Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Tatum had been staring at the same page for twenty minutes.
Not because it was difficult to read. Because what it said kept landing in her chest in a way she needed a moment to sit with before she could move on.
She pushed back from the desk, rolled her shoulders, and looked at the wall of notes she'd built since Ryker had handed her the thumb drive. It was past nine. She hadn't eaten since the coffee and doughnut that morning, which felt like it had happened in a different lifetime.
She pulled the laptop back and kept going.
The files were meticulous. Whoever did this, whatever they did for Archer, they were extraordinarily good at it.
The bank records were layered and dense, but organized in a way that suggested someone who understood exactly what they were looking at when they pulled them.
They’d done the initial mapping for her. All she had to do was follow the money.
So she did.
The first thing she noticed was the subtle sloppiness.
It was the kind of thing she would have missed if she weren’t looking for it.
But Tatum had been living inside financial documentation for months, and she had developed an instinct for the places where careful people got careless.
It usually happened in one of two ways. Either they were tired, or they were arrogant.
In this case, she suspected both.
The fictitious signatory kept appearing across documents spanning different years and different countries.
A name used consistently enough to suggest habit rather than strategy.
James R. Hollis. She saw it three times before she stopped and stared at it.
Her heart pounded, and sweat broke out across her back.
James R. Hollis.
She knew that name.
Not from any document. Not from the investigation.
She knew it because she'd heard Gil Bennett use it as a joke once, years ago, at a firm Christmas party, slightly drunk and making fun of the kind of name someone would invent for a fake identity.
Something boring, he'd said. Something like James R.
Hollis. Nobody questions a James R. Hollis.
He said he used it on dating sites and occasionally as his name at fast food or coffee places.
She sat back in her chair. Her mouth had gone dry.
Gil Bennett. The nice guy from work. Someone she’d joked with many times. Gone on dates with. It just couldn’t be.
But there it was.
James R. Hollis, Gil's throwaway joke of a fake name, appearing as a signatory across documents connected to the same offshore structures that fed money to Lou Anderson and from Anderson up to whoever was running this whole operation.
She stared at the river.
Gil and Anderson. She'd seen them together.
More than once. Drinks at a bar on the Upper East Side that Anderson liked, the two of them laughing about something, comfortable in the way that people were comfortable when they'd known each other for a long time and had things in common they didn't discuss in public.
She'd never thought anything of it. Gil was affable and well-connected. He moved in the same circles as half the legal community in New York. Of course he knew Anderson.
But Gil wasn't representing Anderson in the lawsuit.
That had struck her as odd when she first heard about it because they were friendly and Gil was good and would have been the natural choice.
She'd assumed her parents were controlling the case assignment, keeping her close to it so they could pressure her into taking it.
Maybe that wasn't why at all.
Maybe Gil couldn't represent Anderson because Gil was already too close to the thing Anderson was trying to make go away. Or maybe Gil wanted to represent Anderson but couldn’t exactly tell her parents the truth.
She picked up her phone and then put it back down. She wanted to think through it a little more before she called Archer. This was crazy. Insane. She genuinely liked Gil. He couldn’t be involved in this, could he?
What was the old saying? When you’ve eliminated all which is impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
She went back to the files.
The second thing she found hit her differently. She almost missed it. It was buried in a transfer record, a payment that didn't match the pattern of the others, a different amount, a different routing structure, a different timeline. She almost scrolled past it. Then something made her stop.
The account it came from.
She cross-referenced it twice to make sure. Then she sat very still for a long moment.
The account that had paid Davis his twenty million, or the first installment of it at least, was the same account that had funded a payment to a private contractor in Brooklyn.
A contractor that the notes identified, with the careful neutrality of someone who documented things without editorializing, as the cleanup crew at the Obsidian Club.
The same account.
Davis and the cleanup crew. Funded from the same source.
Which meant Davis wasn't just connected to the scheme. A straight line connected Davis to the Curator's operation. He was being paid by the same hand that had cleaned up Lebowitz's murder and walked out of that club without leaving a trace.
