Chương 8
“Then she destroys it.”
“Mariana.”
“We cannot illegally enter her apartment, take her phone, or follow her around like private investigators.”
“Then we just let her clean everything up?”
“We preserve what we control.”
He swore under his breath.
“I hate this.”
“So do I.”
He paced once across the kitchen.
“What about the building cameras?”
“Not ours.”
“Security logs?”
“Not ours.”
“Could we ask tomorrow?”
“Through counsel.”
He nodded reluctantly.
His phone buzzed again.
This time it was Lucía.
He opened the message.
His face changed.
“What?”
He handed me the phone.
Lucía had written, Is Mom with you?
A second message followed.
She just called me and asked if I still have Dad’s old document box.
Alejandro took the phone back.
His father had died six years earlier.
I had met him only twice, both times in a hospital where he already looked more tired than ill.
“What document box?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Did your father keep business records?”
“He had a construction company for a while.”
“With Tomás?”
“No.”
“Teresa?”
“She did bookkeeping sometimes.”
I thought about the handwritten note.
Tell Tomás I handled it.
“Ask Lucía what box.”
Alejandro typed.
Her reply came quickly.
Brown metal box from storage.
Then another.
Mom says there are old tax papers she needs.
Alejandro laughed under his breath, but there was no humor in it.
“At midnight.”
“What happened to the box?”
He typed again.
Lucía responded.
I threw it out after we cleared the storage unit last year.
Then, a few seconds later, another message.
Why is she freaking out?
Alejandro started to answer.
I stopped him.
“Don’t tell her anything yet.”
“She deserves to know.”
“She deserves facts.”
“She’s my sister.”
“And Teresa is her mother.”
He looked at me sharply.
“You think Lucía would warn her?”
“I think people do stupid things when they’re scared.”
His mouth tightened because both of us knew that sentence applied to him too.
He put the phone down.
“That was unnecessary.”
“It was.”
I sat back in the chair.
“Sorry.”
He looked surprised.
I almost smiled.
“I can apologize too.”
“Apparently.”
We stayed quiet for a while.
The night had finally moved past anger into something worse.
Uncertainty.
At twelve forty-three, Daniel sent the secure folder.
I did not open it immediately.
Instead I made coffee.
Alejandro stared at me.
“You’re making coffee now?”
“Yes.”
“It’s almost one.”
“I can see the clock.”
“You’re going to regret that.”
“Probably.”
“You hate being awake after three.”
“I hate a lot of things tonight.”
He opened the cabinet and took out another mug.
“You’re having one?”
“No.”
He poured hot water over a tea bag instead.
“You still drink chamomile when you’re stressed?”
He gave me a look.
“You still clean kitchens when you’re furious?”
“Fair.”
It was ridiculous.
We stood side by side making beverages while somewhere in the city his mother might have been racing toward an apartment to retrieve something she feared I had discovered.
For a few minutes, neither of us spoke.
Then Alejandro said, “If the investigation shows I violated policy, you can’t protect me.”
I looked at him.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“I know.”
He stared into the tea.
“That’s one of the things I love about you.”
The sentence caught me off guard.
I did not answer.
He did not seem to expect one.
I carried my coffee into the study and opened Daniel’s folder.
There were invoices, approval records, vendor documents, badge logs, payment batches, and a preliminary reconciliation spreadsheet.
Alejandro stayed in the doorway.
“Am I allowed to look?”
I considered the question.
“No.”
He nodded.
No argument.
That hurt too.
I opened the visitor logs first.
Teresa’s name appeared four times.
Each visit coincided with either an emergency authorization or a vendor meeting involving Grupo Marea within forty-eight hours.
The fourth visit was different.
She had entered at 3:12 p.m. three weeks earlier and remained for eleven minutes.
No host was listed.
I clicked the scanned visitor note attached to the entry.
The security guard had written that she requested access to Alejandro’s temporary office to leave a folder.
Alejandro was in Monterrey that day.
I turned toward him.
“Did your mother have access to your Toluca office?”
His face went still.
“No.”
“Could she have gotten in?”
“Only if someone let her.”
I looked back at the log.
At the bottom of the handwritten note was the name of the employee who had escorted her upstairs.
Sergio Beltrán.
Alejandro whispered, “That’s impossible.”
“Who is he?”
He did not answer immediately.
Then he walked into the room.
“Sergio was fired two months ago.”
“For what?”
“Stealing fuel cards.”
Alejandro took the mouse from my hand before I could stop him and enlarged the scanned visitor note.
“Look at the date.”
“I am.”
“No, the termination date.”
He opened another file from memory, navigating through the folder tree faster than I could follow.
Sergio Beltrán’s termination had been processed fifty-one days before Teresa’s fourth visit to Toluca.
Alejandro leaned closer to the screen.
“He shouldn’t have had badge access.”
“Maybe he didn’t.”
“He escorted her upstairs.”
“That’s what the guard wrote.”
“He couldn’t have.”
“Then either the guard was wrong or someone never disabled Sergio’s access.”
Alejandro stepped back.
“IT disables accounts within an hour.”
“IT disables digital accounts.”
“Security disables badges.”
“Usually.”
He stared at me.
“You think someone left his physical credentials active.”
“I think we don’t know.”
He hated that answer every time I gave it.
I was beginning to hate it too.
I opened the access-control export Daniel had included.
The file took several seconds to load.
There were thousands of lines.
Alejandro pulled a chair beside mine but did not sit until I nodded.
We filtered by Sergio’s employee number.
Nothing appeared after his termination.
Alejandro exhaled.
“See?”
I changed the filter from employee number to badge ID.
Three entries appeared.
His expression changed.
May you like
The badge had been used twice after termination.
Once at 7:08 in the morning, eighteen days after Sergio was fired.
