Chapter 7: What Hargrove Didn't Know
Warren made coffee.
Nobody asked for it, but he made it anyway, and set four cups on the table, and somehow that small ordinary act steadied the room.
Rosalind came back from the window and sat down.
Grace was on the phone with Reyes, speaking in the low, clipped shorthand of people who had worked together long enough to drop the full sentences.
I caught fragments.
*Timeline.
Motion.
Hargrove's filing.
The Edinburgh name.*
I wrapped both hands around the coffee cup and thought.
Adrian was out.
That was Celeste's move — not to save him, but to buy time.
Time for what?
Crane had been stopped at the storage facility.
The files were already in federal hands.
The documents I'd given Reyes were logged and timestamped.
The ledger was in evidence.
What did she think she could still reach?
"The letter," I said aloud.
Warren looked up.
"She knows about the letter," I said.
"That's why someone was in my apartment.
She's not trying to recover the financial documents — those are gone, she knows that.
She's trying to find the letter from Thomas Whitmore.
Because that letter connects her to something older than the fraud.
Something she can't explain away with a good attorney."
"The payment," Rosalind said.
"And what came after it."
Grace ended her call and sat down.
"Reyes says the Edinburgh name is already being run.
Harlan Voss — the official record shows he d*ed in a sailing accident off the coast of Scotland twelve years ago.
Body never recovered."
"Of course it wasn't," I said.
"She's pulling international records.
It'll take time." Grace looked at me.
"The emergency motion Hargrove filed — it was based on a procedural gap in the warrant.
Reyes says it'll be reversed, but it could take twenty-four to forty-eight hours."
"So Adrian has a day," I said.
"Possibly two."
"What will he do with it?"
Nobody answered, because we all knew.
He would come for me.
Not personally — Adrian had never done anything personally that he could delegate.
He would send someone.
He would make a call.
He would use the forty-eight hours to try to collapse the case from the outside, to find the one thread he could pull.
And the only thread left that he might still reach was the letter.
"We need to go to my apartment," I said.
"Reyes said to stay—"
"I know what Reyes said." I set down the cup.
"But if that letter is still there, and Adrian's people go back for it tonight, we lose it.
And if it's already gone—" I paused.
"Then I need to know that too.
Because if it's gone, it means Celeste already has it.
And if she has it, she'll destroy it before anyone can subpoena it."
Grace looked at Warren.
Warren looked at me.
"My contact went to the apartment.
She's there now.
She hasn't found anyone inside, but—" He picked up his phone.
Typed a message.
Waited.
"She says the apartment has been searched.
Drawers opened.
Books pulled from shelves.
But whoever did it left in a hurry.
The search wasn't finished."
"The letter," I said.
"Ask her to look behind the baseboard heating unit in the bedroom.
Left side, near the window.
There's a panel that doesn't sit flush."
Warren typed.
We waited.
Sixty seconds.
"She found it," he said.
I exhaled.
"She's photographing it now and sending the images directly to Reyes," Warren said.
"The original will be secured within the hour."
Rosalind closed her eyes briefly.
When she opened them, she looked steadier.
"What does the letter say?" she asked.
"Exactly."
I had read it so many times I could recite it.
"Thomas wrote that he had accepted a payment from Celeste Voss in exchange for his silence regarding the dissolution of Harlan Voss's company.
He wrote that he believed the dissolution was not voluntary.
That Harlan had been — his word was *persuaded* — to sign the company over under duress.
He wrote that he had kept records.
That if anything happened to him, those records were to be sent to a solicitor in Edinburgh named Alistair Drummond."
The room was very quiet.
"He knew," Rosalind said softly.
"He knew something was wrong.
And he took the money and stayed quiet.
And then—"
"And then four years ago he changed his mind," I said.
"I think that's why he became Adrian's partner.
I think he was trying to get close enough to find proof.
To do what he should have done years earlier."
"And instead he d*ed," she said.
"Yes."
She looked at the table.
Her hands were flat on the surface, very still.
"He was trying to fix it.
At the end."
"I think so."
She nodded once.
A small, private nod, the kind that isn't for anyone else in the room.
Grace's phone buzzed.
She read the screen.
Then she looked up with an expression I hadn't seen from her before — something close to satisfaction, but sharper.
"Hargrove just withdrew the emergency motion," she said.
I stared at her.
"Why?"
"Because," Grace said, "Reyes just informed him that his own name appears in the correspondence from the Westchester storage unit.
Apparently Celeste used him to draft several of the shell company documents." She paused.
"He's no longer representing Adrian Voss.
Effective one hour ago."
The table went quiet.
Then Warren said, almost to himself: "She built a house of cards and put everyone she knew inside it."
"Yes," I said.
"And now it's falling, and she's the one holding the walls up."
My phone lit up on the table.
A call this time.
Not unknown — a number I recognized.
Adrian's personal cell.
May you like
I looked at it for three full rings.
Then I picked up.
