Two weeks of careful, methodical tracing produced almost nothing — the numbered Cayman account routing through three additional shell layers before terminating in a jurisdiction that offered federal investigators no meaningful cooperation, a dead end that left Nakamura's team frustrated and Desmond, characteristically, unwilling to accept the closure as final.
"There has to be a pattern somewhere," he said, spreading printouts across Wren and Cruz's kitchen table on a rainy October afternoon, Ana napping upstairs while the adults worked. "Twenty years of quarterly payments doesn't happen without some kind of consistency we can trace, even if the money itself disappears into jurisdictions we can't touch."
"What kind of consistency," Wren asked, studying the timeline Desmond had assembled.
