When Detective Hale came back, he was holding a single printed photograph.
He laid it face up on the conference table.
It was a driver’s license photo. The heavyset man with the gray beard. The man in my burned car.
“The male victim has just been identified,” Hale said. “His name is Daniel Ross.”
He looked straight at Patricia.
“Mrs. Carter. Do you know this man?”
Patricia didn’t say anything.
She didn’t have to. Her face said everything.
“According to his phone carrier,” Hale said, “you called Daniel Ross seventeen times this afternoon.”
The room went dead silent.
Detective Hale separated us immediately after that.
Ethan went to Interview Room Two. Claire went to another room down the hall. Patricia stayed in the conference room with a deputy.
They put me in a small room across the hall and told me not to talk to anybody.
For almost an hour, nobody told me who Daniel Ross was.
Then Detective Hale came in with a thick file under his arm. He sat down across from me and closed the door.
“Rachel,” he said. “I need you to think carefully before you answer. Have you ever heard Patricia mention a man named Daniel Ross?”
“No. Never.”
“Construction contractor. Fifty-eight years old. Lived in Hendersonville.”
I shook my head.
He opened the file.
Daniel Ross had done renovation work for Patricia four years earlier, on one of her rental properties out near Weaverville.
That by itself didn’t mean anything.
The phone records did.
Between noon and five o’clock that afternoon, Patricia had called Daniel Ross seventeen times. He’d called her six times.
And at 5:03 p.m., about twenty minutes after Patricia drove away from my house, she sent him one last text message.
Detective Hale slid the printout across the table to me.
It’s done. You know what to do.
The whole room tilted.
“What does that mean?” I whispered.
“We’re working on that,” Hale said.
But I could see in his face that he already had a pretty good idea.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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