NOAH ♠️
The portfolio was real.
I had checked. Not obviously, not the kind of checking that left fingerprints on the question, but I had looked at it when she held it up in the doorway and it was the same portfolio a client gave to her at the Gala earlier and it was real and it had been retrieved from somewhere and this was either exactly what she said it was or the most specific, well-prepared lie I had ever encountered.
I was not yet certain which.
That took a while. I had said it without inflection. Deliberately without inflection, the thing I had learned about gathering information from people who were practiced at managing information was that you never showed the shape of what you were looking for.
You kept the surface completely neutral and you watched what happened in the
