Chapter 23 Twenty-Four Hours
The federal contact arrived at two in the afternoon.
Her name was Agent Diane Tran, no relation to édouard, she said, when I clocked the name and she clocked me clocking it, which established immediately that they were both paying attention and that the conversation could be efficient.
She was forty, compact, with the specific economy of movement that came from years of operating in rooms where economy mattered.
She sat at the dining room table with a laptop and a recorder and looked at the drive for a long moment before she touched it.
"How long have you known about this building?" she said to Dominic.
Tran looked at me. "Walk me through the analysis."
I walked her through it. The fourth layer gap, the Tchoupitoulas property, the chain to Fosse's shell company, the timing relative to Reyes's disappearance.
I was precise and I was thorough and I watched Tran's expression the entire time, not for approval, but because the way someone listens tells you what they already know and what they're learning.
Tran already knew about Reyes. She already knew about Fosse.
The shell company chain was new to her, and the building was new to her, and when I mentioned the padlock combination in Dominic's father's files, something shifted in Tran's attention that was very close to the expression Avery associated with a hypothesis confirmed.
"The sworn testimony," Tran said, when I finished. "Reyes's document."
"In the envelope." I slid it across the table.
Tran opened it carefully. Read it without expression, or rather, with the controlled expression of someone who had trained the reaction out and was now working from a baseline that only deviated when something was truly unexpected. Halfway through the pages, something deviated.
"He names four witnesses," Tran said.
"Yes."
"Two of them are dead. One relocated, identity changed in 2002." She looked up. "The fourth is alive. I know where she is."
I held that. "She can corroborate."
"She can do considerably more than corroborate." Tran put the pages down. "Ms. Callahan, I'm going to ask you something directly, and I want a direct answer."
"All right."
"Your mother's name is in these files as a source.
Your father was investigating the same network when he disappeared.
You entered this household seven weeks ago under the auspices of a financial arrangement.
" She paused. "How much of what you've done in this apartment was directed toward finding this documentation? "
I looked at her steadily. "None of it. I came here because my father owed a debt. I found the connection to my mother's name six days ago. Everything that happened before that was, something else."
"Something else," Tran repeated.
"The acquisition analysis was legitimate work. The rest was, personal."
Tran looked at me for a moment. Then at Dominic. Then back at the drive.
"All right," she said. "I'm going to need both of you available for the next seventy-two hours. Don't go anywhere you can't be reached. Don't discuss this with anyone outside this room. And Ms. Callahan..." She paused. "I'm sorry about your mother."
She said it the way people said things they meant, without padding.
"Thank you," I said.
* * *
Tran left at four-fifteen with the drive, the sworn testimony, and my analysis as a supplementary document. She took the photograph too, as evidence, she said, of the relationship between Reyes and his source. Avery had held the photograph for a moment before handing it over.
I would get it back. Tran had said so.
I believed her.
* * *
The apartment was quiet after Tran left.
Dominic made calls, I could hear him in the office, his voice low and steady, the specific register of someone managing multiple moving pieces simultaneously.
I sat at the dining room table with my laptop and did not work.
I was thinking instead about the clock that had started the moment Tran walked out the door, the twenty-four hours, roughly, that Dominic had estimated before Salas's network registered a shift.
I thought about what Salas would do with that information.
I thought about what I would do, in his position, with a documented operation about to collapse and a leverage point that was rapidly becoming useless.
I thought: He'll try to use what he has before it expires.
I thought: What does he still have.
My father.
Not his location, no one had that, but the pressure of it. The fact of the disappearance, the implication that Salas knew where Daniel Callahan was and what had happened to him, the possibility of that information as something to trade.
He would offer to trade.
He would frame it as negotiation and it would be a last attempt to make my useful before I became irrelevant to him.
I was considering that when my phone rang.
Unknown number.
I looked at it for one ring. Two.
Then I picked up.
* * *
"Ms. Callahan." Salas's voice was the same as at the restaurant, warm, controlled, with the formality that had started in another city. "I hope I'm not disturbing you."
"Not at all," I said.
I stood up and walked to the doorway of the office. Dominic was on the phone, I caught his eye and held up one finger and then pointed at me own phone. He read it immediately. I watched him end his call.
"I find myself in a position," Salas said, "where a conversation might be mutually beneficial. I wonder if you'd be willing to meet."
"When?"
A brief pause, he had expected more resistance, or he was performing the expectation of resistance. "This evening, if possible. There's a place I have in mind. Somewhere private."
"Just us?"
"Just us." A pause. "I want you to understand that my intentions are entirely..."
"I'll bring Dominic," I said.
Silence.
"Ms. Callahan..."
"I'll bring Dominic, or I won't come." I kept my voice even. "If the conversation is mutually beneficial, it's beneficial to all three of us. If it's not, then we don't need to have it."
Another silence. Longer this time, the silence of someone recalibrating.
"Eight o'clock," he said finally. "I'll send the address."
The call ended.
I looked at Dominic, who was already standing.
"He's moving," I said. "He knows something has shifted."
