28. Cali
CALI
Two days pass. Navi is holding. That's the word the doctors keep using, and boy, have I come to hate it.
Holding. Like a man dangling off the edge of something by his fingertips. Better than falling. Not the same as safe.
Ronan barely sleeps. He goes to the hospital in the mornings, sits with his cousin for the hour they allow, comes home, cooks whatever Isabella asks because he can't say no to her, and then stares at his phone like it's going to tell him something.
He hasn't said much. Neither have I. There isn't much to say when you're both just waiting to find out if the last honest man either of you knows is going to make it.
I'm at the sink Thursday morning, up to my elbows in dish soap, when the doorbell rings.
Ronan is upstairs with the kids. "Who's there?" he calls down.
"I'll get it, don't worry!" I dry my hands and go to the door.
Through the frosted glass, I see the shape of a woman.
I open it, and there's Gia Mercer.
She's in a dark coat and her hair's down for once. She looks more exhausted than ever. I get the feeling the people in this house aren't the only ones having a bad week.
I don't fully trust her. But ever since the fake agents incident, something in her eyes seems a bit less adversarial than it was previously. Her showing up here like this is also interesting.
If her investigation is real, she has to know about Navi's accident by now. A shooting like that doesn't stay quiet. Which means she's either here because she wants something, or because she knows something.
"Agent Mercer," I say, keeping my voice flat. "It's a little early."
"I know," she says. "Can I come in?" She glances past me, up the stairs, toward the sound of the kids. "I need to speak with you. Privately."
Something in the way she says privately makes my stomach drop.
"The kids are home," I say. "My husband's here."
"I know. That's why I said privately." She continues to whisper. "Just you. Ten minutes. It's important, or I wouldn't come by like this."
I stand there a second too long. Then I call up the stairs, light as I can make it. "Ronan? Can you keep them up there for a bit? I've got a work thing."
There's a pause. Then: "Everything alright?"
"Yeah. Just work."
He doesn't believe me. But he doesn't come down. He says, "Alright," and then, to Isabella, "Come here, brave girl, let's see if Doctor Fuzz is ready to come out yet." I hear her feet run toward her room.
Satisfied, I close the door on the hallway and lead Mercer into the kitchen.
I don't offer her coffee or a seat. She stands on the other side of the island and crosses her arms.
"Todd Bradshaw is dead," she says.
The dish soap is still slick on my hands. I wipe them on my jeans without thinking about it. I must've misheard her, though. Because what I thought she just said is pretty strange.
"What?"
"Your ex-husband. He's dead. Found yesterday morning in a motel outside Harrisburg. He'd been there two nights." She watches my face while she says it. "I'm sorry. I know that's a hell of a bombshell to get dropped on you."
I grip the edge of the counter.
Todd.
Todd, who stood on my steps three weeks ago with his hollow face and his wet eyes and told me he was a dead man. Don't let them hate me.
Todd, who tried to call me two nights ago from a number saved as DO NOT ANSWER. I sent it to voicemail without a second thought, and turned my phone off, and held Ronan's hand under the fluorescent lights, and haven't thought about him since.
"When…" I try to stammer out, "w-when did he—"
"Coroner's putting it Tuesday night. Late." She keeps watching me. "He called you that night, didn't he?"
I don't answer. I don't have to. She can see it on me, clear as day.
"I checked his phone records before I came," she says. "Last outgoing call was to you. 11:21 P.M. You didn't pick up."
I think about the little envelope badge blooming in the corner of my screen. The voicemail I never listened to. There lie the last words Todd Bradshaw ever tried to say to anybody.
"I thought you were keeping him safe? The feds. You people. He was cooperating. You said—he said men came and asked him everything, and then he was talking to you, and— Didn't you have people on him?"
Mercer's jaw tightens. "We did," she says.
"And?!"
"The detail was stood down late in the afternoon.
Two agents. They got a call routing them to a different assignment.
Verified codes, verified chain. The whole thing came through clean on their end.
" She grimaces. "Except it didn't come from us.
It came from somebody who speaks our language well enough to sound like us. Somebody who knew the protocol."
They faked it. They hacked in. They knew, and they used that to kill.
"So somebody spoofed your codes to pull his guards," I say slowly. "And then—"
"And then that person walked into that motel room and put two bullets in the back of his head while he was sitting on the end of the bed with the TV on.
" The detail is jarring, but she's not trying to be cruel.
She's trying to make me understand something, and she's decided the fastest way is to not soften it. "Professional. In and out."
In and out. A professional job.
"Why are you telling me this?" I say. "You didn't have to come here. You could've sent a—a person. A card. You keep coming to my house yourself."
"Because of what's in this folder," Mercer says, pulling out a sheaf of papers. "And because I wanted to watch your face when you saw it."
