* * *
Inside: a flash drive, in a sealed plastic bag. Two USB connectors, one standard, one the older format. Wrapped in cloth to prevent movement. Beneath it: a manila envelope, sealed, the adhesive long since dried and resealed with tape. And beneath that: a single photograph, face down.
I picked up the photograph last.
Turned it over.
My mother was young in it, younger than I had any photograph of her, mid-twenties maybe, laughing at something outside the frame. I was sitting at a table Avery didn't recognize, in a room I didn't recognize, and next to my was a man Avery had never seen but who had the specific look of someone who worked with information for a living: a man in his thirties, careful eyes, a posture that didn't quite relax even when it was trying to.
On the back of the photograph, in my mother's handwriting, I knew the handwriting from a single birthday card that had survived, the only thing I had, two words:
Thomas. 1999.
* * *
I was aware of Dominic behind me. I was aware of the room and the darkness and the sound of the street outside and the weight of the flashlight in my hand.
I was also, underneath all of that, completely still.
1999. Two years before my mother died. My mother had known Thomas Reyes. Had known him well enough for a casual photograph, well enough to write his name on the back the way you wrote the name of a friend, not a subject.
I had not been a peripheral witness.
I had been something else entirely.
* * *
The envelope contained eleven pages. I read them standing at the workbench, Dominic beside my holding the flashlight steady without being asked, while the city outside continued its indifferent nighttime business.
The pages were Reyes's handwriting, dense, precise, dated across a span from 1998 to 2001. They were not a report. They were notes, the personal organizational system of someone who thought better by externalizing, who kept a separate record from the official documentation because official documentation was subject to interference.
I read.
My mother had come to Reyes in 1998. Not the other way around. She had come to him with information about Ramón Salas, specific, operational information about the movement of money through a series of businesses in the south corridor, businesses that Margaret Callahan had worked for, briefly, in 1996 and 1997. I had kept records. I had kept them because, Reyes wrote, I understood before I did what I was looking at, andI was methodical in the way of someone who doesn't trust that anyone else will do it correctly.
She had been feeding Reyes information for three years.
She had been, in every meaningful sense, an informant, not a peripheral witness, not an accidental observer, but a person who had made a deliberate choice to document something dangerous and give it to someone who could use it.
In January 2001, Ramón Salas's people had identified me.
Reyes had tried to accelerate the federal case. The case wasn't ready. He had asked for protection for Margaret, and the request had been routed through Gerald Fosse, who had been the liaison between the task force and the protection infrastructure, and who had, Reyes wrote with a bluntness that read like fury in retrospect, failed to act on it. I cannot determine whether this was negligence or intent. I intend to find out.
Margaret Callahan died in March 2001.
Fosse resigned in September.
The federal case collapsed.
Reyes had spent the next eight years rebuilding what had been lost, starting over, building a documentation structure so complete that it couldn't be routed through anyone who could interfere with it. He had given the building to Fosse's shell company as bait, a test to see if the man still had operational connections to Salas. The transfer had confirmed it.
The last entry was dated July 2009. Three weeks before he disappeared.
If this is found by anyone other than D.C., I ask only that they finish it.
D.C.
I looked at the initials for a moment.