Chapter 5 - THE RED LEDGER
For the next forty-eight hours, I was not Rebecca Hale.
Not officially.
The protected hotel reservation used another name.
The car transporting Mom and me changed twice.
My phone was replaced.
My employer was told only that I had been placed on extended medical leave.
Detective Flores would not say whether Wade Mercer intended to kill the six people on his list or expose them.
Both possibilities were dangerous.
The first five names made sense.
The retired deputy and bank officer were suspected of helping the Hales.
But me?
I had never met Wade.
At least I didn’t think I had.
Then an investigator showed me a photograph from twenty months earlier.
A Hale family barbecue.
Darlene stood near the grill.
Cody held a beer.
Travis was laughing beside me.
In the background, half hidden behind a truck, stood a thin man in a baseball cap.
Wade Mercer.
I remembered him only vaguely.
Darlene had introduced him as an old farmhand.
He had shaken my hand.
Asked where I worked.
Asked whether payroll systems were complicated.
At the time, I thought he was making conversation.
Now I wondered how long I had been observed.
The answer came from an unexpected source.
Travis.
His attorney contacted prosecutors and requested a proffer meeting.
He wanted to talk.
Not because he had discovered a conscience.
Because murder charges were beginning to circle the family.
And Travis understood that the first person who cooperated might survive prison young enough to see daylight again.
Detective Flores asked whether I wanted to know what he said.
“Yes.”
She warned me.
I still said yes.
Travis admitted the financial fraud.
Not immediately.
First he blamed Darlene.
Then Cody.
Then their dead father.
Eventually investigators confronted him with documents carrying his electronic credentials and account access history.
He folded.
The farm had been drowning in debt.
Travis had used my identity because my salary and credit rating made lenders comfortable.
The second refinancing package would have bought them another year.
Maybe two.
When I froze my credit, several lenders began reviewing old files.
That threatened to expose fraudulent transactions going back more than a decade.
“So the burial was punishment,” I said.
“Partly,” Flores replied.
“What was the other part?”
“Getting you to sign a statement saying you had authorized all previous documents.”
I remembered the pages on the kitchen table.
I had assumed they were only another loan.
I was wrong.
Buried among the financing forms was a notarized declaration.
Had I signed it, I would have confirmed every loan application made in my name.
They weren’t only trying to steal more money.
They were trying to rewrite the past.
“And Sunday?” I asked.
Flores looked down.
“Travis claims Darlene contacted Wade without telling him.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Some of it.”
“What did Wade plan to do?”
“According to Travis, he thought Wade would frighten you into leaving Missouri.”
I laughed once.
There was nothing humorous about it.
“And according to Darlene?”
“She isn’t talking.”
Cody was.
But Cody’s version differed.
He claimed Travis knew exactly why Wade had been contacted.
He said the plan was to make my disappearance look voluntary.
My packed suitcase would be placed in my car.
Money withdrawn from my account.
A message sent from my phone saying I needed space.
Later, the car would be found somewhere far from Hale Ridge.
“And me?”
Cody claimed he didn’t know.
I did.
Melissa Grant had disappeared.
Earl Patterson had died in an accident.
Problems vanished around Hale Ridge.
The next breakthrough came from the red ledger.
A fisherman found it.
Not floating in the river.
Hidden beneath a collapsed section of an old boat ramp nearly four miles from Wade’s truck.
It was sealed inside two plastic freezer bags and wrapped in duct tape.
Wade had hidden it deliberately.
The ledger contained twenty-three years of transactions.
Some were legal.
Many were not.
Bribes.
Fraud.
Insurance manipulation.
Threat payments.
Property schemes.
And five entries investigators believed might relate to suspicious deaths.
Melissa Grant was there.
Earl Patterson was there.
So was a farmhand named Douglas Vane, who had supposedly died in a hunting accident in 2011.
Another name belonged to a county appraiser who drowned in 2016.
And then there was Raymond Hale himself.
Darlene’s husband.
The official story had always been that Raymond died after falling from a grain silo.
The ledger told another story.
An entry dated three days before his death read:
R getting reckless. Wants out.
A second entry, written in Darlene’s hand after his funeral:
Insurance received. Farm secure.
For the first time, investigators considered the possibility that Darlene had killed her own husband.
Wade Mercer had been paid $75,000 two weeks later.
That explained why Wade possessed the ledger.
It was insurance.
Not life insurance.
Leverage.
He had spent years doing dirty work for the Hales while preserving proof that could destroy them if they ever turned on him.
And they had.
A forensic review of Wade’s phone revealed Darlene had recently threatened him.
After police discovered Melissa’s remains, she blamed Wade for failing to hide the body better.
She ordered him to destroy the red ledger.
Instead, he took it and ran.
“So why am I on his list?” I asked.
Flores slid a photocopied ledger page toward me.
Near the bottom was a recent entry.
RH payroll access?
My initials.
Rebecca Hale.
Another note:
She copied files. T knows.
Wade hadn’t put me on the list because I was a target.
He had put me there because I was evidence.
“He knew you had uncovered something,” Flores said.
“Then why break into my mother’s house?”
“We don’t know that he did.”
I stared at her.
“You said Jenna identified him.”
“Jenna assumed it was Wade based on the phrase about signing the papers.”
My skin prickled.
“Then who was in the house?”
Flores placed a still image from a neighbor’s security camera on the table.
A man crossed the street near Mom’s property at 4:07 a.m.
Baseball cap.
Dark jacket.
Broad shoulders.
The face was turned away.
But the build was wrong.
Wade was thin.
This man wasn’t.
“Who?”
“We enhanced the footage.”
She placed another image beside it.
This one captured the man getting into a dark pickup.
A partial plate had been recovered.
Registered owner:
Cody Hale.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered.
“Cody was in jail.”
“Yes.”
“So who was driving his truck?”
Flores’s expression hardened.
“Someone investigators had been treating as a witness.”
The door behind her opened.
A federal agent stepped inside carrying a folder.
He whispered something in her ear.
Flores stood immediately.
“What happened?”
She looked at me.
“Rebecca, your mother needs to come with us.”
“Why?”
The agent answered.
“Because Wade Mercer just walked into a police station ninety miles south of here.”
Relief struck me.
“He surrendered?”
“No.”
The agent put a photograph on the table.
Wade’s face was swollen.
One eye nearly shut.
His shirt was covered in dried blood.
“He says somebody tried to kill him.”
“Who?”
The agent looked at Flores before answering.
“Jenna Hale.”
I stared at him.
“She’s in jail.”
“She made bond three hours ago.”
I stood too quickly.
Pain pulled across my abdomen.
Flores reached for me.
“Rebecca.”
But I barely heard her.
Because the agent had not finished.
“We sent officers to the address Jenna provided to the court.”
May you like
He swallowed.
“She’s gone.”
