The last streetlight on South Halsted flickered twice, then steadied, casting a yellow wedge across the aluminum door of Unit 17.
Aldric Venn stood at the edge of that wedge and listened.
Somewhere south, a freight train scraped against its own length. Closer, the tick of cooling metal from the unit beside his. The Pilsen air carried cumin and diesel from the taqueria two blocks over, a smell that belonged to mornings, not to whatever hour this was. He checked his watch. Eleven forty-seven. Late enough. Early enough. The window he had calculated.
He pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves. The blue film caught the streetlight as his fingers unrolled the cuffs. In his left hand, a slim leather case. In his right, nothing.
The lock on Unit 17 was a disc tumbler, residential grade. Aldric had learned the trick of these in another life, when he was still writing under a byline and still believed the press could set things straight. That belief had cost a man seven years. Aldric carried the weight of those years in the muscles of his jaw, in the way he held his shoulders, in the silence he kept when other men filled rooms with talk.
The pick slid in. He worked the pins by feel, not sight, his breathing shallow and deliberate. One pin. Two. Three. The fourth resisted. He withdrew the pick a quarter inch, adjusted the tension, tried again. Something gave inside the cylinder with a soft click that sounded, in that empty lot, like a fist hitting a kitchen table.
The padlock dropped into his palm. He stood there a moment, the cold brass against his glove, and let his eyes travel up the corrugated door. Rust bled from the seams. A sticker from a moving company, half peeled, showed a cartoon truck and a phone number that no longer connected.
He rolled the door up.
The sound was enormous in the stillness. Metal on metal, the shriek of a track that had not been oiled in years. He paused with the door half raised, his body folded beneath it, and waited for any answering noise from the neighboring units. None came. He raised it the rest of the way and stepped inside.
The smell hit him before his eyes adjusted. Paper, old and dry. Cardboard going soft in places, going brittle in others. Something sharper underneath, ammonia or the ghost of cleaning fluid. And beneath all of it, the particular must of a space that had been shut up too long.
He clicked on his penlight. The beam was narrow, deliberate, the kind of light a man uses when he does not want to be seen using it.
Twelve boxes. He counted them twice.
They were arranged in a precise grid against the back wall, three rows of four, each box a uniform tan, each labeled in the same blocky handwriting. The labels faced outward like the spines of books on a shelf. He crouched and read them.
ASHWORTH DEVELOPMENT GROUP. NORTH LAWNDALE. ASHWORTH DEVELOPMENT GROUP. EAST GARFIELD PARK. ASHWORTH DEVELOPMENT GROUP. WEST ENGLEWOOD. ASHWORTH DEVELOPMENT GROUP. AUSTIN. ASHWORTH DEVELOPMENT GROUP. HUMBOLDT PARK. ASHWORTH DEVELOPMENT GROUP. LITTLE VILLAGE.
Six neighborhoods. Six boxes for each. Twelve total.
Aldric sat back on his heels and did not move for a long time. The penlight trembled in his hand. He steadied it by gripping tighter, the nitrile protesting against his knuckles.
He knew the name. Ashworth Development Group had been a fixture in Chicago permitting notices for the better part of a decade. Their projects moved through the city council with a smoothness that had drawn Aldric's attention two months ago, when a source at the Department of Buildings had whispered a number. Two hundred and fourteen properties acquired in eighteen months. Two hundred and fourteen in neighborhoods where the average homeowner had held for thirty years and longer.
He had filed a public records request. He had been denied. He had filed another. Denied. He had paid a woman in the Cook County Recorder's office two hundred dollars in cash for a single printout, and what she had given him had pointed him here, to a storage unit rented to a name that did not match any officer of Ashworth Development Group. A name that belonged to a woman who had died in 2019.
He reached for the first box. The cardboard was softer than he expected. He lifted the flaps and the smell of paper intensified, the dry papery smell of documents left to their own devices.
Inside, hanging files. He pulled one out and tilted the penlight.
The first page was a deed transfer. 1834 South Harding Avenue. North Lawndale. The seller was a woman named Consuela M. Vega. The buyer was a numbered LLC. The sale price was forty-seven thousand dollars.
Aldric set the file down and pulled another. Same LLC, different address. 2102 South Christiana Avenue. Sale price: forty-one thousand. He pulled another. Another. Another. Each transaction clean, each signature notarized, each price far below market for a parcel that, by the city's own assessor, was worth four times that.
