Chapter 15
VI
The property office is on Merchant Street.
Merchant Street was where you went when you needed business things handled, like a notary, a title company, or an accountant.
My father had an office three doors down from where we're standing right now, back when being the mayor of Rothwell meant you needed a place to work that wasn't city hall.
I spent a lot of Saturday mornings doing homework in the waiting room while he took meetings.
His office is a nail salon now. Or was. The sign is still there but the windows are dark. I see a few old fashion magazines littering the floor and a small pile of bills just inside the mail slot, waiting for someone who's never going to come.
I don't mention this. I don't trust my voice not to break.
The property office is the kind of place where you go when you need a company that looks real on paper but doesn't actually do anything.
Frosted glass on the door, no signage beyond a small placard with a suite number, the kind of hidden-in-plain-sight that's a choice.
Rogue looks at it, then nods once, which means we're going in.
Sting stays at the door.
Inside, there's a front desk with nobody behind it and a wall lined with filing cabinets. A man in his fifties emerges from the back office, takes one look at Armen, and after a moment's hesitation where he seems like he'd really like to kick us out, throws us a forced smile.
"Hello," he says without any hint of enthusiasm.
Armen does the talking. He's good, formal without being aggressive, precise without showing his hand, asking for what he needs and nothing extra. The man produces three folders without being asked twice. Armen sets them on the desk and Rogue goes through them.
I watch Rogue work.
He doesn't touch anything he doesn't need to. An old digital camera I've never seen him use comes out and he photographs each page from the folders in sequence, unhurried, like he's done this before. His eyes move across each document before the camera does. Read first, record second.
I lean in beside him.
Three folders. Three different fake companies, all pointing to the same money moving through the same hands.
Fischer's name is on all of them, no surprise there.
These are the paper trails my father spent a year quietly building a case around, fake businesses set up to make stolen public money look like legitimate investment.
The kind of thing that's invisible until someone knows what they're looking at.
I know what I'm looking at. Months of living inside my father's case files will do that.
But there's a second name.
I almost miss it. It's buried in the third page of the second folder, easy to overlook if you're not specifically hunting for it. I law firm I've seen in my father's files. He’d circled it and added a question mark beside it. I have no idea why.
"Rogue."
He looks up.
I point to the name without touching the page. "That law firm. I've seen it before. In my father's files."
He looks at it. His expression doesn't change but he photographs the page twice.
"You're sure?"
"I've read those files enough to have them memorized."
He nods. Armen, who has been listening, says nothing.
Dad underlined a lot of things in those files. He only put question marks on the ones he hadn't cracked yet. Whatever this firm was, he died not knowing.
I don't make a big deal of it. I just straighten up and keep looking through the folder.
Outside, through the frosted glass door, I can see the shape of Sting on the step outside, shoulders square, arms crossed. A woman approaches the office, slows, stops. She looks at Sting for a moment. She leaves.
Two minutes later, a man in a suit does the same thing.
Sting doesn't move, doesn't speak, doesn't appear to notice either of them. He's just standing there being Sting, which is all it takes to scare people off.
Rogue finishes with the folders and slides them back into their original positions.
Back out on the street, I glance at my father's old office.
"You okay?" Rogue says beside me.
"Working on it," I say.
He doesn't push. He just starts walking and I fall in beside him.