Put it in my pocket.
* * *
The decision I was sitting with was not whether to tell Dominic. I had already resolved that question in the office ten days ago, I was past the point of strategic information management withhim, and I was honest enough to acknowledge that the passage was not primarily a tactical decision.
The decision was what I was telling him.
Because there were two possibilities, and they were not equivalent:
The first: Reyes had hidden the drive in that building before he disappeared, without Dominic's knowledge, using the ownership gap as cover. In that case, the drive was in a building that now belonged to Dominic, and he didn't know it. Telling him meant giving him the drive. I was prepared to do that. I trusted — and I noted the word, noted the fact that I was using it, that he would use it correctly. To end Salas. To surface what happened in 2001. To close the thing that had been open since before she was in this apartment.
The second: Dominic knew. The acquisition hadn't been accidental. He had purchased that building because someone had told him to, or because he had worked it out the same way she had, or because the drive had been put there with his knowledge and the gap was deliberate, a way to maintain plausible separation while keeping the asset in reach.
If the second was true, then everything I had told him in the office had been evaluated, weighed, and permitted to occur by someone who already knew more than he'd disclosed.
I sat with both possibilities.
I thought about the coffee made without asking. The half second in the ballroom. I don't regret it, in case you needed it said. The voice he'd used when he said sit down, careful with something that might break.
I thought about the fact that I had been in this apartment for seven weeks and that nothing I had found in the acquisition report contradicted what he had told me. She was good at finding contradictions. She had been looking, the way shelooked at everything, because the habit was structural and not a reflection on him specifically.
I had found nothing that contradicted him.
I took a breath.
And went to find him.
* * *
He was in the office. I knocked.
"I need to show you something," I said. "It might be nothing. I don't think it's nothing."
He pushed the laptop back and gave me his full attention, that complete, unpartitioned attention that I had understood weeks ago was how he signaled that something mattered.
I sat across from him and walked him through it. The fourth layer gap. The property on Tchoupitoulas. The ownership chain. Fosse's name. The two-month gap before the Moreau acquisition. She was precise and she was concise and she watched his face the entire time the way she always watched, reading the room.
He was still for the first part. Then something tightened almost imperceptibly at his jaw.
When I finished, he said: "Fosse."
"You know that name."
"He was on the task force in 2001. The federal task force." His voice was flat in the way of someone finding the correct arrangement of a thing they already suspected. "He resigned before the investigation collapsed. We assumed he'd been bought by Ramón Salas, that was the working theory." A pause. "We didn't know he'd been managing assets."
"We," I said.
He held my gaze. "My father and I. Later. After his death, going through his files, I found references to Fosse. But nothing specific. Nothing actionable."
"The building on Tchoupitoulas," I said. "Did you acquire it deliberately? Because of any connection to Reyes?"
"No." The word was immediate and clean. "The 2009 acquisitions were opportunistic. Distressed portfolio, post-Katrina pricing. I didn't know that building had a history." He paused. "I believe you. I want you to know that, I'm not saying it to manage what you think. I genuinely did not know."
I looked at him for a moment.
"I believe you," I said.
He held that. Then: "The drive could still be there."