He put the file back. He lifted another folder from the same box. This one was thicker. Inside was a stack of court filings. A complaint for ejectment. A default judgment. A writ of possession. The defendant in the case had been represented by an attorney whose name Aldric recognized from a different file, a different story, a different decade. The attorney had not filed an answer. The defendant had lost the house in seventy-two hours.
Aldric closed the box.
His throat was tight. His hands were steady, but his throat was not.
He thought of the man who had lost seven years because Aldric had believed a source who had lied. He thought of the man's face when the conviction was vacated, the way his eyes had moved across the room as if searching for someone to blame. Aldric had been in that courtroom. He had stood in the back and watched, and the man had not seen him, and Aldric had been grateful for that. He had been grateful, and he had hated himself for being grateful, and he had carried both of those things into the work he did now. The quiet work. The work that did not involve bylines.
He opened the second box. East Garfield Park. The first deed he pulled was for a property on West Madison Street. The seller had been dead for six years at the time of the sale.
Aldric sat down on the concrete floor of the unit and did not stand again for several minutes. The cold worked through the denim of his jeans. He let it.
The penlight made a small circle on the cardboard in his lap. The train in the south scraped against its own length and was gone. Somewhere a dog barked twice and stopped. A car turned onto the alley a block over, its headlights sweeping across the far wall of the storage facility, and then it was gone too.
He pulled out his phone. Three bars. He composed a text to Mateo Frias and stopped with his thumb over the send button.
There was no clean way to put it. Mateo would want the clean version. Mateo always wanted the clean version. Aldric had never been able to give him one.
He put the phone away.
The boxes waited. He went back to the first one and began to work through it methodically, the way he had worked through evidence lockers as a younger man, the way he had taught himself to work through them after the trial. Take it in order. Do not skip ahead. Do not assume. Let the pattern speak for itself.
Box one. North Lawndale. Twenty-three files. Twenty-three properties. Of those, seventeen had been sold by owners who, according to the death certificates he found stapled to the inside of the folder covers, had been deceased at the time of the transaction. Four had been sold by owners who were, according to the medical records in the same folders, patients in long-term care facilities. Two had been sold by owners who had signed under duress, the notarization pages annotated in a small hand that Aldric could not yet place. S signed in presence of J.R., did not appear to read document.
Box two. East Garfield Park. Twenty-seven files. The pattern held. The LLCs rotated, a different numbered entity for almost every transaction, but the notary stamps were identical. The same notary had signed for all of them. A woman named Gloria E. Something. He wrote her name down on the back of an envelope he found in his coat pocket.
He worked through the third box. West Englewood. Eighteen files. He stopped counting individual irregularities.
He worked through the third box. West Englewood. Eighteen files. He stopped counting individual irregularities.
The pattern had become its own kind of evidence, more damning in its repetition than any single forged signature could have been. Every file told the same story. A property owner, vulnerable through age or infirmity or absence. A buyer represented by an LLC with a name that meant nothing, a P.O. box in a strip mall on the southwest side, a registered agent listed at the same address as fifty other shell companies. A sale price that came in just under the threshold that would have triggered additional scrutiny from the county recorder. A notary stamp, always the same notary, always Gloria E. Something, her signature a flowing cursive that Aldric had begun to recognize the way he recognized his own handwriting in old case notes.
He worked until the overhead lights in the storage unit began to flicker, the way fluorescent tubes flicker when the building's wiring has been asked to carry more than it was designed to carry. The flicker came in waves. Three rapid pulses, a pause, three more. Aldric had seen the same pattern in the morgue refrigerator units at the Cook County Medical Examiner's office, back when he had still been a journalist with the credentials to walk into places like that. The lights flickered, and the back of his neck prickled, and he reminded himself that the storage unit was a legal rental paid up through the end of the month.
He moved to the fourth box. Back of the unit, lower shelf, tucked behind a plastic bin labeled XMAS in black Sharpie. The box was heavier than the others. Heavier, and the cardboard had a different quality, stiffer, the kind used for archival storage. When he opened it, he understood why.
Bank records. Real bank records. Not the photocopied transaction logs from the property files, but actual statements pulled from actual accounts, the kind of thing that could not have been assembled without someone on the inside. He lifted the first stack. First National. An account in the name of Halsey Property Holdings LLC. He had seen Halsey before. The LLC had purchased four of the homes in the second box, all of them in East Garfield Park, all of them from owners who had been in long-term care at the time of sale.
