Chapter 27: Finding Sara

Bruno paid for the food and we were on the street in under three minutes.

He walked fast and I matched him and neither of us spoke until we reached the car and got in and he pulled out into the road with the focused economy of someone who had already decided on the next move and was simply executing it.

"Where do we start?" I asked.

"She checked out this morning," he said. "She didn't leave the city. Not yet."

"How do you know?"

"Because if she had a way out she would have used it before the journalist call. She made that call last night which means she was still working. Still useful to Richard." He turned onto the main road. "Richard doesn't let useful people leave until he's done with them."

I thought about that. "She's not running from us. She's waiting for instruction."

"Yes. And Richard won't move her until he knows how much damage the journalist piece does when it prints tomorrow."

"So she's somewhere in the city waiting for his call."

"Somewhere he chose," Bruno said. "Not somewhere she chose. Sara doesn't make those decisions."

I looked out at the city moving past the window. Sunday afternoon had brought people out despite the grey sky. Families and couples and groups of friends moving through the streets with the unhurried ease of people with nowhere urgent to be. The ordinary world doing its ordinary things.

"She used a prepaid phone for the journalist call," I said. "But she's been in contact with Richard throughout. He wouldn't use a prepaid. He'd use something clean and untraceable but consistent."

"Agreed."

"Which means she has two phones," I said. "The prepaid for anything that could be traced back. Her real phone for Richard."

Bruno glanced at me. "Her real phone can be located."

"If someone has access to the network records."

"Luca's office isn't answering," Bruno said. "But Luca isn't the only person I know with that kind of access."

He made a call through the car speaker. It rang four times and a man answered in Italian and Bruno responded in the same language, fast and direct, and I caught enough to understand he was asking for a location trace on a number.

He read Sara's number from his phone.

The man on the other end said something short.

"Twenty minutes," Bruno said to me after the call ended.

We drove without a destination, keeping moving, which felt better than sitting still waiting for a number to resolve itself into a location.

"When we find her," I said. "What do we do?"

"Talk to her."

"She won't want to talk to us."

"No," Bruno said. "But she'll want to talk to someone. Sara has been in Richard's orbit for a long time and she's smart enough to understand what happens to people in his orbit when they stop being useful." He kept his eyes on the road. "She cooperated with the investigators once already. She knows how that works. She knows it's the difference between a sentence and a deal."

"You think she's looking for a way out."

"I think she's been looking for one since Monaco," he said. "She just hasn't found a door she trusted yet."

I looked at him. "And you think she'll trust us."

"I think she'll trust you," he said. "I'm the person she helped destroy. That's harder to get past."

I sat with that.

The city kept moving outside the windows. Bruno turned down a quieter street and slowed the car slightly and I watched a woman come out of a building with a child on her hip and a bag over her shoulder, managing both with the practiced ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times.

My phone buzzed.

Luca. Finally.

I answered and put it on speaker.

"I'm sorry for the gap," Luca said. "We had a situation in the office."

"What kind of situation?" Bruno asked.

"Someone accessed our case files remotely this morning. Our IT team flagged it forty minutes ago. They got into the Monaco correspondence and the filing records." A beat. "Nothing was deleted. But everything was read."

"Harlan," I said.

"Almost certainly. We've locked the system and we're documenting the breach for the investigators." Luca's voice was careful and precise. "Bruno, I need you to assume that anything I knew about this case, Harlan knew within hours."

"Understood," Bruno said.

"Including Sara's hotel location when you gave it to me this morning."

"Yes," Bruno said. "We already worked that out."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault," Bruno said. "Keep documenting the breach. Send everything to the lead investigator."

He ended the call.

I looked at him.

"He had access to everything," I said. "From the beginning."

"Yes."

"Which means Richard knew about Margaret's folder before we moved it."

Bruno's jaw tightened. "Yes."

"So Richard already knows what's in it."

"He always knew what was in it," Bruno said. "He brought it to Margaret himself. He knew every document inside that folder. What he didn't know was that she had looked." He paused. "And he still doesn't know we have copies."

