Chapter 60 THE FEDERAL INVESTIGATOR

Chapter 60 THE FEDERAL INVESTIGATOR
ELIAS POV

The federal investigator's office was on the fourteenth floor of a building that looked deliberately unremarkable from the outside, the kind of place designed to make people walk past it without stopping.

His name was Daniel Reeves. Late forties, thick through the shoulders, the kind of man who looked like he had been sitting behind that particular desk for long enough that the chair had learned the shape of him. He shook all three of our hands when we came in and gestured toward the seats across from his desk without any small talk.

I liked him immediately.

Nova put the USB drives and the ledger on his desk and he looked at them without touching them first, his eyes moving over each item carefully.

"Your mother compiled all of this?" He looked up at Nova.

"Over four years." Nova kept her hands folded in her lap, her back straight. "The ledger is the key to the coded entries on the drives. She built the whole system herself."

Reeves picked up the ledger and opened it to the first page and read quietly for a long moment.

The office was small and very quiet. One window behind his desk shows a narrow strip of grey sky. A framed certificate on the wall that nobody had straightened in a long time. Two filing cabinets in the corner with a coffee cup sitting on top of one of them that looked like it had been there since the previous week.

"I worked with my predecessor on the original case before he retired," Reeves said without looking up from the ledger. "Isabella Sinclair made contact eight years ago and provided preliminary information. We were building toward a formal interview when she died." He turned the page carefully. "The case went dormant after that. No witnesses, no documentation, no way forward." He looked up. "Until three days ago."

Callum leaned forward slightly in his chair. "What happened three days ago?"

Reeves closed the ledger and set it flat on the desk in front of him, his palms resting on the cover. "A financial analyst at a firm connected to one of Castellano's subsidiary companies came to us voluntarily. He has been watching irregularities in the accounts for two years and finally decided to do something about it." He looked between the three of us. "What he brought us connects directly to the same shell company structure your mother documented. Same methods, same coded transfers, just eight years more recent."

"So you have current activity," Callum said.

"Current enough." Reeves tapped the ledger once. "With what this adds to it we have a continuous thread going back over a decade. That is not something a good defence attorney walks away from easily."

Nova was very still in her chair beside me.

"There is something else." Reeves opened the folder on his desk and looked at it for a moment before looking back up. "In the course of investigating the current activity we identified a contact inside Blackthorn Industries. Someone with access to internal communications and financial projections who has been passing information to Castellano's people for at least eighteen months."

The room went quiet in a different way than it had been quiet before.

"Inside the company." Callum's voice came out flat. "You are certain."

"The communications are documented." Reeves held his gaze. "We don't have a name yet. But the access level tells us it is someone senior enough to see things that don't reach general staff."

I looked at Nova.

She was looking at the desk in front of her with her hands still folded in her lap and her face completely composed in a way that I had learned meant she was thinking very fast and very carefully behind it.

"How senior?" she asked, her eyes coming up to Reeves.

"Department head level or above." He looked at her steadily. "Or someone with a direct line to that level."

Nova held his gaze without flinching.

"We need everything you can give us on the communication pattern," she said, unfolding her hands and leaning forward in her chair. "Timing, frequency, what categories of information were passed. All of it."

Reeves looked at her for a moment with an expression that reminded me of the way people looked when they encountered something that matched a description they had been given a long time ago.

"You sound like her," he said quietly. "Your mother. When she sat across from my predecessor and laid out her preliminary case, he said she was the most organized witness he had ever spoken to." He opened the folder fully and turned it toward Nova. "She would have been proud of what you brought in today."

Nova looked at the open folder and something moved across her face briefly before she put it away and looked back at him.

"Then let's make sure it counts," she said, pulling the folder toward her.

We were in that office for two hours.

By the time we walked back out into the grey morning the investigation was formally reopened, the USB drives were in Reeves's possession with a full chain of custody documented, and we had a contact number that rang directly to his desk any time of day.

The three of us stood on the pavement outside the building without talking for a moment.

Nova had the copy of the communication pattern summary Reeves had given us folded in her hand. She was looking at it without reading it, her eyes somewhere past the paper.

"Someone inside the company," Callum said quietly beside me.

"Someone with department head access or a direct line to it." Nova looked up from the paper and her eyes went to Callum's face. "Who has had a direct line to you since I started working there?"

Callum looked back at her.

Neither of them said the name out loud.

But I watched Nova fold the paper carefully in half and put it in her bag and I watched Callum's jaw tighten once and I knew we were all thinking the same thing.

"We go back to the office," Callum said, already moving toward the car. "We go back and we act like this morning never happened."

Nova fell into step beside me and I reached over without thinking about it and took her hand and she let me, her fingers closing around mine without looking up.

"Elias." She kept her eyes forward.

"Yeah."

"Whatever we find when we look at that communication pattern." She kept walking, her hand steady in mine. "We handle it together."

"Together," I said.

She nodded once and kept walking.

But her hand tightened around mine in a way that told me the name sitting behind her teeth was the same one sitting behind mine.

And it was someone neither of us wanted it to be.