Chapter Eleven #2
Remi moved past him and gave the room a slow, professional read. Nothing in his expression suggested he saw what Leo did. “It’s clean, Leo. Tidy. Nothing’s tipped over or broken, no drawers hanging open.” He glanced back. “What are you seeing that I’m not?”
“My letter opener.” Leo crossed to the desk and pointed, without touching, to a brass-handled blade lying parallel to the edge of the blotter.
“It sits at an angle. Always. Forty-five degrees, handle toward the window, every single time I leave this room. It’s been that way since I started working here. ”
Remi looked at the letter opener, then at Leo, plainly waiting for the rest.
“It’s a baseball thing.” Leo heard how ridiculous it sounded and admitted it anyway.
“When I played, I never stepped on the chalk lines coming off the field. Not once since Little League, not even by accident. You don’t break a streak by tempting it.
” He nodded at the desk. “So I leave one thing the same every time I walk out of this office. The opener at forty-five degrees. It’s a stupid little ritual.
I’ve done it so long I don’t even think about it anymore.
” He looked up. “And it’s squared off flat against the blotter.
Somebody picked it up, put it back down, and didn’t know it was supposed to be crooked. ”
Remi’s effortless charm packed itself away, and the operative surfaced. He no longer looked remotely like he was hoping to break into the agent business.
“Okay.” He kept his voice pitched low for the room and not the hallway. “I believe you. A guy who never once clipped a chalk line knows where he leaves his letter opener.” He scanned the office again, slower this time, reading it as a scene rather than a space. “Could it have been Marcy?”
“Maybe, but she doesn’t like to come in when I’m not here, so she usually tells me.”
“Before we ask her, see if anything’s missing.”
Leo made himself breathe and started a mental inventory. The framed jerseys on the wall, untouched. The bourbon in the credenza, present and accounted for. His laptop sat where he’d docked it Friday, and when he checked, it was still locked and asking for the password he had given no one.
Then he took out a key and opened the bottom drawer of his desk, the deep one where he kept important client files, and stiffened again.
“Here.” He crouched and studied the hanging folders without disturbing them.
“Someone has gone through these. The tabs are out of order. I file by sport, then alphabetically, and Devonte’s is sitting in front of the football section instead of behind it.
” His jaw tightened. “I haven’t archived Miles Ashworth’s file yet, and it’s two slots forward of where it belongs.
Somebody pulled these and put them back in a hurry. ”
“Anything actually gone?”
Leo went through them one at a time, his pulse loud in his ears. Contracts. Endorsement riders. Medical authorizations. Personal notes he’d handwritten after meetings, the private observations he never put in an email. He counted them twice.
“No, not that I can tell.” He sat back on his heels, and somehow that was worse than a clean theft would have been. He looked up at Remi. “They wanted to read it. Or photograph it.”
Remi crouched beside him and inspected the rifled drawer.
“They must’ve picked the lock, but there are no scratch marks.
Seems they got everything they came for and walked out clean.
You’d never have known, except you’ve got a superstition older than your career.
” He stood and pulled out his phone. “Anja’s going to want to hear this before we touch one more thing in here. ”
A knock came at the open door, and both men turned.
Marcy marched in, a stack of message slips in one hand, and stopped short the instant she got a clear look at Leo’s face. Whatever she saw there made her own expression shift. She’d spent years watching him weather good news and bad.
“Leo, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” He slid the smooth smile back into place, the one he’d been holding all morning, and hoped it reached his eyes. “Long weekend. I didn’t sleep much.”
Her gaze flicked to the open desk drawer, then to Remi, then back to Leo, missing nothing. “You have a look. I know it. It’s the one you had the morning the Roule deal almost fell apart.”
“It’s not the Roule deal.” That, at least, was true. “I promise. It’s nothing I can’t handle.” He nodded at the slips in her hand to move her off the subject. “Those for me?”
She held his gaze another second, plainly unconvinced, then let it go and crossed to place the messages on his desk.
“Sinclair’s office called twice about the Cross extension.
And this is Remi, I assume.” She gave Remi a swift, assessing once-over and a brisk nod.
“Welcome. If he forgets to feed you lunch, and he will, my desk is the one with the candy dish. He runs people ragged and calls it mentoring.”