I thought about that carefully. "The copies I made on my own phone."

"Yes. Separate device. Separate account. Nothing Harlan ever touched." Bruno looked at me. "That's our clean evidence. Everything else is compromised."

His phone rang through the car speaker.

The contact from earlier. The one running the location trace.

Bruno answered.

A short exchange in Italian.

He took a right turn immediately, with the certainty of someone who had just been given a destination.

"She's still in the city," he said. "A serviced apartment building on the east side. Registered under a company name."

"Richard's company?"

"A subsidiary," he said. "Three steps removed. But it traces back."

We drove in silence for a few minutes.

"Bruno," I said.

"Yes."

"When we get there." I looked at him. "Let me go in first. Alone."

He looked at me sharply.

"You said she'd trust me more than you," I said. "You were right. If she opens the door and sees you she'll close it again before either of us can say anything."

He was quiet for a moment. I could see the part of him that didn't want to agree working against the part that knew I was correct.

"I stay in the building," he said. "Lobby. Close enough to be there in thirty seconds."

"Fine."

"Phoebe." His voice was low and serious. "If anything feels wrong you walk out. You don't try to manage it. You walk straight out."

I looked at him.

"I spent twelve years managing things that felt wrong," I said. "I know the difference now."

He held my gaze for a moment.

Then he nodded and turned his eyes back to the road and drove.

The building appeared ahead of us, a clean modern block with a glass entrance and a doorman visible through the front window.

Bruno pulled over a short distance back.

I got out of the car.

Walked to the entrance.

Gave the name of the company to the doorman.

He checked his screen and looked up.

"Third floor," he said. "She called down five minutes ago to say she was expecting someone."

I stopped, she had been expecting someone.

I turned slowly and looked back at the street.

Bruno's car was where I had left it.

But parked directly behind it, engine running, was a black car I recognized.

Richard's car.

He had been following us the entire time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

THE LOBBY

I walked back out through the glass door and onto the pavement without running.

If I had ran, Richard would know i saw him which I don't want.

I kept my eyes forward and took out my phone and typed to Bruno without looking up.

Black car directly behind you. Don't turn around. He followed us.

I watched Bruno's car from the corner of my eye.

He didn't turn. He didn't move. Three seconds after I sent the message his door opened and he got out with his jacket in his hand, unhurried, like a man who had simply decided to step outside for air.

He walked toward the building entrance without looking at the black car and came through the door and stood beside me in the lobby.

"How long?" he said quietly.

"I don't know. At least since we left the restaurant."

"He knows we're here for Sara."

"Yes."

The doorman was at his desk looking at his screen, not paying attention to us. The lobby was quiet, a couple waiting for a lift, a woman checking her phone by the door. Ordinary Sunday afternoon movements.

"Sara called down five minutes ago to say she was expecting someone," I said. "It wasn't us she was expecting."

Bruno looked at the lift. "She was expecting Richard."

"Or someone he sent."

"If Richard is in that car he's not coming in himself," Bruno said. "He never puts himself in the same room as something that can go wrong."

"So he sent someone ahead."

"Or Sara called down for us," Bruno said. "If she saw us pull up she might have called down deliberately. Giving herself a reason for the doorman to let us up before whoever Richard sent arrives."

I looked at him. "You think she wants to talk to us."

"I think she's been sitting in a serviced apartment waiting for Richard to decide what to do with her and she's had enough time to understand what that usually means for the people he's done with."

The lift opened and we stepped in at the third floor.

Sara Minetti looked at me through the gap. She was in her late thirties, dark-haired and very slender.

"You found me faster than I expected," she said.

"Are you going to let us in?" I asked.

She looked at Bruno directly. "You have every reason to want me in a cell."

"I have every reason to want Richard in a cell," Bruno said. "You're a means to that end. Nothing more."

She held his gaze for a long moment.

Then she closed the door.

The apartment was a single large room with a kitchenette along one wall and a window overlooking the street below. A suitcase open on the floor, half packed. A laptop on the table with three browsers open. Two phones, one of them the prepaid, sitting beside an empty coffee cup.

