Chapter 3 Reasonable Explanations

She skipped her coffee this morning.

Medium dark roast, one sugar, Lexington stand on the corner of Forty-Eighth. She orders it every morning at 7:58 and she's through the lobby by 8:12. When she skips it, she's short on cash, and when she's short on cash her father's bills have come in, and I watched her cross the lobby empty-handed on Camera 6-A with her bag pressed against her ribs and her jaw set hard and I had my phone in my hand before I'd decided to do a damn thing about it.

I put the phone down because it wasn't time yet, and I knew that, and it didn't stop my hand from reaching for it again thirty seconds later.

My name is Cael Montreaux, and I've been tracking Maren Voss for three years, two months, and fourteen days. I don't call it obsession. Obsession means disorder, and I've controlled every piece of my life since I was fourteen years old, standing in a kitchen that smelled like copper while paramedics covered my mother with a sheet. What I do with Maren I call due diligence. I call it asset protection. I call it whatever word makes the four-inch file in my bottom drawer pass for a business decision, and most days the language holds.

The file contains everything: her college transcripts, her father's medical records, her lease, her credit history, the brand of tea she keeps in her desk, the route she takes when the subway breaks down, the name of her father's morning nurse. I built it over a thousand days and only one other person alive knows it exists.

That person let himself into my office without knocking.

Orion Cade, ex-military intelligence, ten years private security, the only man I've trusted with the full scope of what I've been doing. He's built broad, close-cropped blond hair, and his face gives away nothing he doesn't choose to show. He dropped a tablet onto my desk and leaned against the doorframe.

"Monthly update." He nodded at the tablet. "Voss account."

That's what he calls it. Professional language stretched over a situation he's been uncomfortable with since the day it started. He told me once, three years ago, that what I was doing would end badly. I listened, I didn't fire him, and he never said it again. Not until right now.

“Her father’s facility billed thirty-one this month,” he said. “Insurance covered nineteen. She’s carrying the rest.”

“Twelve.”

“Twelve. Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “And before you reach for that phone…”

“Route it through a different foundation.”

"We're running low on clean ones, Cael."

"Then build one. Register it offshore if you have to."

"You hear yourself right now?" He said it quiet, not angry. "You're talking about setting up shell foundations to pay a woman's medical bills. A woman you've never... you've never even said hello to."

"I've said hello."

"Saying her name to yourself while watching a camera feed doesn't count." He let that sit for a second, then: "You moved a camera in her building last week."

"Security adjustment."

He repeated it back to me flat, no inflection, letting me hear it. "Security adjustment. For a woman you've never spoken to."

"For a person of interest in an ongoing investigation."

"You engineered her job." He pushed off the doorframe. "You set the salary. You put her on your floor. You repositioned a camera outside her apartment at three in the goddamn morning." He crossed his arms. "At what point does 'investigation' stop covering this?"

I didn't answer because the answer was a door I wasn't ready to open. On the monitor behind him, Camera 14-B showed the fourteenth floor, and she was at her desk with the red notebook open, writing with her whole body, leaning in, her pen moving fast, her hair falling across her face, and she pushed it back without looking up and I knew she'd done that forty-seven times in five days because I'd counted every one.

“Authorize the twelve thousand,” I said.

"Through which channel?"

"Harmon-Gale."

"Harmon-Gale is two disbursements from triggering an audit flag."

"Then route it and burn the channel after."

He picked up the tablet and looked at me for a long time. "She found a data error in the Nordic fund her first week. Sixty-thousand-dollar decimal nobody caught in six months."

"I know."

"You hired a risk analyst. Her job is finding hidden patterns." He paused. "What happens when she starts finding yours?"

"She won't."

"She will." No hesitation. "She'll trace the payments, she'll clock the camera, she'll pull the thread, and when the whole thing comes apart you won't be her employer anymore, you'll be the man who's been watching her sleep for three years." He stopped at the door. "You need to figure out what this is, Cael, because right now you're funding it through shell foundations and moving cameras at three AM and none of that is... that's not due diligence. You know that."

The room was quiet after he left. Six monitors on my desk, all live: parking garage, lobby, elevator bank, conference room, executive hallway, fourteenth floor.

I was watching one, and she was still writing, her pen slower now, her head tilted at an angle I'd catalogued months ago, the one that meant she was turning a problem over in her hands and hadn't cracked it yet.

I authorized the twelve thousand. I closed the Harmon-Gale file and I pulled up Camera 6-A and rewound to 7:52, to the moment she walked past the coffee stand without stopping, and I watched her do it again.

Then I picked up my phone.

"Orion. The cafeteria free meal program. Extend it to the fourteenth floor, starting tomorrow."

Nothing on his end.

"Did you hear me?"

"I heard you." His voice was low. "I'm just... trying to figure out when you stopped pretending this was about the investigation."

"It is about the investigation."

“Right.” Another pause. “And the camera outside her apartment, that’s the investigation too. And the twelve grand. And the meal program. All… due diligence.”

"Orion."

"What is she to you, Cael?"

I hung up.

Previous Chapter
Next Chapter