Marcus Reyes Talks
Chapter 06 - Marcus Reyes Talks
Marcus Reyes arrived at the Fairfax County police station at 11 AM voluntarily, with his own attorney beside him, and made a statement before anyone asked him a single question.
"I want immunity," he said, "and then I'll tell you everything."
His attorney — a mid-level defense lawyer named Howard Chen who specialized in white-collar cooperation deals — laid out terms. Full cooperation, complete disclosure, in exchange for reduced charges related to the financial fraud connected to the buyout, and no charges at all related to Claire Hawthorne's death, since Marcus insisted, adamantly, that he had no knowledge of what Victoria had done to Claire until after the fact.
The district attorney's office agreed to hear him out before committing to anything.
Marcus talked for six hours.
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He and Victoria had been together, secretly, for just over two years — since three months before Claire Hawthorne's death.
"It started as an affair," Marcus told Katz, his hands wrapped around a paper cup of station-house coffee he hadn't touched. "Victoria and Claire built that company together, but Claire was always the creative force, the one clients actually wanted. Victoria handled operations. She felt invisible. She used to say Claire got all the credit and she did all the work."
"Is that why she wanted Claire dead?"
"Partly. But it was also about the buyout structure. Claire had drafted a buy-sell agreement years earlier — standard boilerplate, the kind two friends sign without really reading closely, that says if one partner dies, the surviving partner can buy out the deceased partner's share at a fixed valuation instead of market value. Claire's company was worth close to four million dollars by the time she died. The buy-sell agreement valued her half at six hundred thousand."
"So killing her wasn't just about eliminating a rival. It was arbitrage."
"Victoria called it 'correcting an inefficiency.' Her words, not mine."
Katz felt something cold crawl up her spine at the clinical detachment of the phrase.
"Did you know in advance what she planned to do to Claire?"
Marcus was quiet for a long moment.
"I knew she'd been researching something. I knew she made a call to a compounding pharmacy in Loudoun County that made no sense for our business. I didn't ask questions I didn't want answered. That's the truth, and I know how that sounds, and I've had two years to hate myself for it."
"And after Claire died?"
"After Claire died, Victoria got the buyout. Six hundred thousand dollars, structured as an insurance-funded transaction because the buy-sell agreement was backed by a key-person policy neither Daniel nor Claire's family knew existed. Victoria used two hundred thousand of it to pay off debts and fund our — arrangement. The rest went into rebuilding the company under her sole ownership."
"And then she started pursuing Daniel."
"That wasn't the original plan. I want to be clear about that. Victoria became Sophie's nanny because it looked compassionate — the grieving business partner, stepping in to help the widower with his daughter. It was good optics. It kept her close to the situation in case anything ever came up in an investigation."
"When did it become about marrying him?"
Marcus's jaw tightened.
"About eight months in. She came to me and said Daniel Hawthorne was worth eleven times what Claire's design firm was ever worth. She said, and I remember this exactly because it made my skin crawl: 'Why correct one inefficiency when there's a bigger one sitting right in front of me?'"
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"Mr. Reyes," Katz said, "why are you talking to us now? Why not stay quiet and hope this all goes away?"
Marcus reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper — a printed email, dated three weeks earlier.
"Because of this."
Katz took it. Read it.
The email was from Victoria's personal account to a financial advisor, discussing "restructuring beneficiary designations following the Hawthorne merger" — corporate language dressed over what was, in plain terms, a plan to update Daniel's life insurance policy and estate documents to reflect Victoria as primary beneficiary immediately following the wedding.
"That's standard for a new spouse," Katz said.
"Keep reading."
The next paragraph discussed a timeline. A twelve-to-eighteen-month window "for the transition to feel natural, given prior circumstances," followed by a reference to "revisiting the interiors company's remaining minority stakeholder position" — language that, cross-referenced against the company's cap table, referred to Marcus's own twelve percent ownership stake.
"She's talking about buying you out," Katz said slowly. "Or —"
"Or eliminating me the same way she eliminated Claire, once I've served my purpose and Daniel's estate is secure. I found this email by accident, checking her laptop for something unrelated. I've barely slept since."
Katz looked at Marcus Reyes — a man who had known, at minimum, that his lover had orchestrated a business partner's death, who had taken his cut of the proceeds, who had said nothing for two years, and who was now sitting across from her not out of moral clarity but out of naked self-preservation.
It didn't make him innocent.
But it made him talk.
"Mr. Reyes, I'm going to need everything on that laptop. Every email, every financial record, every text message you have between you and Victoria Sterling going back three years."
"I already copied it all onto a drive. It's in my car."
"Why?"
Marcus looked at her with the hollow expression of a man who had spent two years lying to himself about what kind of person he'd become.
"Because I knew this day was coming eventually. I just didn't know if I'd be sitting across from a detective, or lying next to Victoria when she decided my usefulness had expired."
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Keep reading Part 7 — because the drive Marcus hands over doesn't just confirm the plot against Daniel. It contains something Katz doesn't expect: financial records showing Victoria Sterling isn't her real name, and that Fairfax County isn't the first place she's done this. There's a paper trail stretching back nine years, through two other states, under two other identities — and at least one other dead husband nobody ever connected to her at all.