He set the statement aside and moved to the second. Third box on the shelf. A different bank. A different LLC. Same pattern of deposits and withdrawals, a rhythm of activity that pulsed with the regularity of a heartbeat.
The third folder in the box was different. He knew it before he opened it. The folder was manila, but newer than the others, the tab still crisp, the edges sharp. Someone had put this in the box more recently than the rest of the materials. Someone had wanted it found, but not too quickly.
He opened it.
A wire transfer receipt. The header read Coastal Trust, a bank Aldric did not recognize, with branches listed in Wilmington, Delaware, and Geneva, Switzerland. The transfer amount was ,000,000. The recipient was not listed by name. The recipient was listed as a routing number and an account number, and beneath the account number, in a small box marked Reference, a single line of text.
J.R. - 2021 Q4 retainer.
Aldric's hand went still on the folder.
He set the folder down on top of the plastic bin and pulled his own phone from his coat pocket. The screen was at thirty-one percent. He had not thought to bring a portable charger, and the storage unit had no outlets within reach of where he was working. He opened the camera app. The receipt was photographed. He checked the image. The text was legible. He photographed the header again, and then the reference line, and then the amount, each time making sure the frame included a corner of the folder so that the chain of custody would be visible later, if later ever came.
He opened the notes app. He typed the current date and time, and beneath it he typed a description of what he had just photographed, and beneath that he typed the words image saved to device. He locked the phone and set it face down on the bin.
He went back to the folder.
The wire transfer receipt sat on top of a small stack of papers. He lifted it carefully, by the edges, the way he had been trained to lift documents in the newspaper's evidence room when he was a young man and the work still felt clean. Beneath the receipt was a printout of an account summary, two pages, both stamped with the Coastal Trust logo and the date of the transfer. The summary showed the originating account, an entity called Linden Real Estate Partners, and it showed the recipient account, the one designated only by the routing and account numbers from the receipt.
The recipient account was held at First Chicago Trust, a community bank on the south side that Aldric had driven past a hundred times without ever thinking about it. The account holder was listed as J.R. Holdings, with a mailing address at a UPS Store in the Loop.
J.R.
He thought about the notations he had seen in the property files. S signed in presence of J.R., did not appear to read document. He had assumed J.R. was an initial. He had not allowed himself to assume it was anything else.
He photographed the account summary. Two pages. He checked the images. The text was legible. He typed the date and time into the notes app again, and a description, and the words image saved to device.
He sat back on his heels. The concrete floor of the storage unit was cold through the knees of his trousers. He could smell the cardboard, and beneath it the faint chemical tang of the plastic bins, and beneath that something older, dust and the residue of decades of other people's belongings moved in and out of this space. He could hear the building settle. He could hear, very faintly, traffic on Halsted.
He looked at the reference line on the wire transfer receipt again. J.R. - 2021 Q4 retainer. The language was specific. Retainer was not the word an honest person used to describe a payment. Retainer was the word used in legal contexts, or in the kind of ongoing arrangements that existed between people who had agreed to look the other way in exchange for regular compensation.
,000,000. A judge. A Cook County judge, if his instinct was right, and his instinct had been right often enough over the years that he had stopped doubting it when it spoke this clearly. A circuit court judge, perhaps, or a chancery judge, someone who had the authority to sign off on the kind of orders that would make the fraudulent transfers unchallengeable in court. Someone who could ensure that the probate cases moved through the system without the kind of scrutiny that would have surfaced the forged signatures and the notarized documents signed by people who had been dead for years.
He thought about the cases he had worked as a journalist. The man who had been wrongfully convicted. The corrupt official whose exposure had led to the conviction. Aldric had been right about the corruption. He had been wrong about the man. The man had not been guilty of the crime Aldric had accused him of, but he had been guilty of other things, and the prosecution had found those other things once they started looking, and the man had gone to prison anyway, for the right reasons through the wrong door. Aldric had carried that weight for fifteen years. He had carried it through the end of his marriage and the end of his career at the paper and the long, quiet years that had followed, years in which he had taken on the kind of work that did not require him to be right about anything more consequential than whether a subject was home on a Tuesday afternoon.
