Chapter Twenty-Eight
Isolde
By eight the following morning, Northglass’s library had stopped resembling any room intended for reading and become an evidence center assembled by people who had committed their crimes across enough incompatible systems to make organization feel like punishment.
Corwin’s archive occupied one end of the long table in printed summaries and drive exports, the fraudulent preservation records covered another, and Marco’s museum-attack file had been wedged between Bellandi access logs and a corporate chart dense enough with shell companies that Isolde had begun resenting anyone who believed arrows were an acceptable substitute for explanation.
Orsino sat beneath one of the windows with his glasses low on his nose and three separate cups of coffee within reach, while Taddeo worked across from Isolde in shirtsleeves, his jacket abandoned several hours earlier and the concentration in his face sharpened by the fact that everyone in the room now believed Lelio Ardizzi deserved more than suspicion.
The fragile shift between Isolde and Taddeo from the previous evening remained present without either of them trying to turn it into forgiveness.
She had taken his hand after Marco confirmed the connection between Federico Lanza and one of the museum attackers because she wanted to, and that choice had led to a brief kiss downstairs before breakfast this morning, initiated by Isolde and returned by Taddeo with enough restraint that she had been painfully aware of every place he did not presume to touch.
Her body had welcomed him with humiliating ease, but when the kiss ended she had gone to the library instead of his bedroom, and Taddeo had followed without suggesting the distinction meant anything other than what she intended.
Trust was still damaged.
Desire apparently had poor administrative discipline.
Orsino took off his glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “I would like to begin by formally objecting to Corwin Dacre’s filing system. Any man who creates three folders containing the words ‘secondary review final’ has forfeited the right to criticize Bellandi bookkeeping.”
Isolde glanced toward the spreadsheet open in front of him. “Your organization has four files called Final Accounts and three called Final Accounts Revised. I don’t think you have standing.”
“Ours are confusing for criminal reasons.” Orsino picked up one coffee cup, discovered it empty, and reached for another without apparent embarrassment. “Your brother appears to have done it recreationally.”
Taddeo kept his attention on the access report. “Mauro considers clear bookkeeping a form of government surveillance, so the standard around here is admittedly low.”
“That explains more about Mauro than I wanted to know.” Isolde pulled the Bellandi report closer and frowned at the columns of authentication data. “Now somebody explain why Corwin was opening historical financial files he supposedly had no authorization to see.”
Taddeo shifted his chair nearer rather than launching into the technical explanation from across the table.
“He was opening them with his own credentials, but the permissions were being altered around him. His normal consulting account had redevelopment access and a narrow financial-review scope, then somebody began placing him temporarily into a broader administrative group.”
Isolde followed the dates down the page. Some access windows lasted hours; others remained open for only part of a day before disappearing again. “So he could search for something and suddenly get more results without realizing somebody had changed his account.”
“Exactly. If the expanded access looked relevant to the project he was already working on, he had no reason to inspect the mechanism behind it.” Taddeo placed a second report beside the first. “What matters is that the primary system claims those changes were automated, while the mirrored security record shows manual intervention.”
Orsino leaned forward. “Whose intervention?”
Taddeo turned the laptop enough for all of them to see the administrator identifier. “Giacomo Verri.”
Isolde recognized the name from Corwin’s notes and the older Bellandi redevelopment records. “Lelio’s administrator.”
“For nine years.” Taddeo’s voice had gone quieter, which Isolde now knew meant whatever he was looking at had moved beyond irritation. “Verri had legitimate authority to change project permissions because Ardizzi-controlled companies were involved in several of the developments Corwin reviewed.”
“And Verri is dead,” Orsino said, his expression tightening. “Heart attack eight months ago. Nothing about it raised suspicion at the time, and there was enough family cardiac history that no one thought to question it.”
Isolde stared at the permission windows. “So we can’t ask whether Lelio ordered the changes.”
