I went upstairs.
The city turned gold outside the windows, and New Orleans did what New Orleans did, and neither of them said anything else about it that night.
* * *
But I thought about it.
I thought about it the way I thought about things that mattered more than I had budgeted for -- not constantly, but persistently, like a frequency that kept appearing in the background of whatever else I was doing. I thought: he sees most things. I thought: he couldn't have helped it.
I thought about the kiss in the garden, and the word all right, and the way he had looked at me in the dark with the party continuing behind them.
I thought: I couldn't have helped it either.
I acknowledged it, finally, a folder I had been building for weeks without naming it.
I named it now.
I thought about it for a while longer.
I acknowledged it — finally — the folder I had been building for weeks without naming it. I named it now. It didn't change what I had to do. But it changed what doing it meant.
Chapter 20: The Drive
I found it in the acquisition report.
Not the drive itself, the shadow of it. The shape of a thing that had been moved carefully and then not carefully enough, the way all financial concealment eventually betrayed itself: not in what was there but in the specific geometry of what wasn't.
It was a Thursday morning, eleven days after the lunch with Salas. I had been working on the fourth layer for a week, mapping backward from the gap I'd identified, following the logic of the structure rather than the documented trail. The person who had built this had been meticulous. But meticulous people made a particular kind of mistake, they were so careful about the things they knew mattered that they left the things they hadn't anticipated unguarded.
What I hadn't anticipated finding was a property.
Specifically: a commercial building on Tchoupitoulas Street, currently listed as a warehouse storage facility, which had been acquired by a Moreau Holdings subsidiary in 2009. The acquisition itself was unremarkable, part of a series of post-Katrina purchases when distressed properties were available and the price was rational. What was remarkable was the chain of ownership in the eighteen months before the acquisition.
I built the chain three times to make sure.
The building had been transferred in January 2009, six months before Reyes disappeared, from a shell company whoseregistered agent was a name I had to look up twice before I believed it: Gerald Fosse.
The same Lieutenant Gerald Fosse who had signed my mother's death report.
* * *
I sat very still for approximately ninety seconds.
Then I got up, walked to the kitchen, filled a glass of water, drank half of it, put it down, and walked back to the desk.
The building had been transferred from Fosse's shell company to another shell company in March 2009. Then again in June 2009, six weeks before Reyes disappeared. Then acquired by Moreau Holdings in October 2009.
I looked at the acquisition date.
October 2009.
Reyes had disappeared in August.
Somewhere between the moment Reyes vanished and the moment the building entered the Moreau portfolio, there were two months of ownership by a company that had since been dissolved without a traceable successor. Two months in which the building had been owned by no one, administratively speaking, which was structurally impossible and practically common, the kind of gap that appeared when someone needed time to move something before closing the transaction.
I took out a piece of paper. Wrote down the address.
Folded it.