30. Cora
CORA
Three days had passed since the night Nik's call sent Dmitri out of my apartment and into motion before either of us had time to think, three days I had mostly spent trusting that no news meant good news, and the ordinary rhythm of my own office finally felt like solid ground again.
The office had emptied out by increments, the way it always did on nights when everyone privately agreed the day should have ended two hours earlier and nobody wanted to be the first to say so out loud.
Naomi went first, coat half on while she finished a call with the Whitmore caterer, one hand patting blindly at the doorframe for her keys.
Beckett left twenty minutes after that, hovering in the doorway with his bag already on his shoulder, the particular hesitation of a man who wanted to leave and also wanted permission to leave, as if I might dock his pay for going home at a reasonable hour.
"You're allowed to leave too," he said. "That's generally how offices work."
"I know how offices work, Beckett. I own one."
"You own one badly right now, Cora. You're the only person left in it, and it's nearly nine."
"I have a few things to finish."
"You said that at seven."
"I finished the seven o'clock things. These are the nine o'clock things."
He looked at me a beat too long, the careful way he'd started doing since the whole business with Sean, like he was checking my face for something specific and hoping not to find it. "Is he okay? Really okay, not the version you tell people so they'll stop asking."
The short version was the one I had given everyone who asked.
The fuller one still sat behind my ribs at odd hours: Nik's call that night reporting the same two men back outside Sean's building, closer to the door than they had gotten the first time, and Dmitri moving him into a safe house before I had finished pulling on my shoes.
Three days of check-in calls I was not allowed to trace, most of them relayed through Nik instead of Dmitri himself, because for those three days Dmitri had not trusted his own voice to sound calm about it.
Nobody had touched Sean. That was the only fact that actually mattered, and I made myself hold onto it every time the rest of the details tried to crowd back in.
"He's settled somewhere safe, somewhere I'm allowed to know about but not allowed to say out loud in an office with the lights on, which is a genuinely strange sentence for me to be saying to you, and yet.
" I aimed for lightness and mostly landed there.
"He's fine, Beckett. I talked to him an hour ago and he complained about the coffee, which felt like an excellent sign. "
"Okay." He didn't fully believe me, which was fair, since I didn't entirely believe myself either. "Lock up properly. Both locks, not just the top one. I know you cut corners on the bottom one when you're in a hurry."
"I contain multitudes. Some of them remember the bottom lock."
He left. The door shut, then opened again a few seconds later when he came back to check the top lock himself, and shut once more behind him, which I chose to find endearing instead of insulting, and then the office was mine, exactly the way I had been quietly angling for it to be for the last two hours without admitting that to anyone, including myself.
I could have gone home. There was a couch waiting there, and a very good bottle of wine I'd been saving for a reason I hadn't decided on yet.
Every rational argument available to a reasonable woman said that someone whose brother had just spent three days somewhere safe, because two men in dark coats had wanted only to confirm his last name, should probably go sit on that couch and let herself feel something about it, instead of staying late to alphabetize a problem into submission at her desk.
I have never been a reasonable woman when there was a spreadsheet available instead.
Fear turned out to be a very specific kind of exhausting when it had nowhere to go.
I could not do anything about the men in dark coats.
I could not do anything about a summit I had not been invited to, happening in a room I was personally building for four hundred people who believed they were attending a benefit for a children's wing that, as far as I currently understood, still consisted of a floor plan and one extremely optimistic press release.
What I could do something about was a vendor list. That, at least, fell inside my actual jurisdiction, and I intended to use it the way other people used a punching bag.
I opened my own database first: three years of it, alphabetized, color coded, annotated within an inch of its life, every business I had ever handed a deposit to logged with a license number, a contact name, and, in a few memorable cases, a note in red that said things like NEVER AGAIN in letters large enough to read from across the room.
Then I opened the summit's approved vendor list, the folder Dmitri had handed over without making me ask twice, full of names and license details and insurance certificates that Nik's people had presumably scrutinized down to the letter for anyone who might be carrying something more dangerous than a chafing dish through a service entrance.
It was, structurally, the single most boring document I had ever been given willingly. I loved it immediately.
I made tea I didn't drink, put on a playlist I stopped noticing within four songs, and started at the top of the alphabet the way I started everything, because a plan that skipped around always ended with me convinced I'd missed something even when I hadn't.
Somewhere around the two-hundredth line item, cross-checking insurance certificate numbers against my own records with the single-minded devotion of a woman avoiding her own feelings, it occurred to me that if this entire ordeal ended with me personally unraveling an organized crime plot using nothing but a shared folder and three years of compulsive record keeping, I was going to find that extremely funny, and also mildly insulting on behalf of every actual detective who had ever needed a badge and a gun to do this job.
I had a color-coded tab system. It felt like it shouldn't be enough to matter. Apparently it was.
My phone lit up around ten, Dmitri's name on the screen, and I answered before the second ring, the reflex trained into me over the last few weeks without my noticing exactly when it had happened.
"You're still at the office," he said, no greeting, which by now barely registered as rude.
