Chapter 26: Sara Minetti

I stood beside the car with the phone pressed to my ear and the grey morning sitting heavy around me.

"Sara Minetti," I said.

"The number is registered to a prepaid account," Diane said. "But the call came from a hotel in the city. We have the location."

"Which hotel?"

She gave me the name.

It was four blocks from Cassano's restaurant.

I looked at Bruno over the roof of the car. He read my face and came around to my side without waiting to be told.

"Thank you," I said to Diane. "Run the piece. Don't pull anything."

"I wasn't planning to," she said. "I just needed you to know."

I ended the call.

Bruno was already close enough to hear most of it. I told him the hotel and watched his expression move through something fast and land somewhere cold.

"She's been here the whole time," he said.

"While Harlan was filing documents with her name on the submission," I said. "They coordinated it. She contacts the journalist, he files the forgeries, Richard sits clean in the middle of both."

"Same structure as Monaco," Bruno said. "Different people. Same design."

We got in the car.

He didn't start the engine immediately. He sat with his hands on the wheel and looked at the road ahead and I could see him working through it, laying the pieces out in the order they needed to go.

"Luca needs to know about Sara," he said.

"Yes. And the investigators need to know she's in the city before she moves hotels."

"She'll move today," Bruno said. "If she made that call last night she already knows it can be traced."

"Then we move faster than she does."

He started the engine.

I called Luca while Bruno drove. Luca answered on the second ring, which told me he hadn't stopped working since the call ended an hour ago. I gave him the hotel name and Sara's prepaid number and told him about the journalist call and he said he would contact the lead investigator directly and personally, not through the portal and not through any channel Harlan had ever touched.

"How quickly can they move on the hotel?" I asked.

"If they're already looking at the second filing, fast," Luca said. "I'll make sure they understand the timeline."

I ended the call and sat back.

Bruno was navigating through the quieter Sunday streets, taking the longer route that avoided the main roads, which I had noticed he did when he was thinking. He needed the extra minutes. So did I.

"She was working with Richard before Monaco," I said. "We know that now. But she also cooperated with the investigators."

"She gave them enough to look credible," Bruno said. "Not enough to actually damage Richard."

"So her cooperation was managed."

"Yes. Carefully enough that nobody questioned it." He turned onto a wide empty road. "She gave them Sara's story. She kept Richard's out of it."

I thought about the folder on the back seat. Margaret's eight years of careful record-keeping. The photographs of Richard and Cassano at a table six years before Monaco. All of it assembled by a woman who had watched from a distance and finally decided watching was no longer enough.

"Richard has been doing this for a very long time," I said.

"Yes."

"And every time something went wrong he had someone else positioned to absorb it."

"Sara in Monaco. Harlan in the filing. Mara with you." Bruno glanced at me briefly. "He builds structures around himself. People who look independent but are connected to him in ways that only become visible when the pressure comes."

"Until now," I said.

"Until now," he said.

We reached Bruno's contact and handed over Margaret's folder and she took it with the brisk efficiency of someone who understood urgency and asked no unnecessary questions. Bruno thanked her and we went back to the car and for the first time since Sunday morning started neither of us had an immediate next call to make or a document to move or a problem requiring the next ten minutes.

We sat in the parked car in the quiet street.

Bruno looked at me. "Food," he said. "Now. Not negotiable."

"You're very forceful about meals."

"Someone has to be."

I looked at him and despite everything, despite Sara in a hotel four blocks from Cassano's restaurant and Harlan filing forgeries and Richard sitting clean in the center of all of it, I felt something loosen in my chest. The particular release of being with someone who noticed the ordinary things. Who made sure you ate. Who put his hand over yours at a table without needing to announce it.

"There's a place two streets from here," I said. "Opens at noon on Sundays."

"It's eleven forty."

"We can wait ten minutes."

He looked at me for a moment. Then he got out of the car and I got out and we walked to the end of the street and found a low wall in a patch of thin Sunday sunlight and sat on it side by side without talking.

His shoulder was against mine.

I didn't move away and neither did he.

We sat like that for ten minutes while the street woke up around us and the sun moved in and out of the clouds and the city did its slow Sunday things and none of it asked anything from us except to sit still for a moment.

Then we went to eat.

The place was small and warm and the woman who ran it brought coffee without being asked and the food came fast and we ate properly for the first time since Saturday morning and said very little because we didn't need to.

Halfway through the meal Bruno's phone lit up on the table.

Luca.

Bruno answered and listened and I watched his face.

He set the phone down after forty seconds.

"They went to the hotel," he said.

"And?"

"Sara checked out this morning. Two hours ago."

I put my fork down.

What the fuck do you mean she checked out this morning?

"She knew," I said. "She knew before we did."

"Someone told her," Bruno said. "Someone who knew Luca would move fast once we found out about the journalist call."

I looked at him.

We reached the same answer at the same moment.

"Luca's office," I said quietly.

Bruno picked his phone back up and dialed. The call rang out. He tried again.

Nothing.

He sat very still with the phone in his hand and looked at me speechless. I knew what was going through his min and it was trust issues.

"Who else knew we called Luca this morning?" I asked.

Bruno looked at the table.

Then he looked up at me.

"Harlan," he said. "Harlan knew I used Luca for Monaco. He knew his name. He knew the connection."

My coffee was going cold in front of me.

"Then Harlan told Sara," I said. "And Sara was gone before Luca even made the call."

Bruno stood and put his jacket on.

"We need to go," he said.

"Where?"

"To find Sara before Richard does," he said. "Because if Richard gets to her first, she doesn't cooperate with anyone anymore."