Chapter 6: Where Sofia Had Been
The contractor's name was a man named Harlan Voss.
Vincent had encountered the name twice before in connection with people who had needed to vanish.
Both times, the vanishing had been permanent.
Both times, Vincent had kept his distance and asked no further questions, because in his world, certain contractors existed in a category that everyone understood and nobody discussed.
Finding Harlan Voss took Dominic four hours, two phone calls to people who owed the Moretti family significant favors, and one conversation that Dominic summarized afterward only as "unpleasant but productive."
The address was a property management company in Albany registered under a shell corporation.
The shell corporation had a registered agent whose name appeared on seventeen other companies, none of which appeared to do anything in particular.
The registered agent had a personal address in a suburb of Troy, New York.
Vincent drove himself.
Dominic sat in the passenger seat and did not suggest otherwise.
They arrived at six in the morning, when the sky was the color of old pewter and the neighborhood was quiet enough that a car pulling to the curb was noticeable.
The man who answered the door was in his sixties, heavyset, wearing a flannel shirt and the expression of someone who had been awake for a long time and had known, at some point during the night, that this moment was coming.
"Voss," Vincent said.
"Mr.
Moretti." Harlan Voss stepped back from the door.
"You'd better come in."
---
The conversation lasted forty minutes.
Voss did not pretend.
Vincent later thought that was the thing that surprised him most — the absence of theater.
No denials, no misdirection, no performance of innocence.
Just a man sitting at a kitchen table with his hands flat on the surface, explaining what he had done and why and where.
"Bellamy's instructions were relocation and containment," Voss said.
"No permanent harm.
Those were his words.
I took them at face value because the money was clean and the timeline was specific."
"Where did you take her?" Vincent said.
"A property in western Massachusetts.
Small town called Greyfield.
I had a contact there who managed a rental house.
She was placed there under a different name.
She had funds, a vehicle, a phone with a restricted number.
She was not restrained.
She was not harmed."
"She was imprisoned," Vincent said.
"She was told that contact with you would result in consequences for you personally.
That was Bellamy's instruction.
I passed it along."
"And she believed it."
"For a while." Voss looked at the table.
"About eight months in, she stopped answering the check-in calls.
My contact in Greyfield said she had gone quiet.
Not gone — just quiet.
We assumed she was adapting."
"She was recording voicemails," Dominic said.
"On a phone she had hidden."
Voss nodded slowly.
"She was smarter than Bellamy gave her credit for."
"Most people are," Vincent said.
"Is she still in Greyfield?"
Voss was quiet for a moment.
"My contact lost track of her about fourteen months ago.
She left the rental property.
Took what she could carry.
Left everything else." He looked up.
"I reported it to Bellamy.
He told me to stand down.
He said it didn't matter anymore because the plan was already in motion."
"The engagement," Dominic said.
"I assume so.
I didn't ask."
Vincent stood up.
"If you had to find her," he said.
"Where would you start."
Voss reached into the drawer beside the table and withdrew a folded piece of paper.
He set it on the table without unfolding it.
"I already started," he said.
"Last night, after your man called.
I figured this conversation was coming and I figured it was better to arrive with something useful." He pushed the paper toward Vincent.
"She's been using a name.
Margaret Hale.
She's been working at a medical clinic in a town called Dunmore, about forty miles north of Albany.
She's been there for about a year."
Vincent looked at the folded paper.
"Why are you giving me this," he said.
Voss was quiet for a moment.
"Because Bellamy told me she'd be comfortable," he said.
"And I believed him.
And I've had three years to think about what comfortable means when it's been arranged without someone's consent." He looked at his hands on the table.
"I'm not a good man, Mr.
Moretti.
But I have a line.
I thought I knew where it was.
I was wrong about that."
Vincent picked up the paper.
He did not unfold it until he was back in the car.
Dominic watched him read it.
"Dunmore," Vincent said.
"How far?"
"Forty minutes." He folded the paper again and placed it in his jacket pocket.
"Call ahead to the estate.
Tell Russo to keep Bellamy and Isabella where they are.
Tell him the police will arrive within the hour and to cooperate fully."
"And Grace and Emily?"
"Make sure they're comfortable.
Emily should be in school in—" He checked the time.
"Three hours.
Make sure Grace has what she needs to get her there."
Dominic made the calls.
Vincent drove north.
The sky was beginning to lighten at the edges, the grey pulling back to reveal something pale and tentative underneath, the kind of early morning light that does not yet know what kind of day it will become.
He had not slept.
He did not feel tired.
He felt something he had not felt in three years, something that had no clean name, something that sat between terror and hope and moved with the car through the quiet roads toward a small town called Dunmore.
His wife was forty miles away.
May you like
She had been forty miles away for a year.
He pressed the accelerator and did not look at the speedometer.
