Chapter 55 THE CASE FILE

Chapter 55 THE CASE FILE
NOVA'S POV

The laptop Riley brought down from the study was old, thick around the edges.

If laptop was a living thing then this would have been out of breath or even dead by now.

She set it on the kitchen table next to the box without being asked and went back to the counter and started making toast like we were just three people having a normal morning.

The laptop took twenty minutes for it to start functioning.

I picked up the first USB drive.

My mother's handwriting on the label. Small and precise, the way she wrote everything, each letter sitting exactly where she had put it.

January 2010 — March 2011.

I slid it into the port on the side of the laptop and waited while the machine thought about it.

Elias moved his chair around the table so he was sitting beside me instead of across from me. Callum stayed where he was but leaned forward with both forearms on the table, his coffee forgotten at his elbow.

The drive opened.

Folders. Dozens of them, organized by date the same way the label suggested, each one named with a month and a set of initials I didn't recognize yet.

I clicked the first folder.

Spreadsheets. Pages and pages of numbers, columns of transactions with company names I had never heard of running down the left side and amounts running into the millions on the right.

Every transaction had a corresponding code beside it, letters and numbers that didn't mean anything to me on their own.

"She built a ledger," Elias said quietly, leaning closer to the screen. "Every transaction, coded."

"The physical ledger in the box will have the key." Callum reached over and pulled the ledger out of the box and opened it on the table beside the laptop. "She would have needed a way to decode it."

He was right. The first two pages of the ledger were a key, each code matched to a company name and beneath each company name a set of notes in my mother's handwriting.

Small careful sentences that explained what each company did and who owned it and how the money moved through it.

I looked at the first company name on the list and then at Callum.

He was already looking at it.

"That is one of Castellano's shell companies," he said, his voice very flat. "I recognize it from the correspondence Elias photographed in Father's study."

"She documented his entire financial structure." Elias sat back in his chair slowly. "Every shell company, every transaction, every account the money moved through." He looked at me.

"Nova, this is not just evidence of fraud. This is a complete map of how he has been moving money for over a decade."

I looked at the screen and then at the ledger and then at the three remaining USB drives sitting in the box.

"There are four drives," I said. "This one covers fourteen months. If they all cover roughly the same period, that is more than four years of documentation."

"She was building a case," Callum said. He picked up the ledger and turned the pages slowly, reading her notes. "She wasn't just collecting evidence. She was organizing it into something that could actually be used."

"Used by who?" I looked at him. "She didn't go to the police."

"She went to someone." He stopped on a page near the middle of the ledger and turned it toward me. "Look at this."

A name at the top of the page, underlined once. Not a company name. A person.

Someone in the federal financial crimes division, a contact name and a case number written beneath it.

My mother had already made contact with a federal investigator.

I sat with that for a moment.

"She had a plan," I said. "She was going to hand all of this over. She had the contact, she had the case number, she had four years of documentation." I looked at the date on the ledger page. "This page is dated six weeks before she died."

The kitchen went very quiet.

Riley put a plate of toast on the table and stepped back without saying anything.

Elias was looking at the ledger page with his jaw set in that way it went when he was holding something in very deliberately.

Callum closed the ledger carefully and put it flat on the table and looked at me.

"She was six weeks away from finishing it," I said. "Six weeks away from handing everything over to a federal investigator and Castellano found out."

"And she died," Elias said. Low and flat.

"And she died." I looked at the laptop screen, at the columns of numbers my mother had spent years compiling in secret. "And all of this went into a box and the box went into a storage unit and nobody touched it for eight years because the one person who knew where the key was kept it in a drawer and didn't do anything with it."

I was not angry when I said it. I was past angry. I was somewhere on the other side of it that didn't have a name yet.

Callum's hand came across the table and covered mine where it was sitting flat on the surface next to the laptop.

He didn't say anything. Just put his hand over mine and left it there.

I looked at his hand on mine and then at the screen and then at the three remaining USB drives.

"We need to go through all four drives," I said. "Everything she documented. And then we need to find that federal investigator."

"The case number is right there." Elias leaned forward and tapped the ledger page. "We can trace it."

"The investigator might not even still be active," Callum said carefully.

"Then we find whoever took over the case." I pulled my hand out from under his and reached for the second USB drive. "My mother spent four years building this. She was six weeks from finishing it." I slid the second drive into the port next to the first one. "We are going to finish it for her."

Elias looked at me for a long moment.

Then he pulled the laptop slightly toward him and opened the second drive and started going through the folders with the same quiet focus he brought to everything when he was actually serious about it.

Callum picked the ledger back up and opened it to the key pages and set it where both of us could see it.

Riley refilled all three coffee mugs without being asked and went back to the counter and stayed there quietly, close enough to be present and far enough away to give us the room we needed.

We sat there in the grey morning kitchen going through my mother's life's work page by page and outside the window the city was waking up slowly.

Somewhere across it Matthias Hale was starting his day with no idea that everything he had spent twenty years protecting was sitting open on a kitchen table in the house he had been trying to destroy.

My phone was still face down on the table where Callum had put it.

It buzzed once but none of us looked at it.