Chapter 3: What the Detective Knew
I told Cole I could be out by seven.
"Don't pack a bag," he said.
"Don't change your routine.
Walk out like it's any other morning."
"And then what?"
"Then call me from your car.
I'll tell you where to go."
I set the phone down on the bathroom counter and looked at myself in the mirror for a long time.
The same face.
The same man who had driven to his mother-in-law's house that afternoon thinking the worst thing that could happen was a speeding ticket.
I went back to bed.
I lay on my side of the mattress with my eyes open and listened to Laura breathe.
She slept like someone with nothing to hide.
By six fifty the next morning I was dressed, keys in hand, standing in the kitchen doorway watching her pour coffee at the counter.
She was wearing the blue robe I had given her for Christmas two years ago.
She looked ordinary.
She looked like my wife.
"You're up early," she said.
"Couldn't sleep.
Thought I'd go get the oil changed before the place fills up."
She nodded without turning around.
"Pick up milk on the way back?"
"Sure."
I walked to the car.
I did not look back at the house.
I called Cole from the end of the street.
"I'm out," I said.
"Good.
There's a diner on Clement Avenue, about four miles from you.
The Sunrise.
Go there, get a table in the back, and wait.
I'll be there in twenty minutes."
Cole was there in fifteen.
He was younger than I expected — mid-forties, close-cropped hair, a jacket that looked like it had been slept in.
He sat down across from me and put a manila folder on the table between us without opening it.
"Before I show you this," he said, "I need to know how much you actually knew about Laura's background when you married her."
"What do you mean?"
"Family.
History.
Where she grew up.
Previous relationships."
"She told me she grew up in Portland.
Parents both gone.
No siblings.
She said she didn't like talking about her childhood."
Cole looked at me steadily.
"And you accepted that."
It wasn't a question.
I felt the weight of it anyway.
"She was private," I said.
"I respected that."
He opened the folder.
The first page was a photograph.
A woman who looked almost exactly like Laura — same bone structure, same eyes — but younger, with darker hair and a different name printed beneath the image.
**SANDRA LEIGH VOSS.
DOB: March 4, 1981.
Last known address: Columbus, Ohio.**
"That's her real name," Cole said.
"Sandra Voss.
She was born in Columbus, not Portland.
Her parents are both alive.
She has a younger brother."
I stared at the photograph.
"She was married before," Cole continued.
"A man named Gerald Pruitt, in Ohio.
The marriage lasted three years.
He reported her missing in 2019.
Filed for divorce in absentia in 2021 after investigators determined she had left voluntarily."
"She left him."
"She left him and approximately two hundred and thirty thousand dollars of his savings.
The accounts were drained over a six-week period before she disappeared." Cole turned to the next page.
"She surfaced in Connecticut eight months later under the name Laura Mercer.
That's when she met you."
I looked up from the folder.
"She practiced on him first," I said.
Cole didn't soften it.
"Gerald Pruitt was the trial run.
Your marriage, your accounts, your name — that was the larger operation."
"Four hundred thousand dollars."
"That we've traced.
There may be more."
I sat back in the booth.
Through the diner window, ordinary traffic moved along Clement Avenue.
A woman pushed a stroller.
A man walked a dog.
"Who is she working for?" I asked.
Cole's expression shifted — just slightly.
May you like
Enough to tell me the answer was going to be worse than everything he had already said.
"That," he said, "is what we need your help to find out."
