47. Mat
MAT
I’m at the front door of the bank by the time the sun rises on Monday. It isn’t open yet, obviously, but that doesn’t stop me from pacing around the sidewalk like a madman, muttering complete nonsense to myself.
“Jersey… Jazzy… Chintzy… Doozy…”
I still can’t figure this shit out, and it’s driving me insane. What could Susan have been saying to Caroline before she died? Will the answer be in Bill’s safe deposit box? Or am I burning precious hours on a wild goose chase?
I check my watch. In forty-five minutes, we’ll know.
I pivot on my heel and squint at my reflection in the bank’s mirrored front doors. Fucking hell, I look like shit. Hollow-eyed and stubbled, with the collar of yesterday’s shirt riding crooked under my coat. I look like…
… the sort of man who’d leave his woman in a cage.
Because that’s exactly what I am.
The guilt stabs me like a knife in the ribs. Coincidentally, those flare up, angrier than ever, like barbed wire scorching me from the inside. I double over and clutch against them, sucking in ragged breaths of freezing air, until finally, the pain starts to ebb.
It’s the thought of Cass’s belly hidden under prison grays that kills me the most. That image is night and day from the first time I ever laid eyes on her, when she strutted into Khaza in those ridiculous Prada heels, trying to project confidence in a room full of killers.
She held her chin high, even with the daubs of concealer on her cheekbone showing anyone who cared to look that she was trapped in an abusive nightmare.
Anyone with eyes could see she was prey. And still she’d marched in there, proud, defiant.
I know, I fucking know , that she’ll carry that same proud defiance into her cell. They’ll try to break her, because that’s what penitentiaries and court systems do best. And she’ll fight them to the bitter fucking end.
But she shouldn’t have to. That’s the whole damn point. She shouldn’t be in this at all.
I’ve made so many mistakes along the way. The best thing I could’ve done would be to have never said a word to her.
If not that, then the second-best would have been to throw her over my shoulder then and there, get in a car, and just drive, until this place wasn’t even a smudge in the rearview mirror.
How the hell did I let this happen? How did she let me happen? A woman like that, choosing a man like me... It’s the closest thing to a miracle I’ve ever witnessed, and I have spent most of my life believing in nothing.
Sure, I was supposed to frame her. I came into her penthouse ready to do exactly that. But in the moment that mattered, I wouldn’t have gone through with it. I know that now.
She’s bound to me. Tied up in my life, just like I’m tied up in hers.
There isn’t a fucking person alive who can pry us apart.
The bank manager unlocks the door at eight fifty-nine. As soon as there’s a crack wide enough for me to get through, I’m inside. “I need a manager who can open a safe deposit box for me.”
Her eyes widen as she takes me in. I understand now how Lukas feels all the time, because she looks horrified and cowed into submission. Some people, you just don’t fuck with.
Now that Cass’s life hangs in the balance, I’ve become one of those people.
She leads me down a hallway and into the vault room, then asks for ID. I hand her Bill Oglethorpe’s driver’s license, fished out of the wallet in Caroline’s manila envelope. She glances at the photo, glances at me, glances back at the photo, then at the box number etched into the key.
Ultimately, she shrugs. I don’t think she’s ever going to win Employee of the Month. Fine by me, though. I had nastier plans if she had tried to put up a fight.
“Box 11056,” she murmurs aloud, then walks me to it.
Two keys, hers and mine, turn together. The little brass door swings open. She slides the steel drawer out and sets it on the privacy table behind a curtain, then leaves me to it with a soft, “Take your time.”
I close the curtain, but I have no intention of taking my time.
The drawer is shallow. Inside rests…
… a single black USB drive.
That’s it. After all this work and breathless waiting, it’s almost anticlimactic.
I take a single, long look at it, this simple little stick that has cost Bill his life and may yet cost mine. “What secrets are you holding, friend?” I whisper.
Then I tuck it into the inside pocket of my coat opposite the sonogram.
One pocket for the past, one for the future. Both sitting flush against my aching ribs.
Jillian answers Kir’s door barefoot, the bump of her belly clearly visible now beneath an oversized sweater I’m almost positive belongs to my best friend. Her hair is up in a clip. She takes one look at my face and steps back without a word, holding the door open with her hip.
“You look even worse than last time,” she remarks. “Tea or whiskey?”
“We don’t have time for either.” I drop the USB drive on her kitchen counter. “This came out of Bill Oglethorpe’s safe deposit box.”