Sara sat on the edge of the bed and looked at us.

I sat in the chair nearest the window. Bruno stood near the door, not blocking it, just present.

"Richard is outside," I said.

She looked at her hands. "I know."

"He followed us here."

"He's been tracking my phone," she said. "The real one. I knew he could. I kept it on because turning it off would have told him something was wrong."

"So he knows we're here."

"Yes." She looked up. "Which means you have about ten minutes before whoever he sent comes through that door."

"Then talk fast," Bruno said.

She looked at him for a moment. Then at me.

"I didn't know about you," she said. "When I brought Richard into the Monaco deal. I didn't know he had a wife whose name he was using. I found out afterward and by then it was done."

"What did you do when you found out?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said. "That's the part I have to live with."

I looked at the window without moving to it.

"The forged documents," Bruno said. "The ones Harlan filed with my signature."

"I didn't make those," Sara said. "That was Harlan's design. Richard told me what to put in the journalist call and I did it. I didn't know about the forgeries until yesterday."

"When you found out, you called the journalist to warn her," I said.

Sara looked at me. "How did you know that?"

"Because she told me someone tried to pull the piece using Harlan's name. And then she told me it wasn't Harlan who called. It was you." I held her gaze. "You were trying to undo it."

Sara was quiet for a moment.

"Richard is moving the remaining documents tonight," she said. "The ones Margaret didn't have. There's a second set. Older records from before the Monaco structure was built. He's been keeping them separately. He's moving them out of the country tonight."

"Where?" he asked.

Before Sara could answer, a knock landed on the door.

Three short raps.

The same knock that had landed on my apartment door the morning Cassano arrived.

Sara stood up from the bed.

Her face had gone very still.

"That's not Richard," she said quietly. "Richard doesn't knock like that."

Bruno and I looked at each other.

The knock came again.

And then a voice through the door that none of us had expected.

"Ms. Minetti," Cassano said pleasantly. "I think it's time we had a conversation."

Sara stood up from the bed.

She crossed to the window and looked down at the street and went very still.

"That's not Richard's man," she said. "Richard sends someone young. Someone who looks like nobody." She stepped back from the window. "That man has been standing outside this building since this morning."

Bruno moved to the window without touching the curtain and looked down.

He stepped back.

"Cassano," he said.

I looked at Sara. "Did you contact him?"

"No." She looked genuinely unsettled for the first time since we had walked in. "I haven't spoken to Cassano since Monaco."

"He followed us independently," Bruno said. "He's been watching this situation longer than any of us realized."

I thought about Cassano in my apartment three weeks ago. The silver-haired stillness of him. The way he had looked at me like I was the most useful person in the room before he had even spoken a word.

He had known then.

He had probably known about Sara long before any of us found that hotel.

"He's not here for you," I said to Sara. "He's here for the documents Richard is moving tonight."

Sara looked at me. "How do you know about that?"

"You just told us," Bruno said.

She closed her eyes briefly. "I've been in this room too long."

"Call down to the doorman," I said. "Tell him you're not accepting any more visitors today."

Sara picked up the room phone and did exactly that.

She set it down and looked at us.

"It won't stop Cassano," Bruno said quietly.

"No," I said. "But it buys us ten minutes to finish this conversation before he decides to finish it for us."

Sara sat back on the edge of the bed and looked at her hands.

"The documents Richard is moving tonight," she said. "I know where they are right now. I know the name of the person carrying them out of the country." She looked up. "But if I give you that, I need something in return."

"Talk to the investigators," Bruno said. "Fully. Everything. That's the only deal that protects you."

"I've talked to the investigators before."

"You gave them enough to look cooperative," I said. "This time you give them everything. Richard's name attached to every transaction from the beginning." I held her gaze.

Sara looked at me for a long time.

Outside the building Cassano was still on the pavement while Richard was on he street still in his car.

And Sara Minetti was sitting between all of it with a decision she had been putting off for sixteen months finally arrived at her door.

"Alright," she said.

She reached under the mattress and pulled out a thin envelope.

"Start with this," she said.