“We’ll watch them even more carefully. Learn when they come and go, who they drink with, who they owe... People talk when they think no one’s listening, and Dominic’s men have gotten comfortable. Comfortable people get sloppy.” She taps her pen against the page. “I’ve got connections too. Old debts my father was owed and people in places that matter. Some of them have been waiting years for a reason to be useful to a Petrelli again.”
“And those changes you mentioned?”
“That’s the hardest part, because we don’t know what we’re looking for yet. So we need to watch everything and wait for something to feel off.” She meets my gaze. “It’s going to take time. Maybe a lot of it. Are you going to get bored?”
I grin at her. “Probably,” I say. “But not yet.”
She holds my gaze a moment before she picks the pen back up, and I focus back on the photographs. Why am I enjoying this way more than I should? It’s like there’s something wrong with me, but it doesn’t feel that way. Strange.
Chapter 9
MATTEO
WE SPLIT THE WORK BECAUSEthere’s too much of it for one person. Amalia focuses on studying the money trail. I take the reports from her men about chatter instead, since gossip and rumors can often reveal interesting things.
She’s got a laptop open and folders fanned out in front of her, and she’s scribbling something in the margin of a page. I lean back in my chair and watch her work before I pull my own pile toward me.
“You’re going to overthink it,” she says, without looking up.
“Overthink what? I haven’t even started.” I frown.
“Exactly. You stared at faces in those photos as if they owed you an answer.”
“That’s called being thorough.”
“More like stalling.” A faint smile tugs at her mouth. “Some of us just skim through and find the important parts.”
“And some of us read through the whole thing for hidden info.”
She finally glances over at me, one eyebrow arched. “Did you just call me superficial?”
“I didn’t. You said skim.”
She laughs, and I grin, but then I focus on my work. Every now and then, I keep glancing up at her. Why do I find her so interesting? I have no idea. Maybe because I’ve never been around a woman like her.
As I stare at Amalia for I don’t know which time, I realize her eyes are narrowed at the screen.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“A company.” She doesn’t take her eyes off the screen. “It buys and sells nothing. No products, no clients, no employees that I can find... But money moves through it. A lot of it, in and out. Always to other companies that seem exactly like this one.”
“A shell.”
“A shell inside a shell inside a shell.” She turns the laptop toward me and points. “And every one of them eventually traces back to a man who’s worked for Dominic for years. On paper, he’s a nobody. An accountant. But these accounts have moved more money in a year than Dominic’s legitimate businesses bring in.”
I lean in to read the numbers, and yep, money laundering, buried under a bunch of paperwork to look boring to anyone who didn’t know what to look for.
“This is good,” I say.
“Yep, very good.” She grins. “If we follow these companies far enough, we’ll find where the real money is and who else has their hands in it.”
“And the people whose names are on these accounts. They’re exposed. If any of this ever came out, they’d go down with him. That’s leverage.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.” She pulls the laptop back and starts typing. “We need to find out who else is connected to these shells. Partners, middlemen, whoever signs the papers... One of them is going to have a reason to be nervous, and we can use that.”
We’ve got the money trail now, which is more than we had this morning, but a trail on a screen can only take us so far. At some point, we have to put ourselves in front of these people, hear how they talk, and watch how they flinch when certain names come up. You can’t read much off a bank statement.
“There’s a way to speed this up,” I say. “Maybe you already know, but there’s an event. The kind that doesn’t get advertised. People in our world host them every so often, and Dominic’s men go. The middlemen and the ones who handle the money might like to be seen at things like that. It makes them feel like they’re part of something instead of just bookkeepers. If we’re there, we can hear what they’re saying when they think they’re among friends. We can watch who Dominic’s people defer to and who they ignore. That’s worth more than another week of records.”
