GD: Done.
JS: Raising 6 floors this fast with MSI might be a strain.
CV: Keep things moving.
JS: Understood.
JS: Flag on MSI boxes.
CV: Bring in a second set of eyes. Or change the view. Also, too much talking. Enforce NDAs.
JS: Handled.
“It explains the NDAs, doesn’t it?” Louis says.
“JS,” I muse. “I wonder if that’s Jack Samson.”
Louis’s upper lip tightens. “I got one more to show you. It’s new.” He turns the page.
JS: New inspector nervous.
CV: I got this.
All the blood in my head drops to my gut. “That’s me.”
Matthew’s hand rests over mine. I’m so grateful he’s with me.
Louis hesitates, watching me closely. He’s trying to read me, but right now, all he’s gonna see is terror. “Listen, Bridget. You need to prepare yourself. This is bigger than we thought, and I already knew it would be big. I got photos of cracked concrete and busted pipes, as well as fudged safety reports that document injuries and near-misses. But when I checked, none of those had been reported. If they were, those reports disappeared. Same with—get this—two collapses that never made the news. Vale’s signatures and notes are all over them.”
He sets the papers aside and exhales through puffed cheeks. “Now let’s get personal. Called a friend who got some pretty good, fairly recent shots of your boss with a couple of key players. See this?”
I nod. “That guy is Jack Samson. Who’s that?”
“Leandro Mazza,” Louis replies slowly. He places another photo on top with a snap. “And here she is with Frank Benedetti.”
His tone suggests this is not a good thing. “Am I supposed to know who that is?” I ask.
Matthew shifts in his chair. He looks uncomfortable. “Mob.”
“What?!”
“Yep.” Louis is picking up steam. “And I got more. I thought you’d be interested in this, though. All the skinny on that building you’re getting framed for.” He pauses, waits. “Get it?Framed?”
“Move along,” Matthew sighs.
The playful glint drops from Louis’s expression. “I studied those other, unreported structural failures and compared them to this one. They’re almost identical. Same Montey materials, same signatures. Contractor recordsare almost carbon-copied. Your buddy Paul was on a couple of those. Moonlighting from the Dominion to pay down a gambling debt. Makes sense he would have gotten evidence while working.”
I feel so badly for Paul. Such a nice guy. “He must have been overwhelmed with guilt, working this way. He was a family man. He’d have known it was wrong all along.”
“I went through all the records,” Louis continues, not missing a beat, “looking for your name, too. It appears in a couple, but it’s obvious it was added later on. And here…” He hands me a page. “That’s not your signature, is it?”
“Not even close.”
A chill shivers down my spine as I realize how deeply I have been planted into this situation. Again, my thoughts go to the man in black on the sidewalk. Had he been watching me? Waiting for me to come out of the building, maybe? I’m not ready to suggest that possibility yet, though. I might just be losing my mind. It’s hard to tell these days.
“I had no idea about any of this.” To me, the next step is clear, but I feel a little juvenile asking it. “Should we go to the police?”
Louis shakes his head. “You already tried that, and it might have done more harm than good. You gave me the detective’s name…” He glances at a different page of notes and runs his finger down the neat printing. “Jones, right? Too bad it’s not something uncommon, but I’ll take this. There’s a connection here that I don’t like. You mentioned the balcony collapse. Turns out the lead detective in that case went to school with Jones. Jones married the other guy’s sister, and now their kids go to school together. We ain’t gonna pull those two apart. So we gotta come up with our own approach. Trap Vale red-handed.”
