Chương 5
He didn't answer.
I continued before caution could return.
“Your name is on buildings.”
“Unfortunately.”
“Your family owns companies I can't keep track of.”
“Neither can I some days.”
“People lower their voices when they talk about you.”
“That isn't always justified.”
“Which part?”
He had no quick answer for that.
Good.
“I have a six-year-old,” I said.
“I have rent due.”
“My health insurance ends in three weeks.”
“I am not walking into some meeting because the Moretti family suddenly discovered curiosity.”
Lily had gone still beside the table.
I regretted mentioning rent the second I saw her face.
Dominic spoke more quietly.
“What would make you feel safe?”
“Nothing.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It's the only one you get tonight.”
I ended the call.
For a few seconds the apartment was completely silent.
Then Lily climbed onto the chair beside me.
“Are we poor?”
I closed my eyes.
“Not exactly.”
“Are we getting poor?”
Children had an astonishing talent for finding the sentence you least wanted to answer.
“We're having a hard month.”
“Because of him?”
“Because of a lot of things.”
She touched one of the envelopes.
“Is this why you were crying?”
“Partly.”
“Did I make it worse?”
I looked at her.
Her chin had begun to tremble, though she was trying hard to hide it.
I pulled her into my lap.
“You scared about ten years off my life.”
“Sorry.”
“And you lied to me.”
“Sorry.”
“And you took two trains alone.”
“I said sorry.”
“I know.”
She leaned into me.
“But you did not cause this.”
“Mr. Moretti did.”
“I'm still deciding how much of it belongs to Mr. Moretti.”
She thought about that.
“His office has tiny waters.”
“What?”
“In the refrigerator.”
I stared at her.
“Tiny water bottles?”
“Yes.”
“That's what you took away from today?”
“He gave me two.”
Despite everything, a laugh came out of me.
It was tired and ugly and immediately turned into something close to crying.
Lily wrapped both arms around my neck.
Neither of us mentioned it.
Later, after she fell asleep beside me because neither of us trusted separate rooms that night, I returned to the kitchen.
The shoebox waited under the yellow light above the stove.
I removed the letters one by one and arranged them by date.
Then I placed Vincent's signed document beside them.
At the bottom of the box was something I had forgotten existed.
A business card.
Elliot Pike's.
I turned it over.
On the back, in his cramped handwriting, were seven words.
If Vincent contacts you again, call me first.
My phone lit up on the table.
A message from an unknown number contained no greeting.
It contained a photograph.
In the image, three cardboard archive boxes sat in the trunk of a car.
Beneath the photograph was a single sentence.
You should have let this stay buried.
I stared at the photograph until the screen dimmed in my hand.
The archive boxes were ordinary brown cardboard, each with a white inventory label on the side.
One label was turned toward the camera.
EXECUTIVE CORRESPONDENCE 2013–2015.
My heart started beating hard enough to make the phone tremble.
The message had come from a number with no saved name.
I took a screenshot, then another, because panic made people stupid and I had already been stupid enough for one lifetime.
The next thing I did was call Dominic.
He answered on the first ring.
“Anna?”
“Did you send me a picture?”
“No.”
“Three archive boxes in a car trunk.”
Silence.
“Send it to me.”
“I don't know if I should send you anything.”
“Then read the labels.”
“One says executive correspondence, 2013 to 2015.”
Another silence.
This one had movement behind it.
A chair scraping.
A door opening.
Dominic said, “Marco.”
His voice moved away from the phone.
“Get downstairs.”
Then he came back.
“What did the message say?”
I read it.
He did not speak for a moment.
“Do not delete that.”
“I wasn't planning to.”
“Do not reply.”
“I wasn't planning that either.”
“Good.”
The order in his voice irritated me.
“You don't get to command me because somebody stole boxes from your building.”
“If the person who stole those boxes just contacted you, then this stopped being only an internal theft.”
“It was never only that.”
“Anna.”
“No.”
I lowered my voice and glanced toward the bedroom.
Lily had shifted in her sleep but hadn't woken.
“You don't get to act like I'm suddenly part of your emergency.”
“You are part of it.”
“Because someone decided I was.”
“Yes.”
I hated the answer because it was true.
Dominic said, “Can you see any reflection in the photograph?”
I enlarged it.
The trunk lid showed a distorted stripe of fluorescent light.
Nothing else.
“No.”
“License plate?”
“No.”
“Street?”
“Just the trunk.”
“Timestamp?”
“It came thirty seconds ago.”
“I mean embedded metadata.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Sorry.”
That stopped me.
I wasn't used to men like Dominic Moretti apologizing in the middle of an argument without turning the apology into another weapon.
“Not through regular text.”
I nearly hung up again.
He heard it.
“Fine,” he said.
“Text it.”
I sent the screenshot.
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
Then disappeared.
Dominic came back on the line.
“The label is ours.”
“You can tell from a blurry picture?”
“We color-code archive classes.”
I zoomed in again.
A narrow red stripe crossed the bottom of the label.
“Red means what?”
“Executive restricted.”
“So whoever has them knew exactly what they were taking.”
“Yes.”
I sat at the kitchen table.
The old radiator clicked behind me.
Somebody on the floor above dropped something heavy, swore, and then started dragging furniture for reasons I would never understand.
Normal life kept happening.
That was almost offensive.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Find Pike.”
“And if you can't?”
“We find who helped him.”
May you like
“You think he had help?”
“He got into a restricted floor, removed three boxes, left through a service corridor, and disappeared without his coat.”
