The Wolfe Wore Armani

Chapter 3: What The Cameras Don't Catch

The office they gave her had no windows facing outside.

Zara noticed that first, then she noticed the camera in the upper left corner, then the second one she even had to look harder for the third at were it was tucked high, angled slightly downward nearly invisible unless you were specifically looking for it, and she was specifically looking for it.

She sat down, opened her laptop and turned her chair forty five degrees toward the left wall, and got to work.

Watch my back then. She thought about it without a particular anger, without nerves. Just noted it the way she noted everything.

By 11.am she was somewhere in the system she was fairly certain she had not been invited into yet.

The surface books were spotless, aggressively clean kind of, that was the first problem, not normal clean. The kind of organized that didn't happen by accident that took sustained, deliberate effort to maintain.

That kind of tidy was a flag, she knew what flags looked like. So she stopped looking at the surface and went underneath it through the connective tissue of the financials, the small linking accounts that existed only to move money quietly between the things that mattered. The transfers too small to trigger any automated alert, too regular to be coincidence.

She followed them. The charitable trust had a property attached.

Northern Maine, remote and registered to a holding company that had dissolved in 1987 and re-registered eight months later under a name she didn't recognize, she wrote it down phonetically, sounding it out letter by letter, then sat back and stared at what she had written.

Not a language, not a language she could place, not Latin, not Greek, not any root she could trace back to anything human or historical that she had ever encountered or heard of in her thirty two years of being the kind of person who noticed everything, she stared at it for a long time.

Then she quickly took some photos of it with her phone and kept going.

At that moment the office door opened without a knock.

Cole was wearing a different suit than yesterday, same eyes though.

She noticed both things and told herself very firmly that she had only noticed the suit because she noticed everything. Professionally, that was all. She had absolutely noticed the eyes first.

"You turned your chair," he said from the doorway.

"Your cameras have a blind spot at forty five degrees." She didn't look up from the page. "Did you need something or you checking up on me?"

"Both." He closed the door behind him.

He crossed the room and stopped on the other side of her desk not too close, in that way of his not crowdy not performing authority, just present like gravity was slightly stronger in his immediate vicinity. He just stood there. "What did you find?"

She put her pen down.

"You've shown me the version you wanted me to see," she said. "The books are too clean and you know they're too clean and you gave them to me anyway, which means they're a test or a distraction or both." She held his gaze.

"The charitable trust has a property attached, Northern Maine. The holding company tied to it is registered under a name that doesn't exist in any database I can access." She paused, and she set her pen down.

"And i can access most of them if I want to."

Cole sat saying nothing.

"So i'm going to ask you something," she said gently, "and i would like you to consider, for once before answering it."

She leaned back in her chair and looked at him steadily.

"What is in Maine, Cole?"

The room was very quiet.

He looked at her the way he would looked at her since the beginning like she was something he had not planned for and still had not fully decided what to do about.

His jaw did the thing, that almost invisible tightening she was already learning to read.

"A private property," he said. "It's a company use."

"Monthly company use." She kept her eyes on his. "The one scheduled on a lunar cycle right." She let that sink in for exactly one second. "Someone on your payroll is routing money to a property you plan around the moon, so you either tell me why right now, plainly or I find out myself."

"You won't find out yourself."

"I found sublevel B this morning."

The stillness that followed in a second was different from his usual kind of stillness.

His usual stillness was controlled, chosen. This was the stillness of a man who had just heard something he had been dreading for a long time and, somewhere underneath the dread had also been quietly waiting for.

She had found it by accident. Which, in her experience, was the only honest way to find things worth finding.

The building schematics on record showed eight sublevels. The elevator had shown seven buttons, she had stared at that panel for some seconds before she took the stairs.

The door at the bottom was a reinforced steel with keypad locked, with an handle that did not move even slightly when she tested it. She crouched down and looked at the frame instead, five parallel lines scored deep into the steel.

Clean edged, precise, fresh enough that the torn metal still held a faint brightness where it had been torn and ripped open, she touched one line with her fingertip.

It was a sharp and recent.

Made, without any possible question, from the inside.

She stood slowly and pressed her palm flat against the door, she could not help it, she had always reached for information through whatever channel was available, and right now this door was the only thing talking. It was warm beneath her hand, not room temperature, but something alive.

Her phone rang.

She didn't move her hand, Unknown number, she answered.

"Step away from that door." A female voice. Low, the tension in it wasn't fresh it was an old tension, the kind that had lived with until it became a permanent texture. "Right now."

Zara looked at the empty stairwell and asked. "You can see me?"

"Yes of course I can."

"But how?"

"It doesn't matter Zara, just walk away."

"Who are you then?"

Quickly there was a pause in the atmosphere the kind that had weight in it. "I'm someone who stood exactly where you are standing at the Same door same marks." A breath. "See am trying to spare you here."

"Spare me what, how, what do you mean?"

"The part where you will understand what made those marks and when you do you simply can't unknow it." Her voice dropped further. I liked my life before I knew and i wanted that noted."

Something about the rawness in those words stopped Zara completely.

Not the words themselves but the way they were been delivered, unpolished and genuinely worn down at the edges. This wasn't a woman performing distress to make a point. This was a woman who had actually lost something real and hadn't finished grieving it yet.