The Family Company
Chapter 03 - The Family Company
Detective Renata Muñoz did not smile when Sophia entered her office.
She pointed to the chair opposite her desk, finished typing one sentence, and clicked save before looking up.
"Coffee?"
"No, thank you."
"Good. The machine tastes like somebody dissolved a tire in hot water."
Muñoz was forty-four, compact, and dressed in a navy blazer over a gray T-shirt. A stack of contract files leaned against one side of her monitor. On the other sat a ceramic mug filled with pens, most of them missing caps.
Sophia placed her hands in her lap.
Her thumb found the edge of her phone case.
"Officer Bell said the drive was transferred to financial crimes."
"It was. Mainly because Hale and Voss appears in the preliminary device signature, and because your ex-husband shouted about money in front of half the arts community."
"That part has already reached social media."
"I know. My sister sent me a clip before I got the case."
Sophia looked toward the window. The financial crimes unit occupied the fourth floor of a municipal building with beige carpet and a view of a parking garage.
"Did she recognize me?"
"She recognized the sculpture. She teaches art at Jefferson Middle."
Muñoz opened a thin file.
"Let's go over your history with Marcus Hale. Not the whole marriage. I need the business overlap, financial access, and any reason he might believe you had company records."
Sophia explained that Marcus had served as chief financial officer for Hale and Voss for almost fourteen years. The company had been founded by his father, Robert Hale, and Diane Voss, Robert's younger sister.
Sophia had never worked there.
"Did you have access to his home office?"
"We shared a house. I could walk into the room. I didn't know his passwords."
"Did company files ever come home?"
"Constantly. Printed contracts, binders, laptops. He kept banker boxes under the guest-room bed during audits."
Muñoz wrote that down.
"Any external drives?"
"Probably. Marcus had several. I couldn't identify the one from the gallery."
"Did he accuse you of taking records during the divorce?"
"Not directly. He accused me of taking almost everything else."
Muñoz waited.
Sophia understood the invitation and disliked it.
"The divorce agreement gave me half the equity in the house, my retirement account, and the studio lease. He kept his company shares, two investment accounts, and the house itself after refinancing."
"That doesn't sound like everything."
"No. It sounded like everything to him."
The detective's pen made a quick note.
"When did his behavior become erratic?"
Sophia thought of bottles hidden in the recycling bin beneath folded grocery bags. Marcus sleeping in the den, then insisting he had been answering emails. A kitchen drawer slammed because she asked whether quarterly losses were why he had missed dinner.
"About two years before we separated. It got worse after Robert Hale died."
"His father?"
"Yes. Robert had been ill for a while, but he still visited the office. After he died, Diane and Marcus controlled everything."
"Did Marcus talk about company trouble?"
"He said construction margins were shrinking. Supply costs. Delays. He also said people were trying to make the company look weak."
"Which people?"
"He never named them."
Muñoz leaned back.
"Ms. Hale, the drive is encrypted."
Sophia's thumb stopped against the phone case.
"Can you open it?"
"Probably. Not today. Maybe not this week."
"Then why am I here?"
"Because the device directory gives us partial metadata before decryption. File names, some dates, folder structures."
Muñoz turned her monitor slightly.
A printed list sat open on the desk, but Sophia could read only fragments from where she sat.
"These aren't photographs," Muñoz said. "They aren't divorce records either. The visible names refer to invoice batches, subcontractor payments, city project codes, and internal approvals. Some folders go back nine years."
Sophia looked at the list.
"All Hale and Voss?"
"That's what it appears to be."
"Could he have been taking it to someone else and stopped at the gallery?"
"Could have."
"Do you believe that?"
Muñoz tapped the desk once with her pen.
"I believe he saw the drive fall, fought harder to reach it, and demanded you return it. That doesn't tell me why he had it."
Sophia rose when the interview ended, then paused at the door.
"Detective, Officer Bell mentioned earlier complaints involving Marcus and company files."
"She shouldn't have given you details."
"She didn't give me many."
"Those reports are being reviewed."
"Were people trying to steal from the company?"
Muñoz looked at her without answering.
"Or was Marcus trying to get records back from people who had already copied them?"
The detective's face stayed neutral.
"That's a better question."
