Chapter Eight
Isolde
Taddeo waited until after breakfast to tell Isolde that the problem with Corwin might have begun months before the eight point four million dollars disappeared, which she suspected was less an act of consideration than an attempt to make certain she ate before he gave her another reason not to.
She found him in the library shortly after nine, occupying one end of the long table beneath the windows with his laptop, two folders, a cup of coffee, and enough neatly arranged paperwork to make the room look temporarily annexed by an accounting firm.
The morning after the storm had come startlingly clear.
Pale sunlight struck the Atlantic hard enough to turn portions of it silver, while below the windows two groundsmen worked on the evergreen branches that had obscured the service camera during her escape.
One man stood on a ladder cutting back half the shrub while another hauled wet branches toward a maintenance cart.
Farther along the western path, a new exterior light had appeared overnight.
Isolde pulled out the chair opposite Taddeo and sat. “You've made the prison extremely efficient this morning. I watched someone remove approximately half a tree because I walked behind it once.”
“It needed trimming,” Taddeo said, finishing whatever he was typing before lowering the laptop screen. “The fact that you demonstrated why merely accelerated the schedule.”
“It needed trimming yesterday too.”
“And now it's done.” His gaze moved over her face briefly. “You didn't come here to discuss landscaping.”
“No. Elettra said you wanted me.”
Something changed in his expression at the wording, subtle enough that she might have imagined it. Isolde ignored that possibility immediately, because whatever had begun happening between them in the kitchen the previous night did not need encouragement before coffee.
Taddeo rested his forearms on the table. “One of our accountants went farther back through the accounts after the material we reviewed yesterday. There are smaller irregularities beginning several months before Corwin moved the eight point four.”
The humor left her. “What kind of irregularities?”
“Money routed through project expenses, consulting fees, development accounts. Some transactions were reversed later, others buried inside legitimate activity. Individually, none were large enough to draw attention.”
“How much altogether?”
“We don't know yet.” Taddeo opened one of the folders and turned it toward himself rather than her. “Corwin's access appears in some of them, but not all.”
Isolde sat back slowly. “Some.”
“Not all,” he repeated, and this time the distinction sounded deliberate.
For the last several days she had been trying to fit Corwin into one of two versions of reality.
Either he had stolen from dangerous men and disappeared, making him far more reckless and selfish than the brother she knew, or someone had used his credentials and disappearance to frame him.
Neither possibility had been comfortable, but at least both had edges. This new information blurred them.
“Does that mean you think he didn't take the eight point four?”
“No.”
The answer came quickly enough that hope never had the chance to become useful. Isolde gave him a flat look. “You could have softened that.”
“You wouldn't have believed me.”
“That doesn't mean I wouldn't appreciate the effort occasionally.”
Taddeo's gaze stayed on hers. “I think Corwin moved the money. I also think something was happening before he did, and I want to know whether he knew about it.”
“Which is why I'm here.”
“Yes.” He reached for his coffee, took a drink, then set it down again. “Anything different about him in the last month or two matters now. Work problems, strange questions, people he mentioned, anything that seemed unimportant at the time.”
Isolde reached for the carafe near the center of the table and poured herself coffee.
Thinking about Corwin was easier when her hands had something ordinary to do.
“He was working constantly, but that's hardly unusual.
He canceled dinner twice, and the second time bothered me because he'd been the one who asked me to come.”
“How close to his disappearance?”
“About two weeks, maybe a little more. He blamed work.”
Taddeo gave her a look that made it obvious he understood how useless that explanation was.
“I know,” she said. “Corwin considered work an all-purpose excuse. He'd been distracted the last time we actually had dinner too. He kept checking his phone, and every time I asked what was going on, he said he had an annoying client.”
“Did he identify the client?”
“No. He was careful about confidentiality.” She stirred a little milk into her coffee, then stopped as a memory surfaced with enough clarity to feel newly important. “He complained about invoices.”
Taddeo's attention sharpened. “What about them?”