As I expected, her jaw drops.
Kir, for all that he is a trained killer and son of the Bratva, is also a sentimental bastard and an absolute simp for his wife. I made a guess that he would have filled her in on everything I reported yesterday, and it turns out I was spot on.
That’s good. It’ll make things go faster if I don’t have to explain it all to Jillian from the start.
Without another word, I see her shift gears. She goes from Pregnant Housewife to Cold-Blooded Reporter in the blink of an eye. Her jaw tightens, eyes thin, brows furrow. If I didn’t know her as well as I do, I might’ve been slightly intimidated.
She plucks her laptop from the table, slots the drive in, and pulls a stool up next to mine. We don’t bother with pleasantries.
The files load, revealing folders nested within folders, all organized with naming convention that’s almost obsessive in its tidiness, listed by year, then by name, then by category. 2019/Zimmerman, W./Wires. 2020/Snyder, R./Photos. 2021/Lowery, K./Memos. 2018/Hadley, P./Correspondence.
“Jesus Christ,” Jillian breathes. “He was a librarian. ”
“He kept files on everything,” I tell her, remembering Caroline’s voice in the parlor. Daddy was the same way. The man wouldn’t throw out a parking stub. “His daughter said as much.”
Jillian clicks into the partner folders first, the ones Bill mentioned in the woods.
We skim. Hadley signed off on a wire structuring scheme in ‘17.
Lowery looked the other way on a handful of FCPA violations between ‘19 and ‘22.
Zimmerman has a son who landed a no-show consulting contract with a Latvian shell corp that paid him four hundred grand a year to do, as far as I can tell, fuck-all.
It’s all very neat, very useful.
None of it is what I came for.
“Keep going,” I urge. “This isn’t enough.”
We find the key folder fifteen minutes in. It’s the fattest one in the directory by a wide margin.
DeMaris, J.
That’s when it fucking hits me.
Jozy.
Not Jersey . Not Juicy . Not Cozy .
Jozy.
The nickname Bill himself used at the Crispin, talking about DeMaris while taking a pull from his flask. Jozy always could hold his liquor.
If Bill was as open with his wife as Kir is with his, then Susan would’ve heard that name a hundred times as Bill stayed up late at night, fretting about the consequences of fuck-ups in the sordid games he was trying to escape.
So when she clawed her way up through the morphine for one breath, one word, one chance, it wasn’t a beach in Spring Lake she was thinking of.
It was a man .
“Mat?” Jillian’s voice cuts through. “You look like you’re about to either pass out or punch a wall. Which is it?”
“It’s Jozy,” I rasp.
“What?”
“Susan’s last word. To Caroline. She didn’t say Jersey. She said Jozy . As in Senator Josiah DeMaris. ” I jab a finger at the folder swelling open on her screen. “Look at the size of that folder, Jillian. Look at it. ”
Her jaw drops. She turns back to the laptop and starts to click.
The folder splits open into more folders. Wires. Photos. Correspondence. Travel. Personnel. Jillian dives into Wires first.
It’s a ledger. A spreadsheet, hundreds of rows long, each line a wire transfer.
Originating accounts in Cyprus, the BVI, Liechtenstein, Macao, a smattering of Caribbean banks.
Receiving accounts that I recognize from my own work at the firm—Vainakh shells I’ve helped paper over the years without ever knowing what was actually moving through them.
Dates. Amounts. Notes columns annotated in Bill’s clipped little shorthand.
JD app’d in person, Geneva. JD verbal, secure line. JD sig req’d, see attached.
JD. Josiah DeMaris.
The dates start in late 2018 and run all the way through the third week of January of this year.
“That’s—” Jillian leans in, her finger hovering over the screen.
“Mat, those are approvals. Look at the language. App’d.
Sig req’d. These aren’t payments to him.
These are payments authorized by him.” She turns to look at me, awestruck.
“Josiah wasn’t getting paid off by Vainakh… He was running the whole fucking show.”
What does that make Raymond? It’s becoming clear that Raymond wasn’t even the principal in his own life. He was an errand boy who got cocky.
DeMaris was the man who’d decided enough was enough.
Jillian closes the computer very, very softly.
“Mat…” The reporter has stepped back, and whatever Jillian is underneath that—a friend, a soon-to-be-mother, a woman who read this exact kind of dossier on her own husband before falling in love with him anyway—is sitting next to me at her kitchen island.
“I have to tell you something you don’t want to hear. ”
I nod. “Go.”