# The Last Witness
## Chapter 3: The Accountant
Thomas Reeve looked older than his file picture.
The photo in Margaret’s documents showed a man in his early forties, trim and composed, the kind of face that belonged in a corporate headshot. The man sitting across from Sarah was thinner, grayer, with the drawn quality of someone who hadn’t slept well in years. His hands wrapped around a coffee cup like it was the only thing keeping him anchored to the table.
“You’re Sarah Manning,” he said. Not a question.
“You know who I am.”
“Everyone in my situation knows who you are. The prosecutor who lost to Vance. The one who almost had him.” He smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “I watched the trial on a livestream. I watched him walk away. I’ve been watching him walk away ever since.”
“Then you know why I’m here.”
“Margaret Hollis. She tracked me down a year ago. I told her I couldn’t help. I told her it was too dangerous.” Reeve looked down at his coffee. “She sent me a letter six months ago. She said she was dying. She said she wanted justice before she went. She asked me to reconsider.”
“And did you?”
“I’m sitting here, aren’t I?”
Sarah signaled the waitress for coffee, buying herself a moment to study Reeve. He was nervousâhis eyes darting to the door every few seconds, his fingers tapping against the table. But beneath the fear, she saw something else. Something that looked like the desperate, half-dead ember of hope.
“The files Margaret gave me mention Sandra Diaz,” she said. “What happened in that parking garage.”
Reeve’s face went white. “You don’t need toâ”
“Yes, I do.” Sarah leaned forward. “I need to understand what we’re dealing with. I need to know who he is and what he’s capable of. And I need to know if you’re willing to help me stop him.”
The coffee arrived. Sarah waited while Reeve added sugar, stirred, added more sugar, stirred again. The ritual gave him time to compose himself, to find the words he had been avoiding for five years.
“I had just finished a meeting with the Carbos,” he began. “They were complaining about their cutâalways complaining, always demanding more. I was in the garage gathering my things when I saw Sandra’s car. She was on the third level, near the elevator, and there was a man crouching beside it. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew what he was doing. I’d seen it before. Maintenance requests that never got filed. Parking stickers that appeared on cars that shouldn’t have had them. Vance’s people had been using that garage for years to handle problems.”
“You watched him cut the brake lines?”
“I watched.” Reeve’s voice was flat, recitative, as if he were reading from a script he had memorized long ago. “I stood there and watched him work. I didn’t move. I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t do anything. And then he was gone, and a few minutes later, Sandra came out of the elevator, got in her car, and drove away. I heard the accident on the radio an hour later. Single-vehicle collision, brake failure, no witnesses.”
“You could have gone to the police.”
“I could have gone to a lot of places. I could have testified. I could have told the story you’re about to hear. But Vance had been doing this for twenty years, Ms. Manning. Not just the money launderingâthe cleanup. Anyone who got too close, anyone who threatened to talk, they disappeared. Sometimes legally, through lawyers and settlements. Sometimes not.” Reeve finally met her eyes. “I’ve seen what happens to people who cross him. I’m not suicidal.”
“So why meet with me?”
“Because Margaret Hollis called me three weeks ago. She said she had found you. She said you were reading the files. She said you might actually do something.” He paused. “And because I’m tired, Ms. Manning. I’ve been running for five years, sleeping in different places, never using my real name, never staying anywhere long enough to make a friend. I’m not living. I’m just not dying. There’s a difference.”
Sarah understood. She had felt it herselfâthe exhaustion of existing without living, the weight of waiting for something that might never come.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I want it to mean something.” Reeve pulled a USB drive from his pocket and slid it across the table. “This is everything I kept. The financial records I reconciled, the communications I intercepted, the names and dates and numbers that prove Vance has been running a criminal enterprise since before I was born. It’s not enough for a convictionâthe lawyers made sure of that. But it’s enough to start a conversation.”
“With whom?”
“The FBI has a man. His name is Daniel Worth. He’s been investigating the Carbos family for a decade. He knows something is wrong with Vance’s company, but he can’t prove it. If someone could connect him to the right evidence, give him the thread that leads to the tapestry…” Reeve shrugged. “I don’t know if it would be enough. But it’s a start.”
Sarah picked up the USB drive. It was small, ordinary, the kind of thing that could hold a lifetime of secrets or nothing at all.
“Why now?” she asked. “Margaret’s been dead for two weeks. If you wanted to help, you could have done it while she was still alive.”
“Because Margaret Hollis was a believer. She thought the system could be fixed if you just found the right evidence, the right witness, the right prosecutor.” Reeve’s voice hardened. “I’m not a believer. I think the system is broken, and I think the only way to fix it is to burn it down and build something new. But I’m willing to try the slow way first. I’m willing to try you.”
Sarah slipped the USB drive into her pocket. “One more question. What happened to the man in the parking garage? The one who cut the brake lines.”
Reeve was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “His name is Victor Penn. He was Vance’s fixer for fifteen years. He’s dead now. Heart attack, three years ago, while in police custody on an unrelated matter. The official report said natural causes.” He paused. “I’ve stopped believing in natural causes.”
—
Sarah spent the next week in Phoenix, reading the files on the USB drive, cross-referencing them with Margaret’s documents, building a picture of a man who had spent his entire adult life on the wrong side of the law and had become so successful that the wrong side looked indistinguishable from the right.
The money was staggering. Conservative estimates placed Vance’s laundered earnings at over three hundred million dollars over twenty years. The crimes were even more staggeringâbribes to city officials in six states, manipulation of zoning boards, fraudulent contracts that had diverted hundreds of millions in public funds to private pockets. The body count was the most staggering of all: thirty-seven confirmed deaths directly linked to Vance’s operations, with another hundred suspected.
Robert Vance was not a criminal in the way Sarah had understood criminals. He was not a street boss or a drug dealer or a violent thug who relied on fear to maintain his power. He was an architect. He had built a system that converted crime into profit and profit into influence, and that influence had protected him from every consequence the law might have imposed.
And now he was living in Costa Rica, in a mansion on the beach, untouchable.
Sarah made one phone call before she left Phoenix. She used a burner phone purchased with cash from a gas station, dialed a number she had memorized from years of working with federal investigators, and waited.
“Worth.”
“Daniel Worth? This is Sarah Manning. We met at the Vance pre-trial hearing in 2021.”
A pause. “Ms. Manning. I heard you’d disappeared.”
“I’ve been on vacation. I’m back now.” She glanced at the USB drive on the table in front of her. “I have something you might be interested in. Information about Robert Vance and his connections to the Carbos family. Enough to start a real investigation, if you’re interested.”
“What do you want?”
“I want what I’ve always wanted. I want to put him in prison. I don’t care how long it takes or how many laws I have to break to do it.” She paused. “Are you interested?”
Another pause, longer this time. When Worth spoke again, his voice was differentâwarmer, more cautious, the voice of a man who had learned to be suspicious of gifts.
“Send me what you have. I’ll look at it. But Ms. Manningâ”
“Yes?”
“The last prosecutor who tried to take down Robert Vance lost her career. Don’t let it happen again.”
Sarah hung up and looked out the window of her motel room at the Phoenix skyline, the sun setting behind the mountains, the city spreading out in all directions like a promise that might or might not be kept.
“I’m not the last prosecutor,” she said to no one. “I’m the last witness.”
She had no idea how right she was.