Chapter 35 Maria's Channel

Chapter 35 Maria's Channel
Maria was in the kitchen when they came downstairs.

She looked at the portfolio under Gia's arm. At Marco's face. At the way they had come through the door together with the forward lean of people who had understood something and were moving on it.

She turned back to the counter without a word.

"We need to reach Reyes," Gia said. "Without using any communication channel that Victor Hale can monitor. Phone. Email. Anything digital."

Maria was quiet for a moment.

She opened a drawer beneath the counter. The one that held the household accounts, the maintenance schedules, the administrative paperwork of running a house of this size. She produced a small address book. The kind that no longer existed in most households because everything lived in phones and clouds and digital systems that were simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

Paper. Ink. A handwritten list of names and numbers.

She placed it on the counter between them.

"Third page," she said. "The florist."

Gia looked at her.

"The florist," Maria said again. The tone of someone stating a fact so established it should not require explanation. "She has been handling the arrangements for this house for nineteen years. Her shop is in Silver Lake. She makes deliveries across the city twice a week. She does not own a smartphone. She does not use email. She communicates by telephone with a landline that has not changed in thirty years." A pause. "And she has been friends with a woman named Katherine Reyes since they were neighbours in Koreatown in 1987."

The kitchen was very still.

"Reyes's mother," Gia said.

"Reyes's mother," Maria confirmed. "Who speaks to her daughter every Sunday and who would think nothing of mentioning that the family she has been delivering flowers to for nineteen years wanted to pass along a message to someone her daughter might know."

Gia looked at Marco.

He looked at the address book.

"A message that is not a message," he said.

"Through a channel that is not a channel," Maria said. She picked up the address book. "I will call the florist this morning. The delivery is Tuesday. By Tuesday evening Reyes will know you need to meet her in Paris without a single piece of digital communication passing between you."

She turned back to the counter and began making coffee the way she had been making coffee in this house every morning for twenty-two years, with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had just solved a problem and was not interested in being thanked for it.

Ivy had built Elena Russo.

Maria had built this.

She went to the studio after. To sit in the room that had held everything and was now holding something new... the knowledge of what the portfolio contained and the plan for getting it where it needed to go and the four weeks between now and Paris in which everything could still go wrong.

She set the portfolio on the worktable.

Looked at it.

Sixty-three pages of construction notes in Ivy's handwriting.

All of it leading to a Tuesday delivery from a Silver Lake florist to a woman who had been friends with Reyes's mother since 1987.

She almost laughed.

Not because it was funny. Because Ivy would have loved it. Because if Gia had told Ivy three years ago that her construction notes would end up delivering evidence to a federal prosecutor through a nineteen year old flower delivery relationship, Ivy would have looked at her with that look, the one that said you are so much better than you let them see, and said exactly that. Of course they will. That is exactly how it should work.

She pressed her thumb against the portfolio cover.

Held it there for a moment.

Then she opened her laptop.

She had four weeks before Paris. Four weeks before the testimony. Four weeks in which Victor Hale knew the records had been found but not where they were.

Four weeks was not very long.

But Ivy had worked for three years in four weeks' worth of stolen mornings in a house that was watching her and never suspected what she was building.

Four weeks was enough.

She opened a blank document.

Her own testimony. Everything she was going to say in that federal courtroom in three weeks, in the order she was going to say it, with the precision and the speed and the complete absence of hesitation that the situation required.

She was not going to let Caruso's defence make Elena Russo into a Lombardi operation.

She was going to make Elena Russo into what she was.

Ivy's gift to someone she loved.

She wrote for two hours without stopping.

When she looked up Marco was in the doorway.

He had coffee.

He set it on the worktable without a word and looked at the screen and looked at her and did not need to ask. He could see it from her face and from the pages of notes open on the screen and from the way she was sitting in the chair with the portfolio beside her and the stillness of someone who had found exactly what they were supposed to be doing and was doing it.

She looked at him.

"Tuesday," she said.

He nodded.

"Tuesday," he confirmed.

He went back to the door.

Stopped.

Turned.

"Luca called," he said. "While you were writing. He has a name."

She looked at him.

"Someone at the foundation," Marco said. "One of Maria's first intake clients. She came in last week. She knew Ivy. She was there the night of the gala. She was not a guest."

Gia went still.

"She was working the event," Marco said. "Catering staff. She saw what happened in the ballroom. She saw who fired the shot." He held her gaze. "She has been trying to find a safe way to tell someone for fourteen months. Someone she could trust not to hand her to the same people who had Ivy killed."

The studio was very quiet.

"She knows who killed Ivy," Gia said.

It was not a question.