Chapter 5
The estate had been built for people who understood that comfort was a form of control.
Dark wood paneling, stone floors worn smooth by a century of use, old hunting trophies on the walls — antlers, a mounted pike, two oil paintings of dogs in fields. The fireplace in the main hall was large enough to stand in and was burning when they arrived, filling the room with the particular orange warmth of hospitality deployed as architecture.
She catalogued it the same way she’d catalogued the wedding ballroom.
Her room was in the east corridor, second floor. She located it, set down her bag without unpacking, and looked at the details the way a forensic examiner looks at a scene that might or might not be one. Window: faced the rear garden.
Latch: brass, but with screws that were conspicuously bright against the aged wall around them — recently replaced, perhaps within the week. Someone had wanted this window to open easily from outside, and had done it without being subtle enough to know what subtlety required.
She moved to the door and looked down the corridor.
Lachlan’s room was in the west corridor. She’d been told this by Aldrich’s logistics note during the drive. Bower’s name was on a placard two doors from her own, which she noted without expression. At the far end of the east corridor: a service staircase.
Between her room and that staircase: a stretch of corridor containing, among other things, a locked door with a keypad — visible from her doorway if she stood at a specific angle. She stood at that angle. The keypad was a Bosch unit, same model she’d seen in equipment invoices for three Montreal properties.
She unpacked her clothing, set the notebook on the desk, the reading glasses beside it. She placed the cast iron skillet, still wrapped in its dish towel, on the shelf beside the bed where most people would put a lamp.
Then she walked the corridor twice under the pretext of finding the bathroom.
On the first pass she counted: twelve steps from her door to the service staircase. One loose floorboard, eight feet from her door, which gave when she stepped on it with the careful pressure of someone not trying to avoid it. The main staircase was at the corridor’s opposite end.
On the second pass she tried the storage room door. Locked. She stood and looked at the keypad.
Same brand as the Montreal units. She had memorized the combination for two of those, because she’d memorized everything that moved through the equipment invoices. She also observed: the surface of the keypad had four keys with slightly more wear and residual oil from repeated contact. Keys 1, 4, 6, 9.
She tried two combinations quietly. Neither worked. She tried 1964.
The lock disengaged.
Inside: cleaning supplies on open shelving, linens in plastic bins, a mop unit, the smell of floor wax and cold concrete. In the far corner, placed under a canvas tarp with the specific casual deliberateness of something meant to look uninteresting: a locked weapons case, hard-sided, with combination rollers on the exterior.
She did not touch it. She stood at the room’s entrance and read the scene without disturbing it. The grit track on the floor was inconsistent with the surrounding clean concrete — material had been moved from this corner, or to it, recently. The tarp’s near edge had a crease that only appeared in fabric when it had been lifted and replaced: a fold memory, several hours old at most. The case itself she assessed through weight distribution — she wasn’t close enough to touch, but the floor contact points were visible, and the compression of the hard case’s base against the concrete suggested loaded weight.
At least four long firearms, she estimated. Possibly more in a configuration she couldn’t resolve from the doorway.
She locked the storage room, returned to her room, changed into the clothes she’d sleep in. Set the reading glasses on the nightstand beside the skillet. Lay on top of the covers, fully dressed, one arm across her stomach, and watched the ceiling.
The first dinner was at seven thirty.
Bower was six seats down, in the middle of the long table. In Montreal she had seen him compressed — a man aware that something had shifted in the structural landscape, moving more carefully than his nature preferred. Here, in the first ten minutes of dinner, he performed a version of loose confidence: two jokes that landed well, a story about a Toronto supplier dispute told for maximum theater. But the performance was too calibrated. Too deliberate. A man genuinely at ease doesn’t work this hard at seeming it.
His phone was below the table. She watched him check it three times in the first forty minutes, each time with the same downward flick of the eyes, and on two of those times his gaze moved toward the east corridor afterward — specifically there, with the brief fixity of someone confirming coordinates.
Reyes, the compact dark-haired man from the arrival glance, sat beside a senior Montreal man named Faulk. Broad, weathered, with the particular authority of someone who had been trusted for a very long time and knew it. Reyes and Faulk did not speak to each other once across the entire dinner. She counted. Not once. Neighbors at a table who don’t speak are either strangers or people who have recently said everything they need to say.
The Toronto lieutenant, Carver, sat beside her. He was the direct type: big, unsentimental, not unkind.
“You’re the accountant.”
“Forensic accountant.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A regular accountant tells you what the numbers say.” She picked up her water glass. “I tell you what they’re hiding.”
He grunted. It was, she had come to understand, his version of respect.
Reyes ate almost nothing. He cut his food into careful pieces and moved it around his plate, and twice he looked at his watch with the expression of a man counting toward a specific moment.
May you like
After dinner she said she was turning in early. She went upstairs. Changed nothing about her posture or pace. Entered her room, closed the door, and lay back on top of the covers with her boots still on.
She did not sleep.
