Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 37: Arrested Part 2

Marcus looked at her with the steady, patient expression of a man who has made his point and is waiting for it to complete its journey, and Diana stood in the kitchen of her own villa holding a phone that may or may not have been carrying software she hadn't put there, and felt the particular, grinding discomfort of a certainty that is being dismantled by its own internal logic.

"I'll prove it," Marcus said. "Give me forty-eight hours and I'll show you exactly where the access came from and who put it there."

Diana looked at him.

The doubt was there now. Not certainty — she was not at certainty in either direction, which was its own uncomfortable condition for a woman who operated best when the numbers balanced — but the reasonable, structural doubt of someone whose own reasoning has produced a question she cannot immediately answer.

She opened her mouth.

The front door opened.

Not knocked. Not announced. Opened with the particular, proprietary force of a woman who had a key and had decided some time ago that the key conferred rights that extended beyond the mechanical act of unlocking a door.

Catherine Morrison came through the entrance hall and into the kitchen with her coat on and her phone in one hand and an expression that had been constructed at high temperature and had not cooled during the drive over.

Behind her, two uniformed police officers filled the kitchen doorway.

They were young — mid-thirties, professional bearing, the contained, watchful posture of people waiting for their role in a situation to become active. One had his hand resting near his belt without touching anything. The other had a notepad.

Catherine pointed at Marcus.

"That's him," she said.

The word him carried everything she had been building since the morning she had opened her checkbook in the villa's study and been refused — every humiliation, every party, every bodyguard on the entrance hall floor, every phone call from Liam, every evening she had spent knowing this man was living in her daughter's house.

"Officers." Her voice was crisp and authoritative and very loud in the kitchen. "That man has been stealing from my daughter's company. Wire transfers. Two of them. Over two hundred thousand dollars." She looked at Marcus with the satisfied, absolute certainty of a woman who has finally found the correct lever. "I want him arrested."

Diana looked at her mother.

Then at the officers.

Then at Marcus.

Marcus stood in the kitchen with his hands at his sides and his expression completely level, and looked at Catherine Morrison and the two officers behind her with the specific, contained composure of a man who has been in considerably more serious situations than a kitchen confrontation and is deciding, with some deliberation, how to respond to this particular one.

He said nothing.

One of the officers stepped forward.

"Sir," he said, in the careful, professional tone of someone initiating a process. "We've received a complaint about fraudulent wire transfers from the Morrison Accounting Group's operating account. We're going to need to ask you some questions."

Catherine folded her arms and looked at Diana with the expression of a woman who has done something she considers decisive and is waiting for the appropriate acknowledgment.

Diana looked at her mother.

She looked at the officers.

She looked at Marcus — at the absolute, unhurried calm of him, at the way he stood in the kitchen of her house while her mother brought police through the front door, at the expression on his face that contained neither guilt nor the wounded performance of innocence, but something else entirely.

She thought about changed credentials and public wifi and a line of code on her phone's diagnostic screen.

She thought about a man who turned down money every time it was offered to him.

She thought about a lot of things very quickly.

And then she thought about the fact that she didn't have the answers yet.

And that forty-eight hours was a very specific number for a man to offer when he was guilty.