His face lost all color.
“What does that mean?”
He reached for his hospital phone.
“Marcus.”
“What?”
“Call Marcus.”
I did.
He answered on the third ring.
“Everything okay?”
Daniel grabbed the phone.
“The code.”
Silence.
“What code?”
“Three-two-three.”
Marcus didn’t answer.
Daniel closed his eyes.
“Oh God.”
“What?”
I demanded.
Marcus’s voice came through the speaker.
“That was Jacob’s code.”
The dead accountant.
I felt the room tilt.
“He’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“Then how—”
Daniel interrupted.
“Jacob used three-two-three whenever he believed a communication channel was compromised.”
“When?”
Marcus said quietly, “Before he disappeared.”
I looked toward the window.
Seattle glittered beneath the rain.
“Then someone alive knew his code.”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
Neither man answered.
I thought about the funeral.
The coffin.
The stranger.
Natalie.
Rachel Kim.
The woman who had sent me the funeral notice.
I whispered her name.
“Rachel.”
Daniel looked at me.
“Who?”
“Rachel Kim.
She messaged me this morning.”
Marcus swore.
Daniel sat upright despite the pain.
“Claire, show me.”
I opened Facebook.
Rachel Kim’s profile was gone.
The message remained.
Are you Claire?
I think you need to see this.
Marcus said, “Search the company employee directory.”
Daniel did.
Nothing.
“There’s no Rachel Kim,” he said.
A knot formed in my stomach.
I opened the original message information.
The account had been created three days earlier.
No friends.
No history.
No photographs except the profile picture.
A young Asian woman smiling beside the waterfront.
Then I noticed the background.
I zoomed in.
Behind her was a building.
Terminal Forty-Seven.
“Oh my God.”
Daniel stared.
Marcus whispered:
“That isn’t Rachel Kim.”
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Daniel did.
His hand closed around mine.
“I do.”
He enlarged the photograph.
For a long moment, he said nothing.
Then he whispered:
“Her name is Rebecca Mercer.”
My skin prickled.
“Mercer?”
“Jacob Mercer’s daughter.”
The man in the coffin.
Daniel looked at me.
“Jacob must have told her everything.”
Marcus’s voice was barely audible.
“She sent Claire to the funeral.”
“Yes.”
“She knew Thomas would be there.”
“Yes.”
“She knew the coffin wasn’t Daniel.”
Daniel stared at the profile photograph.
“And she knew opening it would expose her father’s murder.”
The entire day rearranged itself in my mind.
Rebecca hadn’t lured me into danger.
She had used me to do the one thing she couldn’t.
Force Daniel’s family to open the coffin.
The unknown call.
The warning.
Don’t open the coffin.
Marcus is watching.
Not a warning to obey.
A message designed to make me do the opposite.
“She manipulated me.”
Daniel nodded slowly.
“To expose them.”
My phone vibrated.
A new Facebook message.
From an account with no profile photograph.
One sentence.
Thank you for bringing my father home.
Then a second message appeared.
There is one more file Daniel hasn’t found.
Ask Evelyn what happened on August 14, 2015.
I looked at Daniel.
“Wasn’t that the day your father died?”
“Yes.”
We stared at each other.
Evelyn came to the hospital at dawn.
She looked twenty years older.
