Page 9 of Velvet Vaughn

Chapter Two

Leo sat down in his chair without taking off his coat. He lifted his brass letter opener, slit the top edge of the envelope in one clean stroke, set it down, and tilted the mailer over the desk.

Three things slid out. First was a black flip phone sold off pegboards at gas stations, its screen scratched, the plastic casing cheap beneath his fingers. Next was a generic thumb drive, no logo, no label, the silver shell smudged. And last, a single sheet of folded hotel stationery.

Leo picked up the note first.

He recognized Vic’s handwriting before he’d fully unfolded it. He’d seen it on a dozen contract drafts over the years, scrawled in margins and looped through the signature line of more than one agreement Leo had personally negotiated against him. The hand on the page in front of him was Vic’s, but shakier than Leo remembered. He’d written this in a hurry, in fear, or both.

Leo flattened the page on the blotter and read.

Leo — If you’re reading this, I’m already dead and they made it look clean. Don’t believe the story. I didn’t do it to myself.

You’re the only agent in this town I’d trust with this, and that’s saying something because I don’t even like you. You never liked me either, so we’re square. But you’re clean. I watched for years to make sure. You’re the only one I’m sure of.

Don’t take this to the cops or the feds. Don’t take it to your own people. They have assets everywhere. I mean everywhere, Leo. They have people inside places you would never guess. I thought I had been careful. Look at me now.

Get this flash drive to someone outside the industry who knows what they’re doing. Someone who owes you nothing, and someone you owe nothing to. Someone who can’t be reached through leverage.

Watch your clients. They’re coming for yours next. They may already have started.

I’m sorry for every shitty thing I ever said about you in my head and in print. — V

Leo read it through. Then he read it a second time, slower and lawyer-eyed, treating it as a contract whose other party he didn’t trust. On the third pass, he started looking at the language rather than the meaning because language was something Leo knew how to inspect. Six years of contract law had taught him how people lied on paper. He recognized the markers and what evasion looked like when it was trying to dress up as candor. He understood the difference between a man building a story versus telling one.

This was definitely the latter.

The phrasing was too specific to be a performance. They have people inside places you would never guess. That wasn’t the line of a guy spinning a paranoid fantasy. A paranoid fantasy named names, accused everybody, and spilled into the margins. Vic’s note named nobody. He knew exactly which doors he couldn’t trust and was leaving Leo a map drawn in the only ink he had left. The instructions were precise. The omissions were disciplined. Don’t take it to your own people. No reasoning offered. No evidence cited. Just the flat command of a man who didn’t have time to walk Leo through the math because the math had already killed him.

And then the apology at the bottom. I’m sorry for every shitty thing I ever said about you in my head and in print. That was the line that locked it for Leo. A person fabricating a suicide note for some other purpose wouldn’t waste their last paragraph on an embarrassing apology to a colleague he’d feuded with over a point guard. The man who penned this had realized the next forty-eight hours were going to kill him and wanted to leave the world a little cleaner than he’d kept it.

Vic had written this expecting to die.

Leo placed the note on the blotter and flattened it against the leather with the heel of his hand. The tremor had left his fingers. His body had moved past shaking and into the part where it understood there was work to do.

He regarded the thumb drive.

His air-gapped laptop lived in the firm’s safe behind the bookshelf in the corner, a slim Lenovo Leo had bought with cash three years ago for the sole purpose of opening files he didn’t want anywhere near a network. He kept it for the same reason he had a fireproof cabinet and the crosscut shredder in the closet that could turn a phonebook into confetti. Lawyers acquired specific habits whether they wanted to or not.

Leo retrieved the laptop from the safe and powered it up.

While the machine started, he picked up the flash drive and turned it over between his thumb and forefinger. Generic. Unbranded. The kind sold ten to a clamshell at any office supply store in America. Vic had been thinking about traceability when he bought it.

The Lenovo finished booting. Leo plugged the drive into the side port. The machine recognized it after a beat. A single folder appeared on the screen, and inside was an encrypted archive.

A password field blinked at him.

Leo tried Vic’s last name. The field shook its head at him with the annoying red animation of a wrong guess. He tried Vic’s full name, his birthday, which he found on social media, in three different formats, and the name of the hotel printed at the top of the stationery. The date of the postmark plus the hotel name didn’t work. He tried trust no one as a single string with no spaces. The field rejected each attempt with the same patient red shudder, and on the sixth or seventh wrong guess, Leo realized he was doing exactly what Vic had warned him not to do: trying to handle this alone.

He pulled the drive out of the laptop.

The burner phone was sitting on the blotter. Leo picked it up and turned it on. It chimed once, a tinny default startup sound, then displayed a stripped-down menu screen with nothing on it. He thumbed through to the contacts.

One entry: Answer.

There were no names, notes, call history, or even any outgoing or incoming texts or voicemails. The battery sat at eighty-three percent. The signal bars were full.

Vic had charged the phone, programmed one contact into it, mailed it to Leo, and expected it to ring.