He had not carried the weight into this storage unit. He had carried something else. He had carried the question of what had happened to Caelan Brise, Mateo's cousin, the young man who had disappeared after beginning to ask the same questions Aldric was now asking, the same questions about the same properties in the same neighborhoods. The question had been a weight of its own, lighter than the one he carried from the trial but sharper, and it had been the sharper weight that had driven him to the storage unit on a Wednesday morning with a rented key and a borrowed phone and the back-door access that Delphine Solano had arranged through a contact of hers whose name Aldric did not know and did not want to know.
He looked at the wire transfer receipt one more time. He thought about photographing it again, from a different angle, in case the first photograph had been blurred or the lighting had shifted. He decided against it. The images he had were good enough. The lighting had held. The text was legible.
He lifted the folder and the two account summary pages and carried them to the small folding table he had set up near the front of the unit. He took a manila envelope from his coat pocket, the one with Gloria E. Something's name written on the back, and he slid the documents into it. He sealed the envelope. He wrote the date and the time and the words Wire transfer materials, J.R. - 2021 Q4 retainer on the front, in the same blocky print he had used for the notes on the back.
He put the envelope into the inside pocket of his coat.
He stood. His knees ached. The fluorescent lights flickered again, three rapid pulses, a pause, three more. He listened to the building settle. He listened to the traffic on Halsted.
He had what he had come for. He had more than he had come for. The wire transfer receipt was the kind of evidence that did not require interpretation, the kind of evidence that could be handed to a prosecutor and understood without explanation, the kind of evidence that could end careers and send people to prison if it was real and if it was admissible and if the people who handled it were willing to do their jobs.
He did not yet know if the receipt was real. He did not yet know who J.R. was. He did not yet know which judge, or whether the judge was still on the bench, or whether the judge had ever known that the money had been wired through a bank in Geneva on its way to a UPS Store in the Loop.
He knew that Caelan Brise had been asking the same questions. He knew that Caelan was gone. He knew that the storage unit contained the answer to at least some of those questions, and that the answer was heavy, and that carrying it out of the building would be the most dangerous part of the work he had come here to do.
He picked up the box with the bank records. He set it back on the shelf where he had found it. He straightened the plastic bin labeled XMAS in front of it. He folded the table. He carried the table to the back of the unit and leaned it against the wall.
He turned off the overhead lights. The unit went dark except for the thin line of daylight that came in under the door. He stood in the dark for a moment and listened. The building was quiet. The traffic on Halsted was a low, constant murmur that he had stopped hearing when he was working and now heard again, the way a person hears a sound that has been there all along.
He unlocked the door. He stepped out into the corridor. He pulled the door shut behind him and turned the lock and put the key back into his coat pocket, on the outside this time, where he could reach it without fumbling.
He walked toward the freight elevator at the end of the corridor. His footsteps echoed on the concrete. The envelope was a weight against his ribs, inside the coat, over the heart.
He pressed the button. The elevator groaned somewhere above him. He waited.
The elevator groaned somewhere above him, a mechanical complaint that echoed down the shaft and settled into the concrete corridor like a held breath. Lucien Croft stood with his hands in his coat pockets, the right hand wrapped around the key, the left hand resting against the envelope that pressed against his ribs. The fluorescent light above him buzzed at a frequency he had learned to ignore years ago, in the basement archives of the Tribune, where the same fixtures had hummed above microfilm readers and the dust had tasted like old paper and neglect.
He pressed the button a second time. Patience was a discipline he had learned late, in his forties, after the wrongful conviction and the long years of trying to find work in a profession that had decided he was radioactive. He had been patient with the storage unit. He had been patient with the bank records, the photographs, the plastic bins. He could be patient with an elevator.
A door opened at the end of the corridor.
Not the freight elevator. The stairwell door, the one marked EXIT, the one that should have been alarmed but wasn't because the building was old and the management company cut corners on everything that didn't generate rent.
Footsteps. Soft-soled shoes on concrete. The gait was young, quick, the stride of someone who moved through the world as though the world owed them momentum.
Lucien turned his head a quarter inch. That was all he allowed himself. The rest of his body stayed where it was, hands in pockets, posture unthreatening, the posture of a man who had been caught doing nothing and knew that the worst thing to do when caught doing nothing was to look like he was doing something.
The footsteps stopped. About twenty feet away. Close enough to talk. Far enough to run.
"Mr. Croft."
The voice was young, male, and carried the faint musicality of Spanish vowels that had been smoothed by years in Chicago classrooms. It was a voice that wanted to be heard. It was a voice that expected to be believed.
