"In the morning," Cormac said.
"Tonight."
He considered me. "She's asleep."
"She'd want to know tonight. If it were you."
He held my gaze. "Yes," he said. "She would."
I went upstairs.
I knocked softly and waited. Movement, then silence, then her voice, alert and immediate with no sleep in it at all. "Come in."
She was sitting up with the lamp on and her hand near the bedside table, where I was fairly sure she kept the gun. I held both hands up as I came in so she could see them.
"It's just me."
She read my face the way she read everything, working out what it held. Whatever she found straightened her up. "What happened?"
I sat in the chair by the window and showed her the footage on my phone.
She watched it once. Twice. Handed the phone back without a word and sat with her hands flat on the blanket, her attention gone somewhere inward, the place she went when she was working a thing instead of reacting to it.
"Two nights ago," she said.
"Yes."
"While I was sleeping."
"Yes."
She breathed slow and even and deliberate, a woman who'd managed things alone a long time and built a system for exactly this.
"They knew I was here," she said.
"Yes."
"Before the war room. Before we pulled the financial records." Her eyes came up to mine. "They weren't spooked by what we found. They were already watching."
"Which means they've been watching since before you arrived," I said. "Possibly since Chicago."
Something moved behind her eyes. Not fear. I'd learned to read her by now, and this wasn't fear. It was the cold anger of a woman who'd been careful for a very long time and got found anyway.
"Tiernan," she said.
"Most likely. They saw him in Chicago and followed it back."
"They let me come here," she said slowly. "They could have moved on me in Chicago. They didn't. They let me come, and they've been watching." She turned to me. "Why?"
I'd been turning that over since the footage. "Because they want to see what we know. They've been at this a long time. They knew you were alive, or suspected it, but they never knew what you had. You coming here, working with us, that's them finding out what we know, the same as we're finding out what they knew."
"It's a race," she said.
"Yes. Whoever gets to the Galway solicitor first."
"Gets the original records," she said. "And either uses them or burns them."
She was quiet.
