"Get some sleep," he said.
"You too."
I picked up the envelope from the table, the pages, the photograph. I would put them somewhere safe tonight. Somewhere that was hers.
At the doorway to the corridor I stopped.
"Dominic."
He looked up.
"Thank you," I said. "For tonight. For, all of it."
He was quiet for a moment in the way that meant he was deciding between things. Then: "Don't thank me yet. We haven't finished."
I almost smiled. "No. We haven't."
I went to bed with the envelope under my pillow and the city outside doing what it always did, and for the first time in seven weeks I fell asleep before I could finish counting the things I still didn't know.
* * *
Chapter 23: Twenty-Four Hours
The federal contact arrived at two in the afternoon.
Her name was Agent Diane Tran, no relation to Édouard, she said, when I clocked the name and she clocked me clocking it, which established immediately that they were both paying attention and that the conversation could be efficient. She was forty, compact, with the specific economy of movement that came from years of operating in rooms where economy mattered. She sat at the dining room table with a laptop and a recorder and looked at the drive for a long moment before she touched it.
"How long have you known about this building?" she said to Dominic.
"Since last night." He said it evenly. "I acquired the property in 2009 as part of a distressed portfolio. I had no knowledge of its prior ownership chain until Ms. Callahan identified the connection through the acquisition records."
Tran looked at me. "Walk me through the analysis."
I walked her through it. The fourth layer gap, the Tchoupitoulas property, the chain to Fosse's shell company, the timing relative to Reyes's disappearance. I was precise and I was thorough and I watched Tran's expression the entire time, not for approval, but because the way someone listens tells you what they already know and what they're learning.
Tran already knew about Reyes. She already knew about Fosse. The shell company chain was new to her, and the building was new to her, and when I mentioned the padlock combination in Dominic's father's files, something shifted in Tran's attention that was very close to the expression Avery associated with a hypothesis confirmed.
"The sworn testimony," Tran said, when I finished. "Reyes's document."
"In the envelope." I slid it across the table.
Tran opened it carefully. Read it without expression, or rather, with the controlled expression of someone who had trained the reaction out and was now working from a baseline that only deviated when something was truly unexpected. Halfway through the pages, something deviated.
"He names four witnesses," Tran said.
"Yes."
"Two of them are dead. One relocated, identity changed in 2002." She looked up. "The fourth is alive. I know where she is."
I held that. "She can corroborate."
"She can do considerably more than corroborate." Tran put the pages down. "Ms. Callahan, I'm going to ask you something directly, and I want a direct answer."
"All right."
"Your mother's name is in these files as a source. Your father was investigating the same network when he disappeared. You entered this household seven weeks ago under the auspices of a financial arrangement." She paused. "How much of what you've done in this apartment was directed toward finding this documentation?"
I looked at her steadily. "None of it. I came here because my father owed a debt. I found the connection to my mother's name six days ago. Everything that happened before that was, something else."