Chương 10
“That isn’t a reason.”
“No. It’s an explanation.”
She set the mug down.
“Do not let this house explain you.”
In the library downstairs, Adrian sat across from Victor with no guards in the room.
Victor had removed his jacket and loosened his tie. A plate of untouched food rested on the table beside him. He looked less like a prisoner than an irritated executive delayed at an airport.
Adrian placed a copy of the fire report between them.
“Where is the green ledger?”
Victor leaned back. “Ask your housekeeper.”
“She saw it in my desk.”
“That sounds like a problem with your housekeeper.”
“You knew she saw it.”
“I guessed.”
“You don’t guess.”
Victor smiled. “You used to consider that a strength.”
“Where is it?”
“Safe.”
“From whom?”
“You.”
Adrian nodded once. “Why?”
“Because your father understood that some records should exist and never be seen.”
“My father is dead.”
“His debts aren’t.”
“Neither are his victims.”
Victor’s expression hardened. “Careful.”
“Did Mateo Morales copy the South Dock books?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you send Kennelly to recover them?”
“I hired Kennelly after retirement because he knew the investigation. That is not a confession.”
“Did you order the fire?”
“No.”
“Did my father?”
Victor looked at him for a long time.
“Your father ordered the discrepancy handled.”
“What discrepancy?”
“Fuel invoices. Phantom loads. Union payoffs. Money moving through Lakeshore that wasn’t ours.”
“Whose?”
“Sal Greco’s, mostly.”
“And yours.”
Victor’s silence answered.
Adrian’s bandaged hand rested on the table.
“Mateo found it.”
“He found numbers.”
“He called his wife.”
“He should have called no one.”
The sentence settled between them.
Adrian’s voice lowered. “What did you do?”
“I sent Kennelly to retrieve the copies.”
“The fire?”
“Was not the plan.”
“Whose plan was it?”
Victor looked toward the dark shelves.
“One of Greco’s men panicked when Mateo locked himself in the records office. He used an accelerant to force him out. The building’s suppression system had been disconnected during renovations.”
“By whom?”
“Your operations office.”
Adrian felt something cold move through his chest.
“Signed by?”
Victor’s eyes returned to him.
“You.”
The word was quiet.
Adrian did not move.
Two years earlier, his office had processed hundreds of maintenance authorizations. Victor placed papers in front of him. Adrian signed. Fire systems. Contractor changes. Temporary waivers. He had treated signatures as weather passing across his desk.
“I authorized a thirty-day shutdown for replacement,” he said.
“It had been off for four months.”
“I didn’t approve that.”
“You approved the extension.”
“I would remember.”
“Would you?”
Victor leaned forward.
“You were in New York dealing with the Santoro dispute. Your mother was in the hospital. Sofia had just sent back the birthday check you mailed her. You signed everything I gave you.”
Adrian remembered the week in fragments: hospital coffee, his mother asking for a priest, three men talking at once in a hotel room, a stack of folders beside the bed. He remembered signing without reading because reading required attention he did not have.
“Show me.”
Victor laughed softly. “Now you want paperwork.”
“I want the ledger.”
“The ledger protects all of us.”
“It protected you.”
“It protected the organization. There is no difference.”
“There is tonight.”
Victor stood.
Adrian did not.
“You think a child changed you,” Victor said. “She didn’t. She embarrassed you, and you are dressing the embarrassment as conscience.”
Adrian stared at the fire report.
“Maybe.”
Victor waited.
Adrian looked up.
“But Mateo Morales is still dead.”
“So are many people.”
“Not an argument.”
“It has always been the argument.”
Adrian stood then.
Victor’s certainty faltered.
“Tell me where the ledger is.”
“No.”
Adrian moved around the table.
Victor lifted his chin. “You’ll have to kill me.”
“I know.”
For several seconds, they stood face-to-face in the quiet library.
Adrian had killed men before. Not impulsively and not often, but enough that he knew the difference between anger and decision. Anger was heat. Decision was arithmetic.
Victor expected the arithmetic to end with his body.
Adrian opened the library door.
“Marco.”
The guard entered.
“Move him to the east bedroom,” Adrian said. “No one speaks to him without me present.”
Victor’s shoulders lowered by a fraction.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said.
Adrian looked at him.
“No. I made it two years ago.”
At breakfast, Lily refused eggs because they were “too folded.” Mrs. Donnelly ordered the cook to make toast. Elena drank coffee that had gone cold before she remembered it existed.
Adrian entered at seven thirty.
His eyes were bloodshot. He wore the same dark sweater and had not shaved. A small trace of yellow paint remained near his hairline, visible only in the morning light.
Lily pointed.
“You missed some.”
“I know.”
“Do you want me to fix it?”
“Not today.”
She accepted this.
He sat across from Elena.
“Victor says Mateo found evidence of theft,” he said.
Elena set down her mug.
Mrs. Donnelly took Lily to select jam from the pantry without being asked.
“Whose theft?”
“Victor and Sal Greco used Lakeshore to move money through false fuel and storage invoices. Mateo copied the discrepancies.”
“And the fire?”
“A man named Owen Pike started it while trying to force Mateo out of the records office.”
“Where is Pike?”
“Dead. Shot eight months later in Indiana.”
“By you?”
“No.”
“Victor?”
“Probably Greco.”
Elena pressed her palms against the table.
“Probably.”
“I don’t have proof yet.”
“Did your father know?”
“He ordered Victor to recover the documents.”
“And you?”
Adrian looked at his bandaged hand.
“I signed an extension keeping the fire-suppression system offline.”
She stared at him.
“I did not know why,” he continued. “I didn’t read the authorization closely enough.”
“You expect that to matter?”
“No.”
Her chair scraped the floor as she stood.
“Mateo burned alive because you couldn’t be bothered to read a page.”
“Yes.”
May you like
The answer hit harder than denial.
Elena walked to the window. The garden was silver with rain. A groundskeeper in a hooded jacket cleared branches from the path as if the world had not changed.
