I stepped over the broken glass and walked out of the bedroom.
His door was shut when I passed it. I went to my office, locked the door, and got out the folder Nikita had given me. There was a single page inside with three names on it:
Dmitri Holland.
Tony Marek.
Doug Reeve.
Pavel was efficient. Three names, a one page of summary on each, the timeline of who knew what about Keystone and when, and the windows where each man could have made the call.
I'd read intelligence files my whole adult life. I knew how to read them. You started with the name you didn't want to see, and you worked outward. The name you didn't want to see was always the one that mattered.
I started with Dmitri.
I'd known Dmitri Holland for fourteen years. He'd come into the crew from Cleveland when he was twenty-six, and we'd done every warehouse, every collection, every cleanup together since.
Pavel's summary on him was four bullet points and a paragraph. Recent travel: nothing. Recent comms: clean. Recent financial activity: nothing flagged. The only mark against himwas that he'd been in the room when I'd laid out the Keystone plan and he had the standing to do the damage.
That was it. That was Pavel's whole case against Dmitri. He had access. Everyone with access was a candidate.
Tony Marek was thirty-eight and had run the dock side of the operation for the last eight years. He'd built the timing matrix for the Keystone shipments. He knew the shipping windows better than I did.
Pavel's summary on Tony was longer than Dmitri's. The bullet points told me what I already knew. Twice in the last three years Tony had come to me about money. The first time it was the Hard Rock in Cleveland and twenty-two thousand dollars, and I'd paid it because Tony was good at his job and the alternative was finding someone who knew the docks half as well as he did. The second time it was a private game in Cincinnati, and I'd paid that too. I'd told him both times that if he came to me a third time he'd leave without his right hand.
Tony hadn't come to me a third time. I read his name three times before it stuck, because the taste of Fin was still in my mouth and it kept pulling my eyes off the page. I swallowed. It didn't help. I read the line again.
Maybe he'd stopped gambling. Or it could mean he'd stopped coming to me.
Pavel had Tony's financials going back six months. Nothing was hemorrhaging out of the accounts the way it had before. Nothing was coming in either, which was harder to read. Either he'd quit, or he'd found a new source of liquidity, or someone was moving money for him in a way Pavel hadn't yet tracked down.
Doug Reeve was forty-five. He'd been in Nikita's office for seventeen years as a secretary and bag man. He'd been in the building the morning I'd been briefed on Keystone, and he'd been in the building when I'd brought the file back upstairs after,and there was nothing that crossed Nikita's desk that hadn't crossed Doug's first.
Doug had come up under Simeon. He'd been a foot soldier when I was a kid running errands for my father, and the smart money in those years had been on Doug to make captain inside of five. He hadn't. He'd been passed over for it three times that I knew of, and the last time had been mine. Nikita had given me the spot years ago when Doug had been the obvious next man for it. Nobody had said anything to me about it at the time. Doug had shaken my hand and said congratulations, and gone back to his desk in the office.
Pavel's summary on Doug ran two pages. Recent travel: Vegas, two weeks ago, a long weekend with his wife. Recent comms: heavy, but heavy was Doug's normal. He talked to everyone. Recent financial activity: nothing flagged. Lifestyle within means. Doug lived in the same house in Worthington he'd had for twenty years.
I was halfway down the second page before I noticed I hadn't read a word of it. My hand had stopped moving on the desk. I was thinking about Fin’s fingers, the way they'd worked on the hide, sure and slow, like they had all night. The way they'd wrapped around his cock.
Not now.
I put my thumb on the page to hold my place and made myself read the line under it. Then read it again, because the first time didn't take.
The motive case Pavel had built on Doug was a single line at the bottom of the second page. Doug had been there the longest. Doug had seen the most.
One of these three men had betrayed us.
One of these three men needed to die.
The question was, which one?
I leaned back in the chair and ran my hands down my face. The vodka was thin in the glass at my elbow. The clock said twenty past two.
I'd done leak hunts before. Three of them in twenty years. One of those times I'd put a bullet in the wrong man, and I still thought about him most weeks. I was going to think about whichever one of these three I got wrong in the same way.
Dmitri didn't add up. Tony added up too easily. Doug added up the way Pavel wanted him to.
That last part stayed with me. Pavel had given Doug two pages and the others one each, and Pavel had ended Doug's file with a line that wasn't analysis. It was a verdict. He has seen the most.
