Chapter 4: The Wrong Kind of Safe
The apartment they brought her to was not her apartment.
It was on the fourteenth floor of a building in River North, all clean lines and gray stone and windows that looked out over the city like the city owed them something.
The bodyguard — his name was Sal, he had told her this in the car with the tone of someone completing a required form — showed her the deadbolt, the second deadbolt, and the steel bar that dropped across the door frame.
"Someone will be outside," he said.
"All night?"
"All night."
He left.
The door closed.
Both deadbolts turned from the outside.
Evelyn stood in the center of the room and looked at the city through the glass.
Somewhere down there was her studio in Cicero with its jammed deadbolt and its clanking pipes and the eviction notice she had not yet figured out how to answer.
Somewhere down there, Celeste Vane was in a car or on a phone or in a room, working backward through the staff list at The Obsidian, crossing off names.
She sat down on the edge of the couch and pressed her hands flat on her thighs to stop them trembling.
The door opened at just past midnight.
Lorenzo came in alone.
He had changed his jacket.
He carried two paper cups of coffee and set one on the table in front of her without asking.
He sat down in the chair across from her and looked at her the same way he had in the dining room — direct, undecorated.
"Tell me about your father," he said.
Evelyn's hands went still.
"Excuse me?"
"Raymond Marsh.
He worked the docks for Vane Shipping from 2003 to 2009.
Then he disappeared." Lorenzo turned his cup slowly in his hands.
"I had six years to look into it.
I never did.
I'm looking into it now."
The name landed like a stone dropped into still water.
Raymond Marsh.
Her father's name, spoken by this man in this room, at this hour.
She had not heard it said aloud by anyone in years.
"Why?" she said.
"Because the Vane family has been moving money through shell accounts tied to dock workers who disappeared or went quiet between 2005 and 2012.
Your father is on that list." He paused.
"You're not the first person Celeste has tried to use as collateral."
Evelyn looked at him.
"You think she had something to do with my father."
"I think it's possible."
"That's not the same as knowing."
"No," he said.
"It isn't."
She picked up the coffee.
It was too hot to drink but she held it anyway, for the warmth.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you saved my life with a cocktail napkin and you don't know what you walked into." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
"The merger tonight wasn't just a dinner.
Celeste was consolidating the last piece of the Vane shipping network into her control.
If I signed, she owned the north side ports.
If I didn't sign, she needed me gone before I could block it through other channels.
The att@ck tonight was option two."
"And now?"
"Now she's exposed.
She moved too fast and too visibly and she left witnesses." He glanced toward the window.
"But exposed doesn't mean finished.
Celeste Vane has been buying judges and city councilmen since she was twenty-three.
She will not simply accept what happened tonight."
Evelyn set the cup down.
"So what happens to me?"
"That depends on what you want."
"I want to go home."
"Your home isn't safe."
"I know." She looked at him.
"I meant eventually.
I want to eventually go home."
Something shifted in his expression.
Not softness exactly — more like recognition.
He looked at her the way people look at someone who has just said something true in a room full of careful language.
"Then we need to finish this," he said.
"Before she does."
Evelyn was quiet for a moment.
Outside, the city hummed its low, indifferent hum.
"You said she'd work backward through the staff list," she said.
"How long before she gets to me?"
Lorenzo checked his watch.
May you like
Set it face-down on the knee of his trousers.
"She already has," he said.