She opens it.
I don't want to look. But I have to.
She walks me through the contents. "A burner phone," she explains, tapping the printouts one by one with a short, unpainted nail. "A prepaid, activated three weeks ago, cash. It pinged towers in a pattern. Look at the map here and tell me what you see."
I know maps. I've built my whole life on maps like this. The burner is near a cigar bar in Midtown—on a night Ronan was at that cigar bar.
It's near the Brighton Beach waterfront the night of a wedding I stood at—next to him.
It's in Park Slope, near Methodist, the night Navi went under a surgeon's knife—with Ronan slumped in the waiting room.
It's near Ronan. Over and over. On the exact nights I could put him there myself.
"And this," Mercer says as she turns the page.
A payment. Routed. Through a shell, and then another shell, and then a third, six or seven deep, dirty money coming out the far end looking like a consulting fee to a firm in Delaware that doesn't exist.
I know this pattern. Payments routing through business after business until they came out clean.
The Akov pattern.
"Where'd you get this?" I whisper.
"Anonymous. Came into a tip line Wednesday morning, packaged up neat, exactly like this.
Documents attached. Somebody wanted us to have it.
" She closes the folder halfway, then thinks better of it and leaves it open, spread out between us like a winning hand of cards.
"So here's the story it tells, Ms. Meadows.
Your husband used his firm to freeze your assets and gut you in a divorce.
That same organization launders money for a criminal organization your husband has long been accused of running.
Todd got scared. Todd started talking to me.
And a cooperating witness is the single most dangerous thing there is to a man like Akov. So if two plus two must equal four…"
"Stop," I say. "Please, just—"
"I can't blame him; if I were in his position, I'd do the same.
So would you. You'd kill the witness. You'd use your resources to get him vulnerable and then you'd end his life before he could expose you.
" She straightens up and squints at me. "Maybe Ronan thinks he's safe.
But murder isn't a thing your marriage protects him from.
You can't be forced to testify against your husband?
Fine. But there's no privilege on earth that covers ordering a hit on your ex.
If this holds—if any of this holds—your husband spends the rest of his natural life in a federal cell, and no wedding certificate will stop me from putting him there. "
I stare at the map. At the little dots that follow my husband around like a shadow, on every night I could name.
"You think Ronan killed Todd," I say.
"That's exactly what I think," she agrees. "The question I'm asking right now is… What do you think?"
She picks her coat up off the stool where she'd draped it and retreats toward the exit.
"For what it's worth," she says from the mouth of the hall, "I know it's hard to swallow. It's almost too good." She pauses. "But you'd know better than anyone: The prettiest lies are the easiest to swallow."
Then she lets herself out. The door closes with a soft, heavy thunk, leaving me alone in my kitchen with a folder full of my husband's worst crime yet.
Upstairs, I can hear them. Isabella's voice, high and delighted. Ronan's, amused, answering, coaching her on patience, the one thing he knows best. You can't rush it, brave girl. It happens when it happens.
I don't move for a long time.
Then I do the only thing I've ever been any good at.
I get my laptop.
I sit down at the island once again and I open the founder's dev instance. Using the folder that Mercer left behind, I start to feed it.
The burner's tower pings—I type them in. The dates. The locations. Ronan's known movements, which I have, because I have login credentials to a tracker app that watches my whole world. I can pull his history right alongside the burner's and lay them next to each other.
The payment trail. The shells. I have those, too. I have The Akov Firm's whole public footprint mapped from six weeks ago, sitting in a folder marked Receipts like everything else.
I feed it all in.
My hands are shaking. The cursor blinks. I hate that little thing. It's the most honest thing I know. It doesn't flatter you and it doesn't lie, and right now, I hate it with everything in me because I know it's going to tell me the truth, whether I want it or not.
I have to know.
… Or do I?
I could close the laptop. I could take Mercer's folder and put it in the trash, then go upstairs and get down on the floor by the shoebox with the two little people I love more than my own life and the man who reads them books about the bottom of the ocean.
I could choose not to know.
Old Cali might have.
Old Cali made herself small and looked away and called it peace.
New Cali runs the numbers.
I hit go.
The engine chews on it. It doesn't take long. It never takes long; that's the horror of it. Eighteen months of my marriage rendered in a clean timeline in the time it takes water to boil. Todd's whole affair snapped into place in an afternoon.
And now this, the last question, the one I don't want the answer to, resolving while I sit here with my hands over my mouth.
Did my new husband kill my old one?
The dashboard loads.
Correlation. Confidence intervals.
And…
And…
And…
98.1% Likelihood.
My husband did it.
That's what it says. Not in those words. But that's what it means.
I don't move. I sit at the island with my hands over my mouth as I look at the verdict my own machine gave me.
One room over, the man it just convicted plays with my children.