Chapter 57: HUNTING FOR THE BACKER

Dalton

The warehouse office had the smell of cold coffee and cheap carpet. Cole had chosen it because it has nothing that would connect anything to the Blackwood’s name on the lease.

Four laptops were  glowing on a folding table, and a map of the city hung crooked on the wall with red pins marking every place she had been seen and vanished. I stood at the window with the blinds cracked, looking out  a parking lot no one ever used. My son and daughter were behind three locked doors forty minutes away. I had not slept since the word hit Cole's phone. Found.

"She did not do all of this alone," Cole said. His eyes never left the screen. His voice had lost its softness weeks ago. "The decoy. The badge that was stolen. The aeroplane. We were watching the wrong door and someone moved her money. Someone keeps her out our sight."

"A partner," I said.

"A backer." He finally met my eyes. "Sienna is smart. But she is not a ghost. Ghosts cost money and skill, and hers never runs out. That is the part that scares me."

Tehila sat in the corner with a bottle warmer humming beside her, though the babies were not here. She had brought it anyway, like a promise. Her eyes were on me. She did not speak. She did not have to. I had broken this woman once, and now she was helping me hunt the thing my own weakness had let inside.

Lucas came through the door with a folder and dropped it on the table. "I have bank trails," he said. "Three shell companies. Cayman, Zurich, one in Singapore. Every one of them empties into the next before the ink dries. I have chased money for twenty years, but I have never seen it move this clean."

"So we cannot trace it," I said.

"Not the money." Lucas  poked  the folder. "But humans are the ones who transfer money. And people’s habits leave their marks. Whoever built these accounts likes the same routing bank in Zurich. Two of the shells have the same lawyer's name on them."

Cole leaned in. "A name?"

"Not yet. A shadow of one." Lucas rubbed his face. "Give me a day."

The room went quiet except for the fans inside the laptops. I looked at the red pins on the map and felt how thin our thread was. We were three men and a woman with a bottle warmer, hunting someone with unlimited money and ten years  of experience. Fred Brooke had patrol cars watching the safe house, but patrol cars watched doors. This person did not use doors. This person used the wiring behind the walls of our whole lives.

"Whoever it is understands us," Cole said slowly, as if reading my thought. "They knew which floor the hospital moved Tehila to. They knew about the twins before the announcement. They have access."

Tehila spoke for the first time. "You mean someone who was already close. Before any of this started."

Cole nodded. "Before Sienna even came back."

The idea sat in the room like cold air. I thought of the years I had trusted the wrong people, smiled at the wrong faces, signed papers I did not read. Somewhere in my past, a door had been left open, and Sienna had simply walked through it.

My phone rang.

The name on the screen made my chest tighten. Sweet Mama. My grandmother had been recovering at home since the poisoning. She rarely called at night. I answered and put it to my ear, turning toward the window.

"Grandmother." I kept my voice steady. "Are you all right?"

"Dalton." Her voice was slow, older than I had ever heard it. Wind rustled somewhere on her end, she must have left her window open. "I need you to listen to me. Don’t say anything. Listen."

"I am listening."

"There is something I have kept for a long time. Thirty five years. I told myself it did not matter, that it was over, that the woman was gone." She stopped to breathe, and the breath shook. "I was wrong. I think it matters now more than anything."

The room behind me had gone silent. Cole had turned. Tehila's hand had frozen on the bottle warmer.

"What woman?" I asked.

"When your father was still alive," Estelle said, "there was a girl. A young woman who worked for this family. She was clever and beautiful, but she was let go under circumstances I helped to bury, because Victoria wanted her gone and I did not fight it." Her voice cracked. "I never learned what became of her child."

Ice moved through me, slow and total. "Her child."

"I saw a photograph today. In one of the papers, from the interview. She has Sienna's face." Estelle's words came faster now, frightened. "Dalton, I know that face. I have known it for more than thirty years. Not hers. Her mother's."

The map, the pins, the humming laptops all seemed to fall away. "You are saying Sienna is connected to us. That she was always connected to us."

"I am saying she did not choose this family by accident." Estelle's breath hitched. "She was owed something, or she believed she was. And she is not the one I am afraid of." A pause, and in it I heard a sound I could not place. Probably a door. "The one who protected that girl back then, who moved her money and hid her away when Victoria threw her out. He is still alive, Dalton. He never stopped. He has been waiting thirty years for the family to bleed."

"Grandmother, a name. Give me a name."

The line was filled with static. Then her voice, very small.

"He is already here. He has been here the whole time. It is…"

The call went dead.

I stared at the phone. The screen said the connection had ended. I called back. It rang once and dropped. Rang again and gave me nothing but silence.

Cole was already on his feet. "Dalton."

"Get a car." My own voice sounded far away. "Get a car to my grandmother's house. Now."

Tehila stood, one hand on her stomach where our children had grown, her face pale. "Dalton, what did she say?"

I looked at the woman I had thought was the whole of the danger, and understood at last that she had never been.

"She said he has been here the whole time," I whispered. "And she never told me who."