PART 5:

I never believed the official story. She sat with that. His name on Declan’s drive, she said. Means Pierce had information about what happened or involvement or both. You don’t know which. Not yet. She pressed her thumb against the edge of the glass and stared at the waterline. Her mind was doing the thing it did in argument.

she hadn’t prepared for. Moving fast through the information and trying to find the loadbearing fact. The one thing that if she understood it correctly made the rest of it coherent. So you came for me, she said, but you stayed for him. Yes. And that makes me what? Leverage. His jaw moved. It makes you a witness.

And it makes you someone he’s going to come after, which means keeping you alive is currently the most efficient way to get to what I need. She almost laughed. It came out wrong, thin and a little damaged, but she appreciated that he hadn’t lied to her because she’d had enough of that particular comfort to last her for quite a while.

“At least you’re honest about it,” she said. “I find it saves time.” A phone on the counter buzzed. Enzo looked at it and the expression on his face did something she’d been watching faces do enough tonight to read. “What?” Luciano said without looking at him. Pierce moved, Enzo said. He’s not at the building.

Where? Tac team lost him two blocks north. He was in a vehicle we didn’t have plates for. Enzo set the phone down. He had 30 minutes of lead time while we were moving her. That was enough. Luchiano was quiet. He has somewhere else, Rowan said. Both men looked at her. He has somewhere else he goes, she said. I saw calendar entries sometimes. Blocked out.

No labels, irregular intervals. I asked about them once early on and he said it was client meetings. I believed him. She stopped. He talked about a property out of state once in passing. He said his family had land somewhere in the mountains. I didn’t think about it again. Mountains, Luchiano said. I don’t know where.

He never said specifically. Luchiano stood. He moved to the window, which he knew was blacked out and therefore pointless. But people moved to windows when they needed to think, and she understood that. He stood with his back to the room for a moment. And she watched the tension in his shoulders do something complicated.

He’s going to run, Enzo said. If he runs, the drive goes with him. Everything on it. He won’t run yet, Luciano said, not without cleaning up. The word cleaning landed in the room with a weight that everyone understood without defining it. She’s the loose end. Enzo said, “She’s the only loose end left that he can actually reach.

” Luchiano said, “Everything else is embedded, but she saw the drive. She knows what’s on it, and now she’s connected to me, which means Pierce knows I know.” Rowan kept her face flat. She was aware this was a conversation happening partially over her head and partially directly at her and she was choosing to receive it as information rather than insult because insult was a luxury and information was what she actually needed.

So what happens now? She said. Luciano turned from the window. I have people pulling property records in three states for anything connected to Pierce’s holding companies. If he has land in the mountains, we’ll find it. And when you find it, then we go have a conversation with him about my brother. That’s not a plan, she said. That’s an intention.

Something crossed his face that might have been in a less controlled person a small flash of genuine surprise. It was there and gone in under a second. And then he was watching her with what she was beginning to think of as his real expression. Not blank, not hard, just extremely focused on whatever she was actually saying rather than the general situation she represented.

What would you call it? He said, “What I’d call it requires knowing what you actually want out of this. Justice, information, money, personal satisfaction. Those are different problems and they have different solutions. And if you mix them up, you get bad outcomes.” “You’re a lawyer,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation.

More like a piece of information clicking into place. I was training to be environmental. Yes. Which is not remotely relevant except that I know how federal investigations work and I know what evidence has to look like to be usable. And I know that whatever’s on that drive, if it’s what I raid, is the kind of thing the FBI has been trying to build for years.

And I know that a man with your She paused, choosing operational profile. Walking into a federal situation without a structured agreement in place is walking in with nothing. The room was quiet. Enzo was looking at Luchiano. Luchiano was looking at Rowan. What kind of structured agreement? He said, “The kind where what you have is worth something to them and you know what you want in return before you make the first call.

She put both hands on the table. I’ve watched enough environmental enforcement cases to know that cooperation agreements that get made reactively are worth half what preemptive ones are. If you’re going to bring Declan down, and from everything you’ve just told me, you need what’s on that drive to do it.

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