I thought: I'm going to finish it.
* * *
The fourth folder was the simplest and the most significant: a single document, twelve pages, signed and notarized, with Reyes's name and the names of four witnesses. A sworn testimony, not formatted for a court filing but for the record, the kind of document that could become a court filing in the hands of someone who knew how to use it.
It named Ramón Salas directly.
It named Gerald Fosse directly.
It named three other members of the operation by name, with specific documented acts attached to each name.
And it documented, in legal language that had clearly been reviewed by a lawyer before signing, the death of Margaret Callahan as an act carried out on the instruction of Ramón Salas, based on a decision made on February 12, 2001.
I read it all the way through.
Then I said: "Who do we give this to?"
Dominic had read it alongside me. He was quiet for a moment, the thinking-forward quiet. "Not local law enforcement. Fosse had connections to the NOPD through the task force. We don't know how deep they ran." He paused. "Federal. Specifically, someone outside the New Orleans field office, someone without a historical relationship with the operation."
"Do you have a contact?"
"Yes." He was already reaching for his phone. "I'm going to wake someone up."
"It's midnight."
"I know." He looked at me steadily. "This has waited seventeen years. It's not waiting until morning."
I nodded.
I watched him make the call, watched him stand at the window, the city behind him, his voice low and precise as he spoke. I caught fragments: documentation is comprehensive. Physical drive, sworn testimony, financial records spanning, and then lower, turned further toward the window, words I couldn't hear.
I picked up my coffee cup and found it empty. I got up and refilled it and stayed standing at the counter.
In the photograph my mother was twenty-five and laughing.
Avery was twenty-six.
I had spent the last seven weeks inside a situation I had entered as an investigator and was now inside as, something else. I had spent six weeks before that believing I had nothing of my mother beyond the eyes and a birthday card with handwriting I had memorized at seventeen.
I have a daughter. That's exactly why I'm not stopping.
I had stopped being angry somewhere in the last hour. I hadn't noticed it happening, anger was a fuel I managed carefully, and usually noticed when it was running low. But I reached for it now and found something else instead: not peace, not resolution, something more structural. Like a load-bearing wall that had been repaired. You didn't feel peace about a repaired wall. You just felt that it could hold things now that it couldn't before.
Dominic came back from the window.
"Tomorrow afternoon," he said. "Someone will come to us." He paused. "It's going to move quickly after that. I want you to understand, once we hand this over, Salas will know within twenty-four hours that something has changed. He has people who monitor that kind of movement."
"I know."
"It could get difficult before it resolves."
"I know." I looked at him. "I'm not leaving."
He held my gaze for a moment. "I know you're not."
I put my cup down.
It was past midnight and the drive was on the table and tomorrow something would begin that would end the thing that had been open since 2001, and I was standing in a kitchen that had started feeling familiar in a way that I hadn't decided yet what to do with, across from a man I had come here to investigate and had instead, slowly, without planning for it, in the accumulated evidence of small deliberate acts, learned to trust.