"So Salas removed the liability." I looked at what I'd written. "And structured it to look like the Moreaus had done it. Because if there was a killing connected to Marisol's relationship with a Moreau-adjacent target..."
"It pointed directly at the Moreaus as the responsible party." She finished it with me. "My grandmother spent years trying to tell people this. No one listened. There was no evidence pointing anywhere except at the Moreaus, and the Moreaus were the easier story."
I set the pen down.
Looked at the legal pad. At the clean structure of it, the name, the dates, the chain of events, now bifurcated into two possible readings. The one my grandfather had assembled. The one Adele Baptiste had carried for fifteen years without anyone listening.
The flash drive had seemed, two days ago, like a complete picture. A chain of accountability, clearly documented, ready to be understood.
It was not a complete picture.
The payment record, J. Moreau paying Tureaud, could mean what my grandfather had believed it meant. It could also mean something else entirely. Tureaud had been a known associate of the Moreau organization. He could have been paid for any number of things that had nothing to do with Thomas Reyes. My grandfather had connected the payment to the event because the timing fit and because it was the most available explanation.
But available explanations and accurate explanations were not always the same thing.
I thought about Dominic, on the bench in the garden, saying the only good thing he did was the garden. About the specific quality of honesty in the way he'd said it, not performed, not calculated, just flat and true. A man who did not protect his grandfather's reputation. Who understood that the man had done things worth not protecting.
But not necessarily this thing.
I needed to be precise. I could not afford to be wrong in a situation where being wrong had consequences.
* * *
I stayed in the library another hour after Cleo left, turning what she'd told me over and examining it from different angles. Then I opened a browser and searched Victor Salas, not deeply, just the surface layer. What was publicly available. Corporate registrations in Texas and Louisiana, a mention in a business journal about port logistics, one photograph in the caption of a society page from a Houston charity event.
I looked at the photograph for a long time.
Victor Salas was perhaps fifty. Lean, silver at the temples, wearing a suit that was neither celebrating itself nor apologizing for being there. The particular gray of something chosen to be unremarkable.
I closed the browser.
* * *
The house was lit when I came up the drive, the usual warm presence of its windows in the early dark, the post light on in the garden. Henri opened the front door before I reached it, which meant he'd been watching for me, which meant something had changed in the household's normal pattern.
"Miss Callahan." His voice had the particular careful evenness of someone who had something to communicate without communicating it directly. "Mr. Moreau is in the study. He has a guest."
"Thank you, Henri."
I went to the study because it was the natural route to the stairs, and because I wanted to know, and because I was already fairly certain what I would find.
The door was not fully closed. Through the gap: Dominic's voice, low and controlled, in the register I'd come to recognize as the one he used when the situation required more than ordinary management. And another voice, not Henri's, not a voice I'd heard in this house before.
I pushed the door open far enough to see.
Dominic was behind his desk. The maps were visible on the wall behind him, the marked routes in their different colors of ink. He looked up when the door moved, and something in his face, a fraction of a shift, there and controlled before it registered, told me he had not expected me home yet.
The man across from him turned.
Victor Salas looked at me with the same quality of attention he'd directed at me three times across a dinner table at the Vauclain house, the specific, reading attention of someone conducting an assessment. The same gray suit. The same stillness.
The same man from the Houston charity event photograph.
We looked at each other for a moment.
Then I said, without inflection, "I'm sorry to interrupt," and stepped back and pulled the door to its previous position and walked to the stairs and went up to my room and sat at the desk with my coat still on and my legal pad in my hand.
Nobody you need to worry about, Dominic had said.