Now that Cass’s life hangs in the balance, I’ve become one of those people.
She leads me down a hallway and into the vault room, then asks for ID. I hand her Bill Oglethorpe’s driver’s license, fished out of the wallet in Caroline’s manila envelope. She glances at the photo, glances at me, glances back at the photo, then at the box number etched into the key.
Ultimately, she shrugs. I don’t think she’s ever going to win Employee of the Month. Fine by me, though. I had nastier plans if she had tried to put up a fight.
“Box 11056,” she murmurs aloud, then walks me to it.
Two keys, hers and mine, turn together. The little brass door swings open. She slides the steel drawer out and sets it on the privacy table behind a curtain, then leaves me to it with a soft, “Take your time.”
I close the curtain, but I have no intention of taking my time.
The drawer is shallow. Inside rests…
… a single black USB drive.
That’s it. After all this work and breathless waiting, it’s almost anticlimactic.
I take a single, long look at it, this simple little stick that has cost Bill his life and may yet cost mine. “What secrets are you holding, friend?” I whisper.
Then I tuck it into the inside pocket of my coat opposite the sonogram.
One pocket for the past, one for the future. Both sitting flush against my aching ribs.
Jillian answers Kir’s door barefoot, the bump of her belly clearly visible now beneath an oversized sweater I’m almost positive belongs to my best friend. Her hair is up in a clip. She takes one look at my face and steps back without a word, holding the door open with her hip.
“You look even worse than last time,” she remarks. “Tea or whiskey?”
“We don’t have time for either.” I drop the USB drive on her kitchen counter. “This came out of Bill Oglethorpe’s safe deposit box.”
As I expected, her jaw drops.
Kir, for all that he is a trained killer and son of the Bratva, is also a sentimental bastard and an absolute simp for his wife. I made a guess that he would have filled her in on everything I reported yesterday, and it turns out I was spot on.
That’s good. It’ll make things go faster if I don’t have to explain it all to Jillian from the start.
Without another word, I see her shift gears. She goes from Pregnant Housewife to Cold-Blooded Reporter in the blink of an eye. Her jaw tightens, eyes thin, brows furrow. If I didn’t know her as well as I do, I might’ve been slightly intimidated.
She plucks her laptop from the table, slots the drive in, and pulls a stool up next to mine. We don’t bother with pleasantries.
The files load, revealing folders nested within folders, all organized with naming convention that’s almost obsessive in its tidiness, listed by year, then by name, then by category.2019/Zimmerman, W./Wires.2020/Snyder, R./Photos.2021/Lowery, K./Memos.2018/Hadley, P./Correspondence.
“Jesus Christ,” Jillian breathes. “He was alibrarian.”
“He kept files on everything,” I tell her, remembering Caroline’s voice in the parlor.Daddy was the same way. The man wouldn’t throw out a parking stub.“His daughter said as much.”
Jillian clicks into the partner folders first, the ones Bill mentioned in the woods. We skim. Hadley signed off on a wire structuring scheme in ‘17. Lowery looked the other way on a handful of FCPA violations between ‘19 and ‘22. Zimmerman has a son who landed a no-show consulting contract with a Latvianshell corp that paid him four hundred grand a year to do, as far as I can tell, fuck-all.
It’s all very neat, very useful.
None of it is what I came for.
“Keep going,” I urge. “This isn’t enough.”
We find the key folder fifteen minutes in. It’s the fattest one in the directory by a wide margin.
DeMaris, J.
That’s when it fucking hits me.
