Chapter 52 A favor

Chapter 52 A favor
The next morning Nia was at Xavier's office before the rest of the floor had woken up properly.

She knocked. He looked up. He gestured for her to come in and she closed the door behind her, which was enough to tell him the conversation was not about work.

He waited.

"I need a favour," she said. "A personal one."

"All right."

"I am looking for someone. A woman, mid to late forties." She paused. "I have tried on my own and I have found almost nothing. I need someone with better reach than I have."

Xavier looked at her steadily. "Who is she?"

"I am not ready to say yet."

He did not react to that the way some people would have. He did not push for more or make her feel the incompleteness of what she had offered. He just said, "Is she a threat to you?"

"No."

"Then I will have Gia start a search." He picked up his pen. "I will need whatever you have. A name, a date of birth if you have it. Last known location."

"I will write it all down and send it through."

"Do it today. The earlier he starts the more ground he covers." He looked back down at whatever he had been reading before she knocked. "Is there anything else?"

"No." She stood. "Thank you."

"You do not need to thank me for it."

She left.

Walking back to her desk she thought about what she had and had not said. She had given him enough to start. She had not given him the reason.

She told herself she would tell him the full truth when there was something real to tell. Until then she would carry it the way she had been carrying everything for the past year.

She sat down and opened her laptop and pulled up the document she had started the night before. She filled in what she had. 

The last known city from her grandmother's letters. She sent it to Gia and closed the document and went back to the chronology.

Four days later the preliminary report arrived in her internal folder.

She opened it at the end of the day. The floor was quiet. Gia's report was two pages and the first page was full of gaps records that should have existed and did not, listings that returned nothing, address histories that stopped abruptly and did not resume. 

The second page was shorter, near the bottom, in Gia's clean precise style, was a single line.

The absence of records in this case does not appear to be incidental. The pattern suggests deliberate removal. 

This takes sustained effort and typically indicates someone with the resources and motivation to ensure a person could not be easily traced.

Nia read that line three times.

She sat back.

She thought about her grandmother's house. The photo albums she had paged through as a child and always noticed, without ever saying anything, that there were no images of anyone who looked like her. 

The particular silence around certain questions, not the silence of not knowing but the silence of having decided not to say.

It had always been deliberate.

She had suspected it for as long as she could remember. Now she had it written down by someone with no reason to tell her anything except what the evidence showed.

She closed the report and put it in her bag and sat at her desk for a while without moving.

There was a knock at her open door.

It was one of the junior analysts from the floor below, a young woman named Anna who occasionally dropped in with cross-reference queries. She looked at Nia's face and hesitated in the doorway.

"Bad time?"

"No." Nia straightened. "Come in."

Anna came in with a printed sheet. "Cross-reference query from the legal team. They want to know if you can confirm a date from your personal notes specifically the period around a DeLuca board meeting in the third quarter, four years ago."

Nia pulled her notebook toward her and flipped back. "What date are they looking at?"

"The fourteenth."

Nia found the page. "I have a notation here from that week. Anthony had two dinners out, one of which ran past midnight. He came home unsettled, I noted it at the time because it was unusual for him after a social evening. He was normally relaxed."

Anna was writing quickly. "Can you describe unsettled?"

"He checked his phone four times in ten minutes and then put it face down on the counter and left it there. He did not do that. He was the kind of man who always had his phone face up."

Anna looked up. "That is actually really useful."

"Is it?"

"The legal team has a transaction on the fifteenth. If he was managing something the night before that correlates." She finished writing and looked up. "You remember a lot of specific detail."

Nia looked at her notes. "I had three years to observe him. I just did not know at the time that I was building evidence."

Anna glanced around the organised layers of the desk and said, almost to herself, "I do not know how you do all of this at the same time."

Nia looked up. "What do you mean?"

"The chronology. The legal coordination. The ball preparation and you are always the first one in." Anna shook her head. "I would be in pieces."

"I was in pieces," Nia said. "For a long time." She closed the notebook. "This is just what comes after."

Anna looked at her for a moment and then nodded as if she understood, even if she did not fully. She thanked her and left.

Nia sat alone.

She thought about the report in her bag and the woman whose trail had been deliberately erased. She thought about six weeks and everything that needed to happen inside those six weeks. 

She thought about the two things running side by side in her, the operation that was almost ready and the search that had barely started.

She was going to have to do both.