Cold nausea crawled up her throat, and she shivered. It was one thing to suspect Davis, it was another thing entirely to know it. If she had any doubts about the human trafficking, they all went rushing by like the East River outside her window.
She was still sitting with that when she heard a knock at the door. Locking and closing her laptop, Tatum went to the door.
Archer stood in the hallway holding a tray. Covered plates, two glasses, a bottle of wine. When he looked at her face, his expression shifted almost imperceptibly.
"You found something," he said.
She nodded. "Come in." Stepping back to let him pass, she took a deep breath to steady herself. It was all becoming so real.
Archer set the tray on the dining table and began uncovering the plates. Chicken, vegetables, bread, and something that smelled extraordinary. Her stomach growled audibly and she pressed her hand to it.
"Eat first," he said.
"I need to tell you—"
"You can tell me while you eat." He pulled out a chair and looked at her.
She sat. He poured the wine and sat across from her, and she talked while she ate, which was something she almost never did. He listened without interrupting in the way he had of listening that made her feel like every word was being cataloged and considered.
She told him about James R. Hollis first. Watched his face as she explained the alias, Gil's joke, the pattern across the documents.
"Gil Bennett," Archer said.
"Gil Bennett," she confirmed. "A man who is friendly with Lou Anderson. Who is not representing Anderson in the lawsuit, which I initially assumed was my parents’ pulling strings.
" She took a sip of wine. "But I think it might be because Gil can't be anywhere near the Anderson case without drawing attention to his own involvement. "
Archer was already reaching for his phone. He typed a message, sent it, and set the phone back down. "One of my people will do a full workup on Bennett. Everything. His finances, his client list, his movements for the last two years."
"The alias is a mistake," Tatum said. "A sloppy one. The kind of mistake someone makes when they think they're completely safe. The kind of mistake Gil would make because, well, he’s Gil. Good-natured, hard-working, and slightly careless.
“My parents had encouraged us to date, but Gil wasn’t my type.” Not many men were her type. How many Archer Grays were out there? She swallowed a gulp of wine. Not a good path for her mind to stroll down.
She frowned, “I thought he was a good guy, but I have always known he didn’t pay attention to detail the way someone at his level should.
We worked on a case together a few years ago, and I had to redo a couple of things Gil had done.
No major mistakes, but loopholes were left open by the careless use of language.
“I know his paralegal, Diane, goes over everything Gil does just in case. She told Sam, my assistant, about it. She said that if Gil goes down, then he’ll take her with him. She knows because any mistakes anyone finds, he immediately blames on her. Then he feels guilty and gives her big bonuses.”
"Arrogance," Archer said.
"Yes." She put her fork down. "There's something else."
She told him about the account. Davis and the cleanup crew. The same source, the same funding.
Archer went very still.
By now, she’d learned to read his stillness. This one was the particular quality of a man who had just had a suspicion confirmed in a way that changed the shape of everything.
"That puts Davis inside the Curator's operation," he said quietly. "Not just connected to the scheme. Inside the operation itself."
"Yes." She put down her fork. The food seemed to form a lump in her stomach.
Archer sat back. His eyes moved to the middle distance for a moment in the way they did when he was working through something, and she watched him and thought, not for the first time, that there was something extraordinary about the way his mind worked.
Precise and fast and always three steps ahead of where the conversation was.
"How did you get these files?" she asked.
Archer picked up his wine glass.
"Archer."
He took a sip.
"You're ignoring the question."
"Yes," he agreed pleasantly, and set the glass back down. “One of my team.”
“Well, whoever it was is extraordinarily good at organization and detail work.”
Archer nodded.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she let it go.
She had learned, slowly and somewhat reluctantly, that there were things about how Archer operated that she was not going to get answers to, and that pushing on those things was like pushing on a wall.
Solid and immovable and completely uninterested in her opinion about it.