---
The gallery reopened four days after the smash.
Grace had rearranged the central floor so the empty pedestal looked intentional. A white card beneath it read BLUE CURRENT, 2025, temporarily unavailable.
Sophia hated the wording.
It sounded as though the sculpture had gone to lunch.
Upstairs, her studio remained half empty from the show. Worktables stood bare except for dust, tape, and two mugs with dried coffee rings at the bottom.
The surviving shard sat on the windowsill.
Sunlight came through the old industrial glass and painted a narrow blue mark across the floorboards. Sophia watched the color move when a cloud passed.
She picked up the shard.
Its curved surface still carried one of her fingerprints beneath the fired finish, a faint crescent trapped forever inside the piece. She remembered pressing that section into place at two in the morning while Marcus slept downstairs in the loft bedroom.
He had come up later wearing socks and carrying tea.
"You're going to hate it tomorrow," he had said.
"Why?"
"Because you hate everything the morning after you finish it."
He had known her that well once.
Sophia placed the glass back on the sill.
Her hands began shaking.
Not dramatically. The tremor started in her fingers and moved into her wrists, making the loose metal ruler on the table click when she touched it.
She sat on the floor before her knees decided for her.
The opening replayed in pieces. Marcus's elbow. The pedestal bolts tearing free. The top curve of Blue Current falling toward the crowd. A child had been in the gallery, Sophia remembered. Meredith Lane's granddaughter, maybe nine years old, standing near the back wall.
The sculpture could have hit someone.
Marcus could have hit her harder.
Sophia pressed both palms flat to the floorboards and stared at a dark stain beside the radiator, leftover from a glaze spill years before.
Her breathing came too fast.
"Stop," she whispered.
The word didn't help.
She stayed there until the tremor passed, then washed her face in the small utility sink. The water ran cold over her wrists. Her mascara had smudged beneath one eye, and she rubbed it away with a paper towel that scratched her skin.
One breakdown.
Fine.
She could afford one.
Grace appeared in the doorway carrying a brown paper bag.
"I brought soup."
Sophia turned before Grace could see the wet sink or the paper towel in her hand.
"What kind?"
"The place downstairs called it tomato basil. I think it's mostly salt and optimism."
Grace set the bag on the worktable and looked at Sophia's face.
She did not ask whether she had been crying.
"Muñoz called me," Sophia said.
"And?"
"The drive is encrypted. The file names are company records. Years of them."
Grace unpacked two plastic containers and pushed one across the table.
"Marcus carried nine years of company records into your opening."
"Apparently."
"Why?"
Sophia peeled the lid from the soup. Steam clouded her glasses for one second.
"That's what I can't reconcile."
Grace sat opposite her.
"Maybe he was drunk and forgot it was in his pocket."
"He knew it fell before anyone else did."
"Then maybe he came to get something from you."
Sophia looked toward the windowsill.
"I don't have company files."
"Maybe he thought you did."
"After eight months? Why now?"
Downstairs, the gallery door opened and closed. A man's voice asked whether the damaged sculpture would be remade.
Grace stirred her soup.
"What changed recently?"
Sophia pictured the opening announcement in the newspaper, her photograph beside Blue Current, the mention that her studio occupied the floor above the gallery.
Marcus had seen exactly where she worked.
Exactly what she had moved out of the marital house.
She stood and walked to a row of storage cabinets along the back wall. Most held clay tools, receipts, old sketches. One contained personal boxes from the divorce that she had never fully unpacked.
Grace followed.
"Sophia?"
"He asked during mediation whether I had taken the black document case from his home office. I said no. I thought it was another accusation."
"Did you take it?"
"No."
Sophia opened the personal cabinet anyway.
Inside sat tax files, framed photographs facedown, and a shoebox of cords from electronics she no longer owned.
No black case.
No company documents.
She closed the cabinet.
"He wasn't carrying that drive because of me," she said. "He was carrying it because of whatever is on it."
Grace leaned against the worktable.
"Then why bring it here?"
Sophia looked at the single unbroken shard throwing blue light across the floor.
May you like
That was the question Marcus had accidentally left behind with the wreckage.
Why would a former CFO carry nine years of hidden company records to his ex-wife's art opening at all?
