“I’ll stand.”
“Then you’re going to want to sit when I’m finished.”
Down in the lobby, the night security chief brought his laptop to the security desk and stood holding it like a man handing over a weapon. The footage ran in the blue glow while the machine hummed and the snow piled against the glass doors.
9:25 p.m. — Marco in the office doorway. Emma smiling. Marco nodding and walking away.
11:31 p.m. — the elevator log. E. Clarke, badge read, forty-first floor, going up.
Dominic’s hand stopped on the mouse. His phone had buzzed at 11:31. He remembered it now — the small gray banner, Lobby Access, E. Clarke, forty-first floor — and he remembered looking at it, and looking away, because Victor Sloane had been mid-sentence with a glass in his hand and a judge on his arm, and Dominic had turned back to the toast.
She had come back up. She had been three doors from him.
11:33 p.m. — the lobby camera. Emma stepping out of the elevator, and Victor Sloane stepping out of the lounge corridor at the same moment, smiling, his hand already raised, already pointing back toward the service stairwell.
11:36 p.m. — the service exit. Two men in dark coats, Kessler and Dunn, one on each of her arms, walking her out into the alley. One of them carrying a thin stack of printed contracts.
11:41 p.m. — nothing. The alley camera had been dark since 11:20, marked maintenance, authorized at 10:58 p.m. with Sloane’s personal code.
The lobby went very quiet.
“He cut the cameras,” Marco said, “and then he came and found me at the bar and told me to keep everyone upstairs. Everyone. ‘Let the party run, Marco, nobody needs to be babysitting a secretary at midnight.'”
“And you did what he said.”
“I did what he said,” Marco repeated. He set down the coffee he had not drunk. His hand was not steady. “Thirty years I’ve noticed everything. I noticed her coat was thin. I noticed she hadn’t eaten. I noticed her shivering at her desk, and I went home and I took off my shoes and I poured a drink, and the whole time I was telling myself it wasn’t my business because the man who signed my checks asked me to be upstairs.”
Dominic said nothing for a long time.
Then Marco said, “There’s still a way out of this, and you’re not going to like it.”
“Say it.”
“Sloane will pay her. Quietly. Six figures, a lawyer, a non-disclosure, and she walks away whole tomorrow morning. You don’t open the servers. You don’t call anyone. The party was a party, and a girl slipped on the ice, and nobody in this city asks another question.” Marco leaned in. “You open those books instead, Dom, and they open yours. Everything you’ve done in Illinois since you were twenty-five. There is no version of that where you come out clean.”
Dominic looked down the corridor, at the closed doors, at the clock reading 1:14 a.m., at the snow coming down past the windows in slow diagonal sheets.
“What’s in the blue folder?” he asked.
“We don’t know yet. She said it was under something.”
“Then get me a badge and a key,” he said, “and don’t tell me the way out. I’ve taken it before. I know exactly where it leads.”
He crossed the lobby at 1:30 a.m. with Ray trailing behind him, and he opened the doors of his own building, and he did not stop until he was at her desk, where the contracts sat where he had left them, and there — under the loose liner of the desk drawer, taped flat — was the blue folder.
Inside were eleven months of escrow transfers from the tower’s construction account, routed through a nonprofit Sloane controlled, every one of them carrying Dominic Moretti’s signature.
None of them his.
And on the last page, in Emma’s small, careful hand, a note in red ink: The signatures were drawn from my login. Whoever did this is building it so that I am the one who goes to prison for it.
He stood in the dark office with the folder open in his hands and understood, with a cold that had nothing to do with the weather, that every person in that ballroom had known. The judge. The alderman. The real estate kings with the expensive watches. They had all known that a twenty-six-year-old girl two feet from a terminal was being sharpened into a weapon against him, and they had raised their glasses and looked at the ceiling and said nothing, because Sloane held all of their debts in his file cabinet.
And she had found out, and tried to tell him, and he had not been there.
He was in the ICU at 3:40 a.m. when her eyes opened and stayed open, and this time she knew him.
“You’re still here.”
