"Something else," Tran repeated.
"The acquisition analysis was legitimate work. The rest was, personal."
Tran looked at me for a moment. Then at Dominic. Then back at the drive.
"All right," she said. "I'm going to need both of you available for the next seventy-two hours. Don't go anywhere you can't be reached. Don't discuss this with anyone outside this room. And Ms. Callahan..." She paused. "I'm sorry about your mother."
She said it the way people said things they meant, without padding.
"Thank you," I said.
* * *
Tran left at four-fifteen with the drive, the sworn testimony, and my analysis as a supplementary document. She took the photograph too, as evidence, she said, of the relationship between Reyes and his source. Avery had held the photograph for a moment before handing it over.
I would get it back. Tran had said so.
I believed her.
* * *
The apartment was quiet after Tran left. Dominic made calls, I could hear him in the office, his voice low and steady, the specific register of someone managing multiple moving pieces simultaneously. I sat at the dining room table with my laptop and did not work. I was thinking instead about the clock that had started the moment Tran walked out the door, the twenty-four hours, roughly, that Dominic had estimated before Salas's network registered a shift.
I thought about what Salas would do with that information.
I thought about what I would do, in his position, with a documented operation about to collapse and a leverage point that was rapidly becoming useless.
I thought: He'll try to use what he has before it expires.
I thought: What does he still have.
My father.
Not his location, no one had that, but the pressure of it. The fact of the disappearance, the implication that Salas knew where Daniel Callahan was and what had happened to him, the possibility of that information as something to trade.
He would offer to trade.
He would frame it as negotiation and it would be a last attempt to make my useful before I became irrelevant to him.
I was considering that when my phone rang.
Unknown number.
I looked at it for one ring. Two.
Then I picked up.
* * *
"Ms. Callahan." Salas's voice was the same as at the restaurant, warm, controlled, with the formality that had started in another city. "I hope I'm not disturbing you."
"Not at all," I said.
I stood up and walked to the doorway of the office. Dominic was on the phone, I caught his eye and held up one finger and then pointed at me own phone. He read it immediately. I watched him end his call.
"I find myself in a position," Salas said, "where a conversation might be mutually beneficial. I wonder if you'd be willing to meet."
"When?"