"He doesn't know what yet."
"No. He's fishing." I put the phone down. "He wants to offer us something before he runs out of things to offer."
"Your father."
"Probably." I thought about it. "He doesn't actually know where my father is. I've believed that since the beginning, if he had my father, he would have used that directly instead of constructing the arrangement through debt. He knows something. Not everything."
"Are you willing to go?"
I looked at him. "Yes. Are you?"
"Yes." He said it without hesitation. "But not without preparation. I want two people outside the location, and I want to know the address before we agree to it."
I nodded. "Tell him that."
Dominic picked up his phone.
* * *
The address came at six o'clock: a private dining room in a restaurant in the Central Business District, the kind of place that had a public front and a back section that could be fully reserved, the kind of place that understood discretion as a service offering.
Dominic sent the address to two people I didn't ask about.
He gave me a brief look when he was done, handled, and I gave him a brief look back, understood, and they went to get ready.
I stood in front of the mirror in my room.
I thought about my mother, who had spent three years documenting something dangerous and had walked toward it every time I had the choice to walk away.
I thought about the photograph, my mother laughing, unguarded, twenty-five years old and already in the middle of something that would eventually cost my everything.
I have a daughter. That's exactly why I'm not stopping.
I put on a jacket and checked that my phone was charged and went to meet the man who had inherited the decision to have my mother killed.
* * *
Salas was already there when they arrived.
He stood when they came in, the same courtesy as the restaurant, identical in execution, revealing nothing about the fact that the situation was entirely different.
He shook Dominic's hand with the ease of two men who had known each other a long time and had never liked each other and had arrived at a functional détente on the basis of mutual calculation.
"Dominic," he said.
"Victor." Dominic's voice was flat. Not hostile, flat, the way a surface is flat before something is placed on it.
They sat. The room was small, four chairs around a table, a single door, no windows. Someone had thought carefully about this room.
I had thought carefully about rooms like this. I sat where I could see the door.
Salas looked at me with the expression I recognized from the ballroom, the precise assessment, the careful filing. But there was something underneath it now that hadn't been there before. Not urgency exactly. The texture of a man who is operating with less time than he would prefer.
"I appreciate you coming," he said.
"You said the conversation would be mutually beneficial," I said. "We're listening."
He looked at me for a moment. Then, with the manner of someone setting something on the table and stepping back from it: "I know about Tchoupitoulas."
The room held.
"I see," I said.
"I want you to understand that my interest is not adversarial." He folded his hands on the table. "What my father did, the decisions he made, I have carried the weight of those decisions for twenty-five years. I am not my father."
"No," Dominic said. "You're more patient."
Salas looked at him. Something moved briefly in his expression, almost respect. "Yes. I am." He paused. "Which is why I'm having this conversation instead of a different kind of conversation." He looked back at Avery. "What happened to your mother was wrong. I want to say that plainly."
I held his gaze. "All right."
"I was seventeen. I understood what was happening and I was not in a position to stop it and I have not, I want to be clear, I have not made similar decisions in the time since." He paused. "That distinction matters to me, even if it doesn't change what happened."
"It doesn't," I said. "What are you offering?"
He looked slightly surprised, the first genuine surprise I had seen from him. I had moved past the preamble faster than he'd planned for.
"Your father," he said. "I don't know where he is. I want to be honest about that. But I know who does."
I kept my face still. "Who."
"Fosse." He said it evenly. "Gerald Fosse has been managing certain, loose ends, for the past fifteen years on a retainer that originates with my father's estate.
Your father's disappearance is one of those loose ends.
" A pause. "I can give you Fosse. Location, current alias, documentation of the retainer.
Enough to find your father, if he's alive.
Enough to charge Fosse with whatever role he played, if he isn't."
Silence.
"In exchange for?" Dominic said.
Salas looked at him. "In exchange for the understanding that the documentation you found tonight pertains to my father's operation. Not mine. I will not obstruct the federal process as it applies to Ramón Salas's history." His voice was careful. "I am asking for the same clarity in return."
I looked at him.
I thought about the drive. About Tran, who was already working.
About the fourth folder, which documented Victor Salas's involvement starting in 2000, when he was nineteen.
About the fact that what he was offering was information I might be able to get through other channels, for a price I could not pay.
I thought about my father.
I said: "Write down where to find Fosse."
Salas reached into his jacket and produced a folded paper. Set it on the table.
I picked it up. Did not open it.
"I'm going to be straightforward with you," I said.
"The documentation is already with federal authorities.
What's in it is not something I can redact or negotiate on your behalf.
That process is now outside both of our hands.
" I paused. "What I can tell you is that I have not made any claim about what you did or didn't know.
I documented what I found. What I found pertains primarily to your father's operation. "
I let that sit.
"Primarily," he said.
"The truth is the truth," I said. "I don't alter it. But I also don't add to it."
He held my gaze for a long moment. Then nodded, once.
I put the paper in my pocket.
They left. I stood there with the paper in my pocket and understood that the deal I'd just made was the most dangerous one yet. This time, I was the leverage.
* * *