Chapter 3 #2
"She's a liability." The word is correct.
Precise. A liability is something you assess and contain, something you apply protocol to, something that has a solution.
"She was in that building, she saw the body, she saw both of us clearly.
I have no way of knowing what she'll do with that, who she'll talk to, whether she's the kind of person who convinces herself that calling the police is the right thing and worries about the consequences afterward.
" I lean against the counter. "I need to know who she is, and if she’s going to cause us a problem. "
"I can have a full background by morning—"
"Start now. Whatever you can pull tonight." I watch him work. His fingers move across the keyboard with the efficiency of someone who has done this thousands of times and stopped finding it interesting a long time ago. "She gave me a name. Alex Riggs. Start there."
He types. A minute passes, maybe two. The city continues moving, unfaltering, outside the window, and does nothing helpful.
"Alex Riggs," David says. "Twenty-seven.
Illinois driver's license, issued twenty-nine months ago.
No prior state on record." He frowns at the screen in the small way he frowns when something doesn't add up.
"Bank account opened at the same time as the license.
Employment history beginning approximately three years ago — a café on Meridian and, as of four months ago, the Onyx cleaning contract.
" He scrolls. "Current address, Wicker Park, fourth floor. "
He reads me the street.
"What's listed before three years ago?"
"That's what's interesting." He leans back slightly.
"Almost nothing. Her identity is constructed well — it passes a surface check without raising flags — but it doesn't have roots.
No school records that trail back further, no medical history, no prior employment in any searchable database.
No digital footprint older than three years.
" He looks up. "Someone built this deliberately, Victor. And they built it fairly recently."
Someone who’s running. Someone who knew how to run properly, which means someone who had either done it before or had help from someone who had.
My mind moves through the implications of that with the same methodical attention I give every problem that arrives without a clear origin — sorting, filing, noting what fits and what doesn't.
"There's a dependent on the lease," David says. "A minor child. Twelve years old. Listed as Evangeline Riggs. But I can’t find any birth records under that name tied to an Alex Riggs."
The room falls quiet again.
She's been running, whoever she was before Alex Riggs, she's been running with a child in tow, building a life out of a name that didn't exist three years ago and two jobs that together barely cover what a fourth-floor apartment in Wicker Park costs.
She put cameras in the hallway. She put a camera in the child's room.
She stands in the hallway at night and listens to her locks and doesn't leave until she hears every one of them slide home.
She has been living like someone could come for her at any moment.
Who are you really, Alex? And who or what are you already running from?
"Dig everything up you can," I tell David. "I want to know who she was before. I want to know if she has contacts, if she has a history, if there's anyone looking for her." I push off the counter. "And I want to know about the child."
"Victor." He says my name quickly. "Where are you going?"
"To assess the liability."
"It's six in the morning."
"She's not sleeping." She wouldn't be sleeping.
Not after tonight, not with what she saw and what she's carrying and whatever it is she's been running from for three years that taught her to build a camera system in a fourth-floor apartment.
"She'll be awake and she'll be thinking, and I'd rather be there while she's thinking than give her until morning to decide to do something stupid that I'll have to undo. "
"I can have Maksim Aleksei go—"
"No." The word comes out before I've fully decided it, which is information I choose not to examine too closely. "I'll go myself. Text me the address the moment you have it confirmed."
David looks at me across the kitchen island with the expression he reserves for conclusions he's arrived at and decided to hold until they're useful. He doesn't say what the conclusion is. He doesn't need to; we both know it already.
"I'll have more on her background by the time you get there," he says instead. "I'll send it to your phone."
"Good." I take my jacket from the hook by the door. The black one. The grey one is in Wicker Park, which is not something I am going to think about. "Keep digging on Pavel. Tonight, not tomorrow."
"I know," he says. "Be careful.”
“Be careful?” I stop at the door, laughing. "With a twenty-seven-year-old woman with a mop? Yeah, I’ll do that."
"Of a twenty-seven year old woman with a fake name," he says, "those are the ones that are interesting, Victor. And interesting is another word for unpredictable, and potentially problematic."
I open the door. Maksim materializes from the hallway, immediately present, immediately ready to follow my orders.
"With me," I tell him, and take the elevator down.
In the car, my phone buzzes before we've reached the end of the block. David, already. A text with the confirmed address, and below it a single additional line.
She has a camera network registered to the apartment — front door, hallway, and a third interior feed. She'll see you coming the moment you enter the building. Thought you should know.
I look at that for a moment. A woman who has been running for three years, with a child, with a constructed identity and a camera pointed at her own front door.
She has thought carefully about every approach to the people she's protecting, and she has covered them methodically, with what she had available to her.
This should be interesting. Who are you, Alex?