Vanders on Madison Avenue at two-fifteen in the afternoon. Vanders at the sidewalk cafe, at the table, across the table from the lawyer, standing to leave, walking north. Two-fifteen.
He sat with the number. The meeting in his living room had been at five: Vanders had arrived at a little after five, because Elias had come home early and stepped out of the elevator at almost exactly five-past and had heard the voices in the living room already in progress. The dossier had presented the New York afternoon and the Chicago afternoon as the same afternoon, which, technically, they'd been; same calendar day. But the flight from LaGuardia to O'Hare was two hours in the air, plus taxi, plus the trip from the airport into the city. Vanders hadn't taken a private plane, the dossier would've noted it. Vanders had taken a commercial flight, and the earliest commercial flight that could've had him at a Madison Avenue cafe at two-fifteen and in Elias's living room by five was, when he did the arithmetic, not a flight that existed.
Vanders hadn't made that sequence.
He looked at the photograph again, at the angle, at the background. The photograph was of Madison Avenue, he could see that. But it wasn't a photograph he'd, on a second look, stake a reading on. The shot was from across the street, the angle oblique. The man at the table was, yes, Vanders, and the man across the table was, by the best read available, the lawyer the team had identified. But the shot was the shot a surveillance photographer would've taken if the photographer were being paid to confirm a thing already known. A photographer buildinga case from the ground up would've taken the shot from a better angle.
He closed the folder and sat for a long moment.
Elias wasn't a man who second-guessed his senior counsel, and hadn't been in thirty years. He'd hired the man now in charge of the team that had produced the dossier because the man had been reliable at the beginning of Elias's career and had continued to be reliable across every subsequent decade. A man who'd given Elias years of reliable work didn't suddenly, in the matter of Elias's own wife, produce a shoddy product. Unless the product wasn't what Elias had thought it was.
He picked up the phone.
"James."
"Elias."
"The Vanders file." A silence; his senior counsel didn't fill silences. "I need you to walk me through how it came to you."
"In what sense?"
"In the sense of the original intake. Who flagged Vanders to the team, whose desk the name first came across, whose concern initiated the surveillance."
Another silence, longer this time. "You initiated the surveillance," James said.
"Before that."
"Before that, the Vanders name came up in the Laurent file. As I recall, you flagged it. The instruction was to monitor."
"I flagged it because it was in the Laurent file. Who put it in the Laurent file?"
"The Laurent file came to us from Holloway Partners," James said. "They'd done the original due diligence on the Laurent family before you engaged. The section on outside counsel was theirs."
"Holloway Partners."
"Yes."
"Who at Holloway Partners?"
A pause. "Their senior partner on our retainer matters is Lionel Holloway. The due diligence packet would've been assembled by an associate and signed off by a partner. I can pull the signature page."
"Pull it."
He waited, hearing James move through his office, a drawer opening, the rustle of paper, and then James, on the other end, going still.
"Elias."
"Yes?”
"The signature page is Lionel Holloway’s.”
"And who at Holloway Partners has Michael Warren on retainer in New York?"
The silence this time was the longest of them. "Warren represents Holloway Partners's New York clients," James said.
"So the firm that produced the due diligence packet that first flagged Gordon Vanders to me shares a retainer relationship with Michael Warren's firm."
"Yes."
