“Morning.” Eyes on the screen. Breezy. A woman who is not logging the fact that he’s wearing a dark henley with the sleeves shoved to his elbows. His forearms are doing things to my concentration that should require a safety briefing.
He sits. Opens a file. The silence stretches.
“The Metairie transfers are interesting,” I say. Because the silence is filling up with thoughts I refuse to examine. I have words and I intend to use every last one. “Monthly payments to a shell company called Crescent Holdings. Started about four years ago. Amounts vary. Schedule doesn’t.”
“Protection money.”
“Could be. But the source accounts are scattered. Seven banks. All out of state.”
He turns a page. “Run the beneficiaries.”
“Running.” I take a sip. Perfect. My sternum does a thing I’m not going to investigate. “I’m also pulling property records for the warehouse district. If the Benedettis are operating out of?—”
“I’ll get you the addresses.”
“I have most of them.”
“You have the ones on paper.” He looks at me for the first time since he sat down. Those flat black eyes giving nothing away. “I have the ones that aren’t.”
His expression doesn’t change. But something in his face shifts in a way that might, under laboratory conditions with instruments sensitive enough, register as a precursor to an actual human expression.
We work. My keyboard clicking. His pages rustling.
I reach for the property map at the same time he does. Our fingers brush. The knuckle of my index finger against the side of his thumb.
I freeze. He freezes.
Two seconds. Three. Every nerve in my hand on fire. His skin is warm and scarred and not moving.
I grab the map. “Personal space. It’s a concept. You might look into it.”
That flicker. Never becomes a smile but gets near enough I can clock it from three feet away. His chin dips toward the page.
My fingers are tingling. I put them in my lap where they can’t create any more incidents.
“The warehouse on Tchoupitoulas.” I need to talk. “Cross-references with two of the shell companies. That’s either a coincidence or?—”
“Not a coincidence.”
“Let me finish my sentences.”
“Finish them faster.”
He’s reading. Eyes on the page. But I’d bet my entire Benedetti dataset he’s doing this on purpose. The monosyllables.The flat delivery. Daring me to keep going so he can cut every sentence in half.
“The property records show the building changed hands three times in two years. Each time to a different LLC registered out of state. That’s not real estate. That’s a paper trail built to look like a maze.”
“Can you trace it?”
“I hacked your family’s entire security network from a studio apartment with a fire escape that was actively rusting off the building.” I sip the coffee. “So. Yes.”
He watches me. His head tilts. One degree. The way it does when I do something he didn’t expect.
“Do it.”
“Started an hour ago.”
His gaze breaks first. I count that as a win.
