Chapter 9: The Last Card
Liam told the driver to keep going.
We circled the block once, slowly, and he watched the building the way he used to watch the school hallway when we were kids and something felt wrong.
"Back door?" he said.
"The building has a service entrance on the alley side.
Third key on my ring."
He relayed the address to the driver.
We came around the back and went up the service stairs, quiet, single file.
On the second floor landing, Liam stopped and held up one hand.
Voices.
From above.
One voice, actually — low, male, talking on a phone.
We waited.
The voice moved away.
A door closed.
We went up to the third floor and stopped outside our apartment.
The door was closed.
No light visible under it from this side.
Liam looked at me.
I shook my head — I didn't have a better idea.
He turned the key slowly, pushed the door open six inches, and listened.
Nothing.
We went in.
The apartment looked exactly as we had left it, except for one thing.
On the kitchen table, where Liam's legal pad had been, there was now a manila envelope.
Unsealed.
My name written on the front in handwriting I didn't recognize.
Not Elizabeth.
Not Emma.
*Ms.
Harmon.*
Liam put his hand on my arm before I could touch it.
He took a photo of it first, then carefully lifted the flap with a pen from the counter.
Inside was a single sheet of paper.
A printout of a photograph.
I looked at it for a long moment before I understood what I was seeing.
It was a photo of me.
Taken tonight, from a distance, through the glass front of the FBI field office lobby.
I was standing with Alessandro and Liam, visible and clear.
Below the photo, typed in plain font: *The files are not enough.
There is a second witness.
Find her before we do, or we find you first.*
Liam set the pen down.
"They had someone watching the FBI building."
"And they got in here while we were gone." My voice was steady.
I was surprised by that.
"This isn't Hale.
Hale is in custody."
"Which means Hale had someone else." Liam looked at the envelope.
"Someone who isn't in those files."
I thought of what Carla had said in the legal aid clinic, before the panic, before the back exit.
*Someone who needed the Vitali name as cover.* She had said Hale was the name she knew.
But my father's files covered seven years.
Hale had been the channel.
That didn't mean he had been working alone.
I called Alessandro.
He picked up on the first ring.
"What's wrong?"
I told him about the envelope.
The photograph.
The message.
Silence for two seconds.
"Don't touch anything else.
I'm calling Reyes." Another pause.
"Elizabeth — the second witness they're referring to.
Do you know who that is?"
"No," I said.
Then I stopped.
My father's notes.
The name in the margin, underlined, written in pencil like he wasn't sure whether to include it or erase it.
I had assumed that name was Carla Voss.
But Carla had said my father came to her.
She hadn't come to him.
Which meant there had been someone else.
Someone my father had trusted enough to tell, before Carla, before the drive, before the gala.
Someone who was still out there.
Someone who was still alive.
"Alessandro," I said slowly.
"In your father's personal records — his correspondence, his private files — is there a name?
Someone your father trusted outside the company, before he stepped back?
Someone who wasn't Hale?"
A long pause.
"There was a woman," Alessandro said.
"A former board member.
She resigned about eight years ago, quietly, no public statement.
My father never explained why.
He only said once that she had seen something she wasn't meant to see." His voