Chapter 8: What Victoria Knew
Three days into the new job, Emma's phone rang at eleven at night.
She answered it because the number had a Chicago area code and her father was still three days from his cardiology appointment and she had trained herself, since his first episode, to always answer.
The voice was Victoria's.
"I know you took the job," Victoria said.
"I expected you would.
The money must have been very persuasive."
Emma sat up in bed.
Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
"How did you get this number?"
"The same way I get most things." A pause.
"I want to meet with you.
Tomorrow.
Lunch.
Somewhere neutral — your choice."
"I have nothing to say to you."
"That's fine.
I have something to say to you." Victoria's tone remained conversational, even warm, in the practiced way of someone who had spent decades making threats sound like invitations.
"I think you're a smart young woman, Emma.
Smart enough to know that some information changes the picture considerably.
I'd rather you heard it from me than found it on your own and assumed I was hiding it."
Emma thought of the envelope.
The photograph.
The man named Gerald Stokes.
"Is this about Vincent Moretti?" Emma said.
A brief pause — the first hesitation she had heard in Victoria's voice.
"Come to lunch.
One hour.
After that, you can walk away and never hear from me again if that's what you choose."
"And if I don't come?"
Victoria's voice gentled in a way that was somehow worse than the threats.
"Then I'll have to find other ways to make sure you understand what you've stepped into.
I'd prefer not to." She paused.
"I'll send you the address in the morning.
Noon."
The call ended.
Emma sat in the dark with the phone in her hand.
The envelope.
The photograph.
The text.
Now this.
Victoria wasn't trying to frighten her away from the job anymore.
She was trying to pull her toward something.
That was different.
That was more dangerous.
Emma called Daniel Reyes's work line and left a message at eleven fifteen at night because she knew, from three days of observation, that the man responded to messages at any hour.
He called back in twelve minutes.
She told him about the phone call.
She told him about the envelope.
She described the photograph and the printed text and the date on the image.
Daniel went quiet.
Not the pause of someone processing.
The pause of someone who already knew.
"Miss Carter," he said carefully.
"Mr.
Moretti will want to speak with you in the morning."
"Does he already know about Gerald Stokes?"
A longer pause.
"In the morning, Miss Carter."
She hung up and sat for a while.
Then she turned on the lamp, opened her laptop, and spent an hour reading everything she could find about the Eastside development project, Gerald Stokes, the community advocacy group, and every public statement the Moretti Group had made in the three years since.
She found the original coroner's report through a public records archive.
She found three photographs of the building before demolition — a five-story residential structure, old but solid, windows still intact.
And she found, buried in the comments section of the community advocacy site's final post, a name.
Someone who claimed to have been in the building the night Gerald Stokes collapsed.
Someone who claimed to have seen a visitor that evening who should not have been there.
The comment was unsigned.
But the username was three letters: VCL.
Victoria Catherine Langford.
Emma stared at the screen for a long time.
May you like
Then she closed the laptop, turned off the lamp, and lay back in the dark.
Tomorrow had just become something else entirely.
