Page 216 of Diego

We return downstairs to find Giovanni at a closed door at the far end of a hallway past the kitchen.

He looks at the floor.

I follow his gaze.

There is a dark scrape along the wood near the threshold, as though something heavy was dragged across it more than once.

Giovanni opens the door.

A staircase leads down.

We descend with weapons drawn, Ricardo first and Giovanni immediately behind him. The basement is finished only in parts. Storage shelves line one wall, and several metal cabinets stand near a utility area. A single light is already on farther back.

Then Giovanni stops.

I see the body beyond him.

A man lies on his side with his hands bound behind him. His clothes are dirty, his face bruised, and there is dried blood on his shirt. I do not need to look closer to know he has been dead for at least a day.

Giovanni crosses the remaining distance anyway.

He crouches beside him and puts two fingers against the man’s neck, then lowers his hand after a few seconds. His expression does not change, but the muscles along his jaw tighten as he looks at the man he sent.

Antonio stops several feet behind his brother. Nico stands beside Antonio, his gaze fixed on the body, and the hard set of his face makes him look dangerous.

“He's been dead at least a day,” Ricardo says. “Maybe a little longer.”

Giovanni rises. “He was alive when they brought him here.”

The restraints, bruising, and condition of the body make that obvious.

What we don't know is what information they wanted from him and whether he gave it up.

Antonio looks to the stairs. “Then whoever was using this place had time to question him before they left.”

“And they left recently,” Matteo says. “Food upstairs, cars in the garage, guards still posted. They didn’t abandon the property.”

“There has to be a reason why,” I say.

They left people behind. That means they intended on coming back.

Ricardo looks at me. “Search everything,” he orders.

We split up again, this time looking for information rather than people. Cabinets get opened, drawers emptied, papers collected, phones taken from every guard, and anything that can hold data goes into a pile for Matteo. Giovanni stays downstairs only long enough to cover his man with a blanket one of our people finds in storage, then comes back upstairs with us.

The office near the back of the house is the first place with anything worth examining.

There's a computer on the desk and several file boxes sit against the wall. Antonio starts going through them while Dante works through the desk drawers. I take the cabinet and find invoices, utility records, a stack of property tax documents, and a folder containing corporate filings for companies that match names from the list Giovanni brought.

“This is theirs,” Antonio says after several minutes. He holds up two pages and passes them to Ricardo. “Same network. Different companies, same officers buried behind them.”

Ricardo reads the names and hands the pages to Giovanni.

Matteo sits at the computer.

The machine is locked.

“Can you get in?” I ask.