Lucien turned to face him. The fluorescent light caught the young man's features and laid them out with clinical honesty: mid-twenties, dark hair cut short on the sides and longer on top in a style that had gone out of fashion two years ago, a jaw that hadn't fully squared off yet, eyes that were doing too much work at once. He was wearing a charcoal peacoat over a burgundy sweater, and the peacoat was expensive in a way that suggested someone else's money or someone else's credit card, and his shoes were the soft-soled kind that joggers wore, the kind that made no sound on concrete.
In his right hand, held low against his thigh with the casualness of long practice or recent instruction, was a pistol. The barrel was threaded. A suppressor had been screwed onto it, black and cylindrical, the diameter of a man's thumb.
Lucien looked at the pistol. He looked at the young man's face. He did not reach for his own weapon, because his own weapon was in his apartment on West Roscoe and because reaching would be the mistake that ended whatever conversation was about to happen.
"Mateo Frias," Lucien said. The name came out of him with the weight of research done late at night in a kitchen that smelled of cold coffee. "Cousin to Caelan Brise. Reported him missing eleven days ago. Hasn't slept more than four hours a night since."
Something moved across the young man's face. The eyes recalibrated. The jaw tightened by a degree.
"You know who I am," Mateo said.
"I know who you're related to."
The pistol did not rise. It stayed where it was, low, angled, the suppressor pointing at a spot on the concrete floor roughly between them. A man who knew how to shoot held a weapon like that when he didn't want to use it yet. A man who didn't know how to shoot held it like that when he had been coached by someone who did.
"Why are you here, Mr. Croft?"
The question had the cadence of something rehearsed. Lucien recognized rehearsal. He had spent a career listening to sources rehearse their lies, and he had learned that the most dangerous liars were the ones who had practiced in front of mirrors.
"I was looking at a storage unit," Lucien said. "Number 317. Belonged to a man named Harlan Groth. You won't find the name in any of the databases that matter. You will find it in a database that doesn't, the kind that lives in a drawer in Skokie and gets updated by hand."
Mateo's thumb moved on the grip of the pistol. Not the trigger. The grip. The motion of a man reminding himself that the weapon was there.
"Harlan Groth is dead," Mateo said.
"Yes."
"You knew that when you came here."
"I suspected it. The unit hadn't been opened in nineteen months. The rent is paid by automatic withdrawal from an account that hasn't had a human transaction in the same nineteen months. There's a flag on the account. It says deceased."
"Then why did you come?"
Lucien took his time with the answer. He let the silence sit between them, the way he had learned to let silence sit during interviews, because silence was a tool and most people couldn't bear to let it do its work.
"Because Caelan was here," Lucien said. "Eleven days ago. He rented a floor buffer and a lock cutter from a tool rental place on Cermak and he came here and he opened that unit and he spent four hours inside. And then he drove to a motel on Cicero and he hasn't been seen since."
The young man's face did something complicated. It was the face of a man whose grief was being asked to perform for an audience.
"I know that," Mateo said. "I filed the missing persons report."
"I know you did. I read the report. It was thorough. It was also wrong in three places, but we'll come back to that."
A sound from above. The elevator, descending. The mechanical groan was louder now, closer, the cables doing their work in the shaft.
Mateo looked up at the ceiling. The pistol did not follow his eyes. It stayed where it was, aimed at the floor, and that discipline told Lucien that the young man had practiced this, or had been walked through it, or both.
"My cousin is alive," Mateo said. He said it the way a person says a thing they have said to themselves in the dark, over and over, until the words have lost their meaning and become a kind of weather.
"I hope so," Lucien said. "I came here to find out."
"What did you find?"
The question came out harder than the young man had intended. Lucien could hear the overreach in it, the way the consonants landed with too much weight. Mateo Frias was a young man who overthought his sentences and then delivered them before he had finished thinking. That was dangerous in a man holding a pistol with a threaded barrel.
Lucien decided, in the time it took to draw a breath, that he was going to tell the truth. It was a decision he had made before, in other corridors, with other weapons pointed at other floors. He had learned that the truth, offered plainly, was the only currency that survived the next ten minutes.
"I found bank records," Lucien said. "Wire transfers through a bank in Geneva. Photographs of a man I cannot identify. And an envelope."
"What's in the envelope?"
"Answers. Not all of them. Enough of them to make me dangerous to the people who have your cousin."
