Chapter 5 #2
"He's a good agent who recognizes that sometimes the system needs a nudge to see what's in front of it." Will met my eyes. "He doesn't approve of my methods. But he respects results."
"And you think he'll take this seriously? Trafficking is a lot bigger than hedge fund fraud."
"Which is exactly why he'll take it seriously." Will pushed off the wall, something fierce in his expression. "Bates has a daughter. Sixteen years old. When he sees those photographs... he'll move heaven and earth."
I absorbed that, adding it to my growing file on how Will Steele operated. He didn't just hunt predators; he studied everyone. Their pressure points, their motivations, what would make them act instead of look away. It was manipulative. It was also effective.
And it occurred to me, not for the first time, that he'd probably studied me the same way. That the moment in his office when he'd mentioned my father, the Marcus Webb detail, all of it had been deliberate. Designed to see what I was made of.
The thought should have made me angry. Instead, it made me wonder what he'd concluded.
"You're very good at reading people," I said slowly.
"It's a survival skill."
"It's unnerving, is what it is."
"You get used to it."
"I doubt that."
He almost smiled again. I almost smiled back. Then I caught myself doing it and turned to my laptop with the kind of abruptness that probably told him everything my face was trying not to.
Focus. Work. Stop noting his expressions like they're items in a spreadsheet.
It was nearly midnight when I found it.
I'd been digging through Meridian Tech's quarterly reports, Reeves's publicly traded, respectable front, looking for anything that connected the corporate accounts to the shadow network.
Most of it was numbingly legitimate. Board meetings, shareholder dividends, R&D expenditures.
The kind of paperwork that could sedate a roomful of insomniacs.
Then I found the discretionary fund.
It was buried in a subsection of a subsection, the kind of line item that only existed for executives to move money without board oversight.
Small amounts, relatively speaking, fifty thousand here, seventy-five thousand there.
The memo lines were generic: "Security Consulting," "Project Retainer," "Logistics Support. "
I almost moved on. Then I noticed the dates.
My fingers went still on the keyboard. I pulled up Will's timeline from the wall, the one tracking victim movements based on our utility bill analysis, and started cross-referencing.
The first transfer was dated October 15th. According to our data, a victim identified only as "Subject 7" had been moved from Phoenix to Denver on October 14th.
The second transfer was dated November 3rd. Subject 12 moved from Denver to Chicago on November 2nd.
The third. The fourth. The fifth.
Seven transfers. Seven movements. Every single payment was made the day after a victim was relocated. Like clockwork. Like invoicing.
The realization didn't come as a gasp or a revelation.
It came as a slow, sick tightening in my stomach, the way the worst discoveries always did.
Not the thrill of cracking a code, but the weight of understanding what the code meant.
Somebody had built a payment schedule around moving human beings. Somebody had put this in a spreadsheet.
"Will." My voice came out strangled. "Will, I found it."
I turned to tell him, and he was right there.
He'd moved silently across the cramped space while I was lost in the numbers, coming to look over my shoulder at the screen.
Close enough that his breath stirred the hair at my temple.
Close enough that the heat of him registered against my back like a hand pressed flat, even though he wasn't touching me.
He wasn't touching me anywhere, and I could feel him everywhere.
Neither of us moved.
"The discretionary fund transfers," I managed, and my voice sounded wrong, too thin, too aware.
I pointed at the screen, not looking at him because looking at him from this distance would have been a terrible idea.
"They're dated the day after each victim movement.
Seven payments, seven relocations. This isn't a pattern anymore. This is proof."
His eyes scanned the document, and I felt his sharp intake of breath. "The authorization codes," he said, his voice low and rough in the quiet. "They'll show who approved each transfer."
"Reeves. It has to be Reeves. The discretionary fund requires executive sign-off."
"Then we have him."
He didn't move away. Neither did I.
The moment hung there, suspended in the hum of fluorescent lights and the smell of old paper and cold coffee.
I was aware of my own breathing, of his, of the way they'd synced without either of us trying.
My pinky finger was half an inch from his hand on the table, and I was thinking about that half inch with a focus and intensity I usually reserved for discovering offshore accounts.
This is not professional, I told myself. This is not data. This is a man standing behind you, and you are losing your mind.
"We should call Agent Bates," I said. The words came out in a rush, too fast, like I was trying to outrun whatever was building in the eighteen inches between us.
"We should." His voice was rough velvet, and he still didn't move.
Three seconds. Maybe five. Long enough for me to memorize the exact temperature of the air between his chest and my shoulder.
Long enough to know that if I leaned back, even slightly, I'd be leaning into him, and some reckless, sleep-deprived, lo-mein-addled part of my brain wanted to do exactly that.
I stepped to the side. The cold rushed in like a punishment.
"First thing tomorrow," I said, not looking at him. "We'll call Bates first thing tomorrow."
A beat of silence. When I finally risked a glance at his face, he was staring at the spot where I'd been standing, his expression blank in a way that looked like effort. Then he blinked, and it was gone, smoothed over with careful neutrality.
"First thing tomorrow," he agreed.
I gathered my things poorly. Crammed the papers into my bag without organizing them. Put my laptop away without shutting it down. I needed air. I needed distance. I needed to be somewhere that didn't smell like him.
"Lindsey."
I stopped at the threshold, my hand on the cold metal of the door frame.
"The work you did tonight." His voice was quiet, stripped of its usual edge. "Finding that connection. Most forensic accountants would have missed it entirely."
I turned, and he was standing by the table with his hands in his pockets, and the fluorescent light was doing something to his face that made him look younger, less guarded, almost approachable. I wished it would stop.
"I'm not most forensic accountants," I said.
"No." A pause. "You're not."
I left before I could say something I'd regret. The night air hit my face, and I stood in the parking lot for a full minute, just breathing, staring up at a sky I couldn't see past the security lights.
We had proof. Real, actionable, put-Reeves-in-prison proof. Tomorrow, we'd call Bates and set everything in motion.
But as I drove away from the storage facility, I wasn't thinking about authorization codes or discretionary funds or the FBI.
I was thinking about the half-inch between my finger and his hand on the table.
About the way he'd said my name, just Lindsey, no formality, no distance, like he'd forgotten the rules we'd both been following.
About the fact that I'd stepped away. And that stepping away had felt like the hardest thing I'd done all week, harder than the shell companies, harder than the shipping manifests, harder than looking at photographs of trafficked teenagers.
This is a complication, I told myself. Not a development. Not a possibility. A complication. The kind I was supposed to be too smart for.
I'd always been too smart for things. Too smart to trust blindly, too smart to ignore red flags, too smart to let sentiment interfere with analysis. My whole life was built on being too smart, and it had kept me safe, and it had kept me alone, and I'd been fine with that trade.
I'd been fine with it until approximately forty-five minutes ago, when Will Steele stood behind me in a storage unit and I forgot how to breathe.
Tomorrow, when we called Bates and set this whole thing in motion, I was going to have to figure out what the hell I was going to do about it.
But tonight, driving through empty streets with the windows down because I needed cold air on my face, I let myself sit with the feeling instead of filing it. Just for the drive home. Just this once.
It felt like standing at the edge of something. Not a cliff, exactly. More like a door I hadn't known was there, and on the other side was a room I couldn't see into, and every rational instinct I had was saying don't open it.
My rational instincts had a perfect track record. They'd kept me safe for thirty-two years.
But safe, I was starting to realize, and alive were not the same thing.