Page 76 of Undertow

"Ms. Sweet," he said again, savoring it. "Or is it Ms. Ellison today? I lose track."

"Let's not waste each other's time," Cara said.

"Agreed." The sad smile stayed in place. He wanted her to see a reasonable man dealing reasonably with an unreasonable situation. A concerned uncle. A cooperative board member. Whatever costume fit. "Where's my niece?"

"Safe."

His eyes narrowed. "That word means different things to different people."

"It means what I said."

Whitfield’s gaze drifted to Gabe. The small, satisfied flicker in his eyes said he considered Gabe's presence here a gift — a police chief four hundred miles outside his jurisdiction, in the company of a woman using a false identity, sitting in a room he had no legal right to be in.

"Chief Sawyer," Graham said. "You're a long way from Haven Cove."

"I am," Gabe said. Nothing else. He sat with his hands on the arms of the chair, perfectly still, and gave Graham absolutely nothing to work with.

Whitfield shifted his attention to Wade, who was examining the oil painting on the wall with the theatrical disinterest of a man who wanted everyone to know he was bored.

"And this would be — what? Security? Muscle?"

"Whatever’s necessary," Wade said, without looking away from the painting.

"Of course." Whitfield steepled his fingers. "Which tells me that whatever you think you've found, you don't have enough to do anything official about it. Because if you did, you'd have sent the FBI."

Cara let the silence hold for a beat. "Who said we didn't?"

Whitfield’s fingers tensed. The movement was small — a fraction of a second — but Cara caught it. The first crack in the cashmere.

He recovered quickly. “So we have law enforcement with no power, a small-town baker, and some manner of freelancer. Which means that whatever you think you’ve found, none of it is going to⁠—”

“We had an expert examine the compound.” Gabe interrupted him. “The analysis is on file at the lab. Memory suppression. Hippocampal targeting. Criminal to develop. Criminal to administer. Criminal to test on a human subject without consent.”

Whitfield tried to suppress a look of surprise, but he wasn’t skilled enough. Cara caught it. She’d bet Gabe and Wade did, too.

“Six shell entities,” Gabe continued. “Three recurring signatures. All of them running through companies with your name on the filings. Internal memos. Shipping manifests from an Oakland lab.”

Gabe stared the man down. “And here’s the best part. We’ve documented a payment. A million dollars routed through one of those shells, dated two weeks before your brother’s death. Into an entity that took one deposit, never employed anybody, and dissolved the next month.”

“My brother,” the older man said carefully, “died of a stroke.”

“In his sleep,” Gabe agreed. “So we’ve been told. Super convenient timing for the man who took over the Foundation four months later.”

Wade grunted. “No joke there, bro.”

"I want my attorney."

Cara gestured at him. "Call him. We’ll wait."

Whitfield reached for his phone. Slowly. The deliberate slowness of a man buying seconds — not because he had a plan, but because the plan he'd walked in with had just collapsed and he needed time to build another one. He scrolled through his contacts with the exaggerated care of someone pretending to look for a number he already knew, and Cara watched his eyes flick — once, twice — to the closed door behind them.

He was stalling. Waiting for security to notice something was wrong, or for anyone with a Whitfield Foundation badge to walk through that door and give him back the leverage he was losing by the minute.

Cara's phone buzzed against her thigh. Keeping her eyes on Elena’s uncle, she pulled it out just far enough to read the screen.

In. Log pulled. Pirelli's name on every dose. Downloading the rest. 10 min.

Whitfield was still talking — something about defamation and the number of lawsuits he had personally overseen against people who had tried to ruin his name. His words came faster now, pitch rising at the edges, the monologue of a man who could hear himself losing and couldn't stop filling the silence with words that weren't helping.