“Noted, ma’am. Thank you.” Remi gave her the full charm package, and Marcy grinned approvingly before she headed back out.
At the door she paused and regarded Leo, the worry not entirely gone from her eyes. “You’d tell me if something was wrong?”
“You’d be the first,” Leo lied gently, and hated that one more than most of them.
#
Remi moved to the far corner of Leo’s office and let the part of his brain that had been playing eager job applicant for the last ninety minutes power down.
It was a relief, honestly. He’d spent the morning being Remi, the veteran who was breaking into the business. He’d shaken hands, learned names, and turned the charm up to a setting he privately thought of as nuclear. It had worked. It always did. But it cost him.
People assumed a man his size was the silent, slow type, and Remi had learned to let them keep assuming it.
You got more out of a room when it had already decided you weren’t paying attention.
Five years in the Regiment, three more doing wet contract work in places that didn’t make the news, and the single most useful weapon he owned had turned out to be people’s tendency to underestimate big, calm men who smiled easily.
Anja made this look effortless, and it absolutely wasn’t. Remi had developed a genuine respect for her that he hadn’t seen coming. She ran a principal with the same total awareness a good Ranger brought to a patrol, carrying the responsibility so lightly nobody clocked the weight of it.
He glanced at Leo, crouched over a drawer of files that some stranger had fanned through and put back wrong, and bumped his opinion of the man up another notch.
He had Leo pegged on the drive over: smooth talker, expensive condo, a sports agent lawyer, for God’s sake.
It was a profession Remi had mentally filed somewhere between car salesperson and lobbyist. The chalk-line thing had rearranged that.
A man didn’t keep a superstition that long by accident.
It took boring, unglamorous discipline, the same muscle that got a soldier to clean a weapon the exact way ten thousand times until his hands did it in the dark.
Leo De Luca paid attention to small things and held a pattern when nobody was watching.
That was worth more in a protectee than charm or money, because it meant the man might actually survive the next two weeks by noticing something before it killed him.
And it meant the intrusion was real. Remi had half-wondered, watching Leo go pale over a letter opener, whether he was babysitting a rich guy’s nerves.
He wasn’t. Somebody had stood in this office, in this building full of people who’d known Leo for a long time, and gone through a client’s most private papers with enough care to square everything back up.
But they had made exactly one mistake, because they couldn’t have known a washed-up infielder had never stepped on the chalk.
It raised thoughts Remi didn’t love. Whoever was doing this had a key, a code, or a friendly face that nobody downstairs would think twice about. This wasn’t a smash-and-grab off the street. It was an inside job. This was someone who belonged here.
He didn’t like where this was headed, and he liked even less that he was standing in the middle of it in a suit and tie. He adjusted his stance, filed that complaint for later, and took out his phone.
Anja picked up on the first ring. “Tell me he’s behaving.”
“He is. He also just made the find of the day, and you’re going to want to sit down for it.
” Remi kept his voice low, his back to the wall.
“Somebody tossed his office over the weekend. Did it cleanly and carefully, squared everything back up like a pro. We’d never have caught it except your boy’s got a baseball superstition about a letter opener. ”
Remi could practically hear her sorting through possibilities. “Anything taken?”
“That’s the weird part. Nothing. But the client files in his locked bottom drawer have been refiled out of order. They didn’t steal a thing, Anja. They read it. Or shot pictures of it. Came in, learned everything in Leo’s drawers, and walked out clean.”
“Inside job.”
“That’s where my head went too.” Remi watched Leo close the drawer and straighten up, putting on a respectable show of not acting like the rug had been yanked out from under him. Again. “Whoever it was didn’t pick a lock at two in the morning. They walked in like they belonged, because they do.”
“Don’t file a report with building security, don’t mention it to a single soul on that floor, and get him through the rest of his day looking normal.” A pause, and her voice softened, which wasn’t an adjective he thought he’d use on her. “How’s he doing? Truly?”
Remi glanced at Leo, who caught the look and lifted an eyebrow. Remi turned a few degrees away.
“He’s stable,” Remi told her, and meant it. “Rattled, but he’s holding the line. He’s better at this than he should be.” He paused. “You picked a good one.”
“I didn’t pick him.”