“Why?”
“Because he slept through the night.”
The Brookline house had done something to Cabot that the Beacon Hill house didn’t. He’d loosened the moment he walked in and never tightened back up. He’d come down to dinner the first night in pressed trousers and a cable-knit.
He looked at the dining-room ceiling for a count of ten before he sat. He said he recognized the molding.
“Cabot feels at home. He grew up in places like this,” I said. “He’s getting comfortable.”
“I hope not too comfortable.”
Cabot descended the stairs on the balls of his feet, rolling forward one tread at a time. He reached the kitchen doorway and stopped.
He wore a charcoal cable-knit and pressed grey trousers. A hardcover book rested against his hip, with one finger marking his place.
“Good morning, men.”
“Morning, Cabot,” I said.
Cabot crossed to the counter, opened the right cabinet, pulled down a mug, and poured. “This was a stable hand’s house,” he said, nodding at the window over the sink. “Before they put the loft in. You can still see the stall lines in the front room floor if you know where to look. Two stalls, then a workspace, and then the tack room, where you’re sleeping.”
He drank.
“I’ll stop. It’s a habit.”
“Don’t stop on my account,” Farrow said.
“It’s interesting, Cabot,” I said.
“It’s interesting to about forty people in greater Boston, and three of them are already in this house.”
Wiley appeared next. He had a legal pad in one hand and his glasses in the other. He’d slept in the same shirt he’d worked in. The circles under his eyes were dark, almost black.
“Found something,” he said.
I set my mug in the sink. “What?”
“Upstairs. I need to lay it out on the desk.”
“Farrow stays down.”
I followed Wiley to the second-floor office. It had been a sewing room before someone added a long oak desk under the dormer. Wiley had two laptops open, angled outward. A third layclosed by his elbow. He’d printed six or eight pages and fanned them across the right edge of the desk.
I took the long side of the desk where I had a sightline through the dormer to the drive.
“Talk,” I said.
“Three documents. The printout is a sequence of intermediary emails between two of the Onyx Bay shell entities and a third party I haven’t identified yet, from late September through mid-October this year. The left screen is a private donor letter from May, redacted by the recipient’s counsel, and the right is an internal strategy memo from a security firm called Verstand Group, dated last August.”
“And you got them how?”
“The donor letter came through a paralegal at a firm in Hartford who owed me a favor from 2019. Already burned. The Verstand memo came out of a leak I’ve been sitting on for six weeks because I couldn’t authenticate it. I can authenticate it now. The intermediary emails came from Patterson three weeks ago. I just hadn’t put them next to anything else.”
He let us read.
I read enough to see what he was showing us. All three used words in the same way. The sentence construction was nearly identical.
“Same writer,” I said.