Chapter 2
First, hotel records showing Marcus and Claire had been registered in adjoining rooms for three of the four nights of the conference, connected by an internal door, a detail the hotel's booking system listed plainly once I'd called and explained, truthfully, that I was trying to confirm a billing discrepancy on a joint card.
Second, a message thread on a secondary email account Claire didn't know I'd discovered two years earlier during an unrelated password reset, in which she had told Marcus, six weeks before the trip, that she'd "figure out a way to make Daniel believe it" if anything happened.
Third — and this was the detail that turned eleven days of cold methodical investigation into something with actual teeth — Marcus was not just married. He was married to a woman named Patricia Holloway, who happened to work as a fertility nurse at a clinic in Chicago, a detail I learned only because Claire had, with a carelessness that suggested she'd never expected anyone to look this closely, mentioned Patricia by name in one of the emails, complaining that Marcus's wife "asks too many questions about his trips."
I called Patricia Holloway nine days after I found the pregnancy test.
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I did not lead with accusations. I told her, simply, that I had information about her husband's recent business trip that I believed she deserved to see, and asked if she would be willing to come to my house on a specific evening, along with anything she might have on her end. She was quiet for a long moment on the phone. Then she said, in a voice that had clearly been holding something back for longer than this single conversation, "I've suspected something for almost a year. I just didn't have proof that would hold up to him denying it."
I gave her what I had. She told me she had something too — credit card statements showing recurring charges at a boutique in downtown Chicago that Marcus had claimed were client gifts, charges that, cross-referenced against Claire's social media, matched gifts Claire had posted wearing.
