“He’s sending messages,” I say. “To someone outside.”
“That’s what we think.”
My mind is racing. Fischer is connected to people outside the Rot who were part of the corruption, who might still be protecting whatever’s left of the operation. If he’s sending messages, it means he’s not alone. There’s a network, and he’s warning them.
“We need to move,” I say. “Now. Before whoever he’s talking to has time to act.”
“Agreed,” Armen says. “But we need to do it carefully. There can be no confrontation in the neutral zone. It has to be private, just us and him in a room with no exit.”
“I want to be there.”
“I know that. You’re in the room. You’re asking the questions. This is your father’s fight. You lead it.”
I wasn’t expecting that.
“Tonight then,” I say.
“Good,” Rogue says.
I look at the two pages on the table. Fischer’s signature. Tommy’s handwriting. The man who destroyed my family is going to sit across from me in a few hours, and I’m going to ask him questions he better fucking answer.
The fury is still there, but it’s not hot anymore. It’s cold. Focused. Sharp.
Cold is better for what comes next.
62
VI
I findMara in our room sitting cross-legged on the bed, doing something with her hair, humming and happy, or as happy as someone can be in the Rot. She’s a woman who’s found her footing in a strange place and is starting to feel like she belongs.
I’m about to wreck that.
I close the door and sit on the bed across from her. She looks up, reads my face, and the humming stops.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“I need to tell you something about Tommy.”
She frowns as she runs through the possibilities. Tommy got hurt? He left the Rot? He said something about her?
“What about him?”
I don’t know how to do this gently. I tried to plan it on the walk over. I told myself I’d find the soft way to do it, the version that breaks the news without breaking her, but there really isn’t one.
“We think Tommy is Landis Fischer, a city development officer from my father’s papers. He’s the man who signed theshell company contracts, blocked Dad’s audit, approved the property transfers. The man who facilitated the corruption that destroyed Rothwell.”
Mara stares at me. “What? Why?”
“The guys matched his handwriting to the documents. The signatures are the same. They’ve been watching him. When they planted false information through you, he reacted. He broke his routine. He started trying to cover his tracks.”
“Through me,” she says. Her voice is flat. “Planted information through me.”
“Rogue told you that thing about me looking for former city employees. That was the plant. It wasn’t real. It was a test. To see if Tommy would react when it reached him through you.”
Mara’s face is doing something terrible, shutting down and opening up at the same time. Her confusion is being replaced by understanding, piece by piece. I can see her rewinding every conversation she ever had with Tommy. Every lunch in the neutral zone. Every friendly question. Every warm smile.
“Oh my god. He asked about you,” she says. “Every time. He always asked about you. How you were doing. What you were working on. Whether you’d found anything. I thought he was being kind. I thought he cared.”