“No, but we can look at what those changes accomplished.” Taddeo moved Corwin’s activity timeline beside the permission report, eliminating the need to explain every technical field once the pattern appeared visually. “Look at the timing.”
Once aligned, the structure was ugly in its simplicity.
Corwin’s account gained broader historical access, suspicious records were touched beneath his credentials, and the extra permissions vanished again afterward.
It happened repeatedly over seven months, infrequently enough to avoid an obvious automated pattern but often enough that anyone investigating later would see Corwin’s account appearing around portions of the larger theft long before he actually stole the $8. 4 million.
Isolde sat back slowly. “They were putting him into the story before he knew there was a story.”
Taddeo nodded. “That is what it looks like.”
“So if anyone audited the theft later, Corwin already appeared to have been moving through the relevant records.” She looked down at the timeline, anger building with a colder kind of appreciation for whoever designed it.
“Then once he started noticing that money was disappearing, the same manufactured history turned into a frame.”
“And Corwin made the frame considerably more convincing by actually stealing eight point four million,” Orsino said. His tone carried no cruelty, only the bluntness of someone who had stopped pretending Corwin’s guilt needed softening.
Isolde exhaled through her nose. “He walked into something somebody had prepared for him.”
“More accurately, he committed the exact kind of crime that made the older fabricated activity look plausible,” Taddeo said. “Whoever set this up did not need Corwin to be innocent. They needed him to be predictable.”
That was the part Isolde knew would make her brother furious.
Corwin could probably survive being called reckless, arrogant, or criminal because each insult still left him occupying the center of his own mistake, the smartest man in the room who had simply pushed a strategy too far.
Discovering that someone had studied him well enough to predict the moment his intelligence would become ego—that somebody had left just enough rope in front of him and trusted Corwin to decide he knew how to use it—would injure something deeper.
“Corwin is going to hate this,” she said. “Not the frame itself. The fact that somebody knew what kind of bad decision he would eventually make.”
Taddeo’s mouth shifted faintly. “He can be offended after we make sure he survives long enough to hear about it.”
The reminder pulled her attention back from her brother to the table. “You said the timing might connect Verri directly to Lelio. Show me that instead of making me look at another authentication string.”
“Your technical education has been disappointingly brief.”
“I restore historic objects. If I wanted to spend my life reading authentication strings, I would have made different mistakes at eighteen.”
Taddeo almost smiled as he opened the communications overlay Marco had produced overnight.
Most of it showed ordinary contact between Verri and Lelio’s office, which meant very little on its own, but several correlations became more difficult to dismiss once they were aligned with Corwin’s searches.
On the day Corwin first requested broader historical parcel records, Lelio’s private office contacted Verri shortly before Corwin’s permissions changed; another access expansion followed a meeting between Lelio and contractors later connected to the forged preservation chain, while a third appeared hours before suspicious historical-finance records surfaced inside Corwin’s search results.
Isolde reached for the notes from her call with Corwin. “This is what he told me. Lelio knew which historical parcel files Corwin had requested before the redevelopment group knew he was searching them.”
Taddeo moved beside her. His sleeve brushed her arm, and both of them noticed without making anything of it. “Find the date.”
She did, then placed Corwin’s note beside the Bellandi timeline. “Corwin requests the parcel history at nine-ten. Lelio’s office talks to Verri just after noon, and Verri changes Corwin’s permissions afterward.”
Orsino came around the table and studied the sequence. “Then Corwin enters the larger archive that afternoon.”
The realization arrived so cleanly that Isolde felt the shape of the entire investigation shift inside her mind. “Lelio wasn’t only watching what Corwin found.”
Taddeo looked at her.
“He could influence what Corwin was capable of finding.” Isolde tapped the permission report. “If Corwin started going in the wrong direction, Lelio knew almost immediately because Verri controlled the access around him.”
“And none of Lelio’s own credentials ever had to touch Corwin’s account,” Taddeo said. “Verri became the administrative buffer.”