Chapter 50
ROGUE
The city the firm ran off to is everything Rothwell isn't.
The lights work. The streets are clean. People move through them like people who expect tomorrow to show up on schedule, with somewhere to be and money to spend when they get there.
There are restaurants with lines outside.
There's a park with the grass actually cut.
It's a nice place, this city, and I hate it more with every block, because I know exactly what paid for it.
This is where the money went. Our money.
Rothwell's money. Bled out of a dying city one shell company at a time and poured into the foundations of a living one, where the people who did the bleeding could walk around and never think about us again.
You want to know where a dead city goes?
It doesn't go anywhere. It just shows up somewhere else, wearing a nicer suit.
We've been here two days. Quiet ones. We don't move like we're hunting anything. Vi worked out the rule before we left. We look like four people who belong here, nothing more, because the second we look like a threat, we are one, and we don’t want to see how threats get handled in a town that belongs to the people we're chasing.
Which is the part that won't leave me alone.
Ever since that spy walked into the Rot, I've had a feeling I can't shake, that I've seen him somewhere before but can’t figure out where.
Being in his city only makes it worse. I keep checking faces.
I keep watching the reflections in shop windows.
Twice now, I've felt eyes on the back of my neck and turned to find nobody there.
And I've never once been the kind of man who feels watched when he isn't.
I don't say anything to Vi. She's got enough on her mind. But I keep my eyes moving.
The firm has a real office here. Glass and a brass nameplate and the kind of pretty receptionist who offers you something cold to drink.
Fresh flowers and a couple tall ficus trees.
Really respectable. We don't go near it.
You don't get into a place like that through the front door.
You get in through the person they threw away, the one who knows where everything's buried and has nothing left to lose by telling you.
Her name was on the scrap of paper Alice pressed into Vi's hand.
She worked at the firm for eleven years, near the top, trusted with the things you only trust family with, right up until the day they decided she'd seen too much.
They walked her out with a box and a miserly check and a promise about what would happen if she ever talked.
People who get walked out with a box remember everything. And they’re dying to spill it.
We meet her in a coffee shop that's loud enough to swallow a conversation.
She's careful the way Alice is careful, the way everybody who's been close to these people learns to be.
She doesn't want to talk but she talks anyway, because Vi sits down across from her and doesn't push. She just lays a few of Vi’s father's pages on the table, complete with Fischer's signatures, the shells, and the transfers, and lets the woman see that we already have the bones of it.
That we're not fishing. That we're going to do this with her or without her, and with her is safer.
I watch Vi work, and it's the same thing I watched her do in the ops room a week ago, except now the stakes have teeth. She's calm. She's exact. She shows the woman how much we already have, and lets her decide for herself that helping us is a lot safer than standing in our way.
"I can't testify," the woman says. "You understand that. Anything with my name on it is a death warrant."
"I'm not asking you to testify," Vi says, agreeing. "I'm asking you to point. We've got the machine. The shells, the money, the men who signed. What we don't have is the one thing your old bosses spent their whole careers making sure nobody could prove."
She leans in. "Who the firm actually works for. Who all of this was always for. You know. You were near the top long enough. You know whose name never goes on anything."
The woman is quiet a long moment. Around us, the coffee shop roars, oblivious, full of people in a city that works.
"You don't know what you're walking into," she says finally.
"You think it's a law firm and some developers.
It's not. It's one person. It always was.
Everything you're holding, every signature, every dead block back in that city of yours, it all rolls up to one desk, and that person has spent twenty years making sure the world thinks they're a saint. "
"Give me the name," Vi says.
And the woman does.
I'm watching Vi when it lands, and I see the exact moment the name goes in like a blade.
The color drops out of her face. Her mouth opens and closes.
For a second, she doesn't breathe at all.
I've seen Vi take a lot of hits in the months I've known her and never once seen her look like this. It’s like the floor she's standing on just turned out to be painted over a hole.
An open one.
"Vi?" I say.
She doesn't answer me. She's looking at the woman like she needs her to take it back.
"Say it again," Vi whispers.
The woman says it again.
"Lydia Vance."
I know the name. Everybody from Rothwell knows the name.
Lydia Vance, who funded the shelters and the scholarships, who cut the ribbon on the children's wing, who stood next to Vi's father at every podium that mattered and called him a friend of the city.
Lydia Vance, who sent flowers when the mayor died and gave a lovely speech about what Rothwell had lost.
Lydia Vance, who has been the answer this entire time.
Vi puts both hands flat on the table like she's holding it down. When she looks up at me, her eyes are wet and bright and absolutely lethal.
"It was her," she says. "It was her the whole time."
And somewhere out on the clean, bright street where nothing bad is supposed to happen, I feel it again, eyes on the back of my neck, patient and unhurried, the same stillness I've been failing to place since the day this started.
This time, I think I'm finally about to.