The folders are stacked. Color-coded tabs. Labels in her handwriting, sharp and angular. The Benedetti surveillance reports, ordered by date. Tabs for personnel, locations, financial. Cross-referenced with her data. It’s better than my system.
“You touched my files.”
“I improved your files. There’s a difference.” Her eyes haven’t left the screen. “Your system was chaos. Not the productive kind. I found three folders labeled ‘Misc.’ Three. That’s not a filing system. That’s a cry for help.”
She reaches for her mug. Empty. Holds it anyway, turning it between her palms. The way people hold things when they just need to keep their hands busy.
“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” she says. Not to me. To the air. The way she mentions things she wants without asking.
I stand. Walk out. Pour two cups. Hers the way she likes it. Carry them back.
She takes it one-handed, eyes on the monitor. “You know I can get my own coffee.”
“I know.”
“I’m saying. In case you thought I couldn’t operate the fourteen-button machine. I figured it out. Button seven.”
“Noted.”
“Years in a studio apartment running a criminal alias. I am capable of making a beverage.”
I sit down. “And yet.”
She stops typing. One second. Her shoulders drop a half-inch. Starts typing again.
The amber light goes copper. She talks to the screen. I listen.
“Delacroix,” she says after a while. Still at the screen. “The notary who processed all three property transfers on Tchoupitoulas. Same firm that handled the Benedetti warehouse deeds before the attorney turned up dead last year. That name ever come up in your world?”
Your world. Like hers and mine are different countries with a border running through this desk.
“I’ll check.”
“First thing tomorrow. Before the coffee run.” She says it like a fact. Like tomorrow is a given. Like I’ll be in this chair and she’ll be in hers and we’ll be doing this again. The files and the data and the space between us that keeps losing inches.
She keeps typing. The sound of her keys. I’ve been quiet longer than I want to count. She fills it without trying.
And my desire for silence is a losing battle.
13
ISABELLA
My hands won’t stop shaking. I’ve been at the keyboard for hours, chasing a thread through the Benedetti financial records that dissolves every time I get close. The trail loops through shell companies and dead ends that circle back to nowhere. The pattern is there. But every time I pull, the thread goes slack.
I’ve broken into systems that don’t officially exist, and a P.O. box in the Caymans is making me look like an amateur. Humbling.
“Anything?” Lorenzo’s voice from his side of the desk.
Our desk.
“Almost. Maybe.” I lean back and press my palms into my eyes. “The property records loop through a shell in Delaware, scatter through four corporate entities, and every time I trace one back, it dead-ends in a P.O. box in the Caymans that hasn’t been touched in six months.”
“So they’re hiding behind dead ends.”
“They’re hiding behind three of them.” I drop my hands. The cursor blinks at me. Mocking. “I’m close. The encryption signature matches what I found before the warehouse raid.Same routing pattern. But every time I follow it, the trail just. Stops.”
“Then they built the stop.”
