things she did not yet have. But it was a direction, and direction was what she needed to sustain the pace she was going to have to maintain until this was finished. She stood. She held out her hand. He shook it. “Why are you clean?” she said. “Most good reasons for being clean aren’t dramatic,” he said. “I just have a dead father who was a good cop and a son I don’t want to look at me the way I’d have to look at myself if I wasn’t.” She nodded. That was enough. “The baby,” he said, looking at her. “When?” “Three weeks,” she said. “We have three weeks.” He looked at her steadily. “We’ll be done before then,” he said. “We will,” she said. She walked back to her car. She drove home. James was in the kitchen when she came in, making something that smelled good, and he turned with the warm easy smile that she had loved for six years and she looked at him and she thought: I don’t know how much you know. I don’t know if you chose this. I don’t know if the part of you that loves me is real or is part of something else. I am going to find out. And until I find out, I am going to be exactly who I have always been. “You were gone all day,” he said. “Cases,” she said. She sat down at the table. He brought her tea without being asked, the specific tea she preferred, with the specific amount of honey. She watched his hands as he set the cup down. She loved his hands. She might always love his hands regardless of what they had done. That was the particular cruelty of proximity — it didn’t wait for the truth to arrive before creating its attachments. She picked up the tea. She drank it. She planned. Three weeks. It would be enough. It had to be enough.