"How do you know that?"
"Beckett texted Nik on his way out. Apparently you were still at your desk at nine o'clock, and he thought somebody who isn't your assistant should know." He paused, the way I was starting to recognize as him weighing how much to say before he just said it. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. I'm doing paperwork."
"At ten at night, alone, three days after your brother had two strangers memorize his face."
"When you say it like that it sounds significantly more dramatic than double-checking a spreadsheet."
"What kind of paperwork?"
I hesitated one beat too long, the sort of pause I would have caught in anyone else inside half a second. "Vendor stuff. Boring stuff. Exactly what you hired me to handle so you wouldn't have to look at it yourself."
It wasn't a lie. It also wasn't the whole truth, and I heard the gap in it the moment it left my mouth, the same gap I had once stood in a hallway and listened to him fall into, with Kirill.
This one was mine, and I was building it on purpose, and I did not currently have it in me to examine what that said about either of us.
"Cora."
"I'm fine, Dmitri. I promise. I'll lock up properly, both locks. Beckett already lectured me about it once tonight. I don't need the sequel."
He let it go, which surprised me, though maybe it shouldn't have, given how recently he'd learned what it cost to hold onto things too tightly. "Call me if that changes. Any hour."
"I will."
"Cora."
"What?"
"I'm glad you're doing something instead of sitting with it. I know that instinct better than most people alive. I built an entire life on it." Something in his voice went quieter. "Just don't build the same walls out of it that I did."
I didn't have a clean answer for that, so I told him goodnight instead and left it there, and went back to my folder feeling more exposed than I had five minutes earlier.
By eleven the tedium had turned almost meditative, the specific blank calm that comes from doing something methodical enough that the brain stops manufacturing anxiety long enough to just work.
I matched business names first, alphabetically, holding each entry on the summit list against three years of my own history, and found exactly what I expected: nothing, because in this line of work, expecting nothing is usually the safest bet.
Every florist checked out. Every rental company checked out.
The AV vendor Naomi had once threatened over an acoustics argument came back so spotless I felt almost disappointed on his behalf.
So I switched approaches, the way I always did when the obvious method ran dry, and started matching addresses instead of names, because addresses lie less often than the businesses attached to them, a fact I had learned the hard way and never quite forgotten.
Eighteen months ago, a rental company called Silverline Party Supply had taken a six-thousand-dollar deposit from a bride two weeks from her wedding and then stopped answering calls entirely, the kind of vanishing act that turns an ordinary week into a full-blown crisis and a professional relationship into a lawsuit nobody has the energy to actually file.
I spent four days tracking down their registered address myself, certain I could shame somebody into a refund if I just showed up in person and looked disappointed at them properly.
What I found instead was a beige mailbox unit in a strip of light industrial buildings past the warehouse district, unit 4C, no office behind it, no employees, no company at all beyond a name on a lease and a stack of forwarded mail nobody was collecting.
I paid the difference out of my own account, wrote the address down in the green tab of my notebook under a single unhappy word, and told myself I would check that exact detail before I ever signed another contract.
I had not thought about unit 4C in longer than a year. I would not have remembered the number at all if I had not spent four days memorizing it out of pure, useless spite.
It was the ninety-fourth address I checked against the summit list, tucked under a vendor called Beaumont Table and Linen Co.
, a name I did not recognize, attached to an insurance certificate that looked, on its face, entirely unremarkable.
It was registered, according to paperwork Nik's people had approved without apparent objection, to unit 4C, in the same beige strip of buildings past the warehouse district, under a lease dated four months ago.
I read the entry three times, the way you reread a word until it stops looking like a real word at all, waiting for the second read to correct the first one.
It didn't correct anything. It just sat there, patient and ordinary and completely wrong, the exact same four characters I had once written down under a note that still said NEVER AGAIN in red ink dark enough to mean it.
I pulled up my own file on Silverline, the deposit, the calls that went unanswered, the little map screenshot I had saved from the day I drove out there myself and stood in a parking lot understanding, for the first time in my professional life, that a business could be entirely fake and still have a working lock on the front door.
It was the same unit. It was the same block.
A different name had been stitched over the top of it like a coat thrown over a stain, except this time the coat had somehow made it past a security review run by men who checked doors for a living.
I thought about calling Naomi, who would ask good questions and mean well and have absolutely no idea what to do with the answers.
I thought about calling Beckett, who would want to help and would not understand, not really, what this actually required.
I thought, for one long, complicated second, about not calling anyone at all, about sitting with this exactly the way Dmitri had once sat alone in an office with a folder full of wire transfers, deciding on his own what someone else deserved to know and when.
I understood that instinct now in a way I hadn't fully understood it a week ago.
Sitting there with unit 4C glowing on my screen, I also knew that I did not want to be the kind of person who kept something like this to herself, not even for an hour, not even to be certain first.
The address on the shell vendor's paperwork matched an address I'd flagged once before, eighteen months ago, on an unrelated job, for an entirely different reason. I sat very still for a long moment. Then I picked up the phone.