The Cold Numbers
A shattered window on the thirty-sixth floor of Pinnacle Tower. A body in the cold air. And a ledger of numbers someone is willing to kill to bury. Detective Alma Rivera has spent fifteen years learning to read what people leave behind, the lie inside a balance sheet, the silence inside a boardroom, the broken glass that tells the truth when no one else will. But the death at Pinnacle Tower doesn't add up. The victim had enemies in every office from Wall Street to the Senate, and the man who ordered the fall may already be counting his next fortune. As Rivera follows the evidence from the crime scene to the corner office of power broker Marcus Webb, she is pulled into a tangle of corporate fraud, political corruption, and old money that has never once been caught. With her partner Evan Pryce and forensic accountant Greta racing to decode the numbers that name them all, she must outmaneuver fixer Joe Mancini, sort the loyalties of insiders Walter Chen, Patricia Vance, Lena Holloway, and Lila Marsh, and confront the single man whose reach extends into the Senate itself, Senator Roy Donnelly. Every number tells a story. Every lie has a price. And in the cold arithmetic of greed, someone has already decided how much a life is worth. Rivera has forty-eight hours to find the answer, before the next number counted is hers.