“He said people were getting lazy when they falsified them. Something about nobody respecting boring paperwork anymore.” Isolde frowned into her cup. “At the time it sounded exactly like the sort of complaint Corwin makes after staring at spreadsheets for twelve hours.”
“What did he mean by lazy?”
“I don't remember the exact wording, and telling me to try harder isn't going to improve the memory.” She glanced at him before he could speak, which earned the faintest movement at one corner of his mouth.
“He said the invoices were too repetitive.
That whoever created them was copying mistakes because they didn't understand what they were supposed to be imitating.”
Taddeo leaned forward slightly. “And you discussed that with him?”
“Only because I told him forged historical records can have the same problem. Someone copies a source without understanding which marks belong to the document and which are damage, later annotations, stains, printing flaws, whatever.” She paused, and another piece of the conversation slid into place behind it.
“Then he asked how I'd know if an old municipal record had been altered.”
Taddeo became very still.
Isolde noticed. “I thought it was hypothetical.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That it depends on what I'm looking at. Paper, ink, seals, printing process, whether I have the original or a scan.” The memory was easier now that she had found its beginning.
Corwin across from her with his tie loosened, his phone beside his plate, asking questions in a tone casual enough that she hadn't recognized the pattern.
“Then he asked whether the museum kept records from before the waterfront redevelopment.”
“What kind of records?”
“Maps. Harbor plans. Municipal preservation material, probably. I told him the museum had some because of the historic customs and warehouse properties, but the city archives held more.”
“When?”
“Within two weeks of him disappearing.”
Taddeo looked toward the laptop. “Corwin accessed historical redevelopment files during the same period.”
Isolde lowered her coffee. “You knew that?”
“I knew he'd accessed property records. We didn't understand how specific the historical material was until this morning.”
“What exactly was he looking at?”
“We're still pulling the access history.”
She pushed back slightly from the table. Every answer inside Northglass seemed to create another door Taddeo had not yet decided whether to open. “Did he access western harbor records?”
“Some.”
“And you think that's connected to the missing money.”
“I think I'm done deciding what is connected before we understand why he was looking.”
That was unexpectedly reasonable. Isolde disliked having no argument ready for it.
She looked toward the windows, where the groundsmen were dragging away another branch. “He asked something else. He wanted to know whether damage survives when a document is scanned.”
Taddeo frowned. “Meaning?”
“If an original page has a stain or tear, the defect appears in the scan.
If someone later uses that image as the basis for a fake, they can accidentally reproduce the damage because they don't understand it isn't supposed to be part of the document.” She turned the cup between her palms. “It's one of the reasons repeated defects matter.
Real damage doesn't normally migrate from one supposedly separate original to another.”
Taddeo reached for a pen and wrote something down.
Isolde watched him. “Don't turn every conversation my brother had with me into a conspiracy.”
“I wrote down what you said.”
“You have very incriminating handwriting.”
“I'll work on making it friendlier.”
The near-smile threatened again, and Isolde had the unpleasant realization that she was beginning to recognize when he was deliberately hiding one.
Then she remembered the book.
“The Harbor Pilot.”
His expression changed. “What about it?”
“Corwin gave me an old book about ten days before he disappeared. The Crownport Harbor Pilot and Tide Register, 1912. He said he'd found it at an estate sale and thought of me because it was Crownport material.”
“Where is it?”
“At the museum.”
“What was inside?”
“I don't know. Tide tables, navigation information, harbor descriptions. I never examined it properly.” Isolde stared at the table as the memory of the binding returned: faded cloth, loosened covering, newer thread visible beneath the spine. “It had been repaired badly.”
Taddeo waited.
“Modern adhesive. Wrong thread. Probably nothing.” She looked at him. “People repair old books badly all the time. I spent most of my professional life cleaning up after them.”
“You noticed the repair immediately.”
“Of course I did.”
“And Corwin gave it to you during the same period he was asking about altered records and old harbor maps.”
Isolde felt irritation rise because his conclusion had followed exactly the same path hers had. “I know what the timing looks like.”
Taddeo wrote Harbor Pilot beneath the earlier note.
“There's the conspiracy handwriting again.”