23
RAFFAELE
The elevator doors close.
I exhale into the empty cabin and lean back against the mirrored wall, watching myself watch myself in the panel across from me.
How did Antonio Martinez know where she lived?
The question’s been with me ever since. I push it open now.
Timeframe first. The simplest variable.
I split Antonio’s lip in my office at, what? Eleven-thirty in the morning? He left under his own power maybe forty minutes after arriving. He drove home. His men called whomever they had a relationship with at the firm, and Antonio called whomever he calls when his pride’s been kicked in. By the time those two strangers walked into Bea’s apartment, the clock had moved no more than seven hours. Probably less.
Which means whoever told Antonio already knew where she lived.
And that’s where it gets ugly, because there’s only one version of her address that’s real.
When I brought her up to the executive floor, I had her HR paperwork changed. The address on file downstairs—the oneany clerk could pull, the one half the senior partners’ assistants could get inside a day—is a decoy. I made sure of it. If someone went looking for Bea Mendez through the normal channels, they’d get a ghost—one of a handful of empty units the firm keeps on the books for exactly this.
The real address isn’t downstairs. It’s up here. On this floor. In the locked file in my office, in the system that only opens to the executive suite.
Which makes the list very short.
Me.
Lorenzo.
Marcy, who runs the floor and has clearance to the cabinet.
I rule out Marcy. Years at the firm. Her husband did time for the Torinos and never said a word. No connection to Antonio, no incentive, no history of moving information that wasn’t hers to move. And if Marcy had ever wanted to sell me out, she’s had a hundred quieter chances than this one.
That leaves two names.
Mine and Lorenzo’s.
The elevator opens.
I cross the lobby on autopilot. The doorman straightens. I nod. He nods back. The morning light is exceptionally bright outside.
Lorenzo’s car is at the curb. Engine running. Driver’s side door cracked. He’s not in it.
I stop walking.
I look around.
There. By the service entrance. Lorenzo, in shirtsleeves, his jacket draped over one arm, talking to a guy in a maintenance jumpsuit I don’t recognize. Lorenzo’s laughing at whatever the man just said. He claps the guy on the shoulder. The guy laughs back.
It’s the way Lorenzo always is with people. The way he was with the gate guard at Antonio’s Wednesday night. The way he’s been with everyone, everywhere, for five years. He talks to strangers like they’re about to be old friends, and they tend to oblige him.
I’ve always thought of it as charm.
I’m suddenly looking at it differently.
“Boss. Perfect timing. I was just heading out. Old man’s going gambling again. The underground room on the west side. Needs me to babysit while he hands his money to Victor Moreno.”
“Victor Moreno?”