The elevator arrived. The doors did not open. The mechanism settled somewhere above them with a metallic sigh, and the corridor went quiet again, and the quiet was the kind that made small sounds louder: the hum of the fluorescent, the distant murmur of traffic on Halsted, the soft click of Mateo's thumb against the grip of the pistol.
"Give me the envelope," Mateo said.
"No."
"I have a gun."
"I noticed."
"I'm not joking."
"I didn't think you were."
Mateo took a step forward. The distance between them closed to fifteen feet. The pistol rose an inch, maybe two, the barrel no longer pointed at the floor but at a spot somewhere around Lucien's midsection. The young man's hand was shaking. Not much. Enough to be visible in the fluorescent light, a tremor that ran from the wrist into the forearm and stopped at the elbow, where discipline or fear took over.
"I will shoot you," Mateo said, and the sentence came out in the voice of a man who had never shot anyone and was trying to imagine what it would feel like, and was failing.
"Yes," Lucien said. "You might."
The young man's face twitched. The overthinking was audible now, the way it showed up in the pauses between words, in the breath that came too fast, in the way his eyes kept moving from Lucien's face to the corridor behind him to the ceiling to the pistol and back again.
"I'm trying to find him," Mateo said. "I've been trying for eleven days. I filed the report. I called the hospitals. I walked the motel parking lot at three in the morning. I haven't slept. I have not slept, Mr. Croft, and every hour I don't sleep is an hour that something is happening to him that I can't stop, and you walk in here with an envelope that has answers and you tell me no."
Lucien let the silence do its work again. He let the young man's grief fill the corridor, and he let it run out of breath, and he watched the tremor in the hand and the way the pistol dipped and rose and dipped again.
"Your cousin came here looking for the same thing I'm looking for," Lucien said. "He found it. He took something. He drove to the motel on Cicero. And then he made a phone call, one phone call, to a number in Geneva, and the call lasted forty-three seconds, and then his phone went dark."
Mateo's lips parted. The pistol steadied, or tried to.
"You don't know that," he said.
"I have the phone records. They're in the envelope."
"Then give me the envelope."
"The people who have your cousin know that someone has been asking questions. They will know, within the hour, that someone has been in this unit. If you walk out of this building with that envelope, they will come for you. Not for me. For you. Because you are easier to find, and because you are Caelan's family, and because family is the lever they will use to make him cooperate."
The young man stared at him. The tremor in his hand had not stopped.
"I don't care," Mateo said. "I don't care what they do to me. Give me the envelope."
Lucien reached into his coat. Slowly. With the deliberation of a man who understood that the next three seconds were the only seconds that mattered. He took out the envelope. He held it up so the fluorescent light caught the surface, the plain manila, the weight of it.
He held it out.
Mateo reached for it.
Lucien pulled it back an inch.
"If you take this," Lucien said, "you take it understanding that I am going to follow you. I am going to follow you because your cousin came to me, six months ago, and he paid me a retainer, and I spent that retainer learning the shape of this thing, and I owe him the work I was hired to do. If you take this envelope, you take me with it."
The young man's eyes searched his face. Lucien let them search. He had spent a career being searched by eyes that wanted to find the lie, and he had learned that the only way to survive the search was to have nothing to hide.
Mateo took the envelope.
His hand was still shaking. The pistol stayed where it was, the suppressor now pointed at the ceiling, the muzzle tracing an unsteady arc through the stale air of the corridor.
"What's your number?" Mateo said.
Lucien told him.
Mateo repeated it back, correctly, and Lucien understood that the young man had a memory built for the recitation of important things, the kind of memory that grief and sleeplessness had honed to a fine edge.
The elevator doors opened behind them. The car was empty. The light inside was yellow and old, and the floor was scuffed with the evidence of a thousand deliveries.
Mateo walked past Lucien toward the elevator. The pistol disappeared into the peacoat as he moved, tucked into a waistband that was not designed for it, the suppressor pressing against the burgundy sweater. He stepped into the car. He turned.
"Eleven days," he said. "If you don't find him in eleven more, I'm going to find you instead."
The doors closed.
Lucien stood in the corridor and listened to the elevator ascend. The cables groaned. The mechanism settled into its work. Somewhere above him, the car would rise to the first floor, and the doors would open, and a young man with a stolen envelope and a pistol he did not know how to use would step out into a building where the management company cut corners, and the air would smell of exhaust and old concrete, and the morning would go on.
Lucien pressed the button. The elevator groaned above him, and then began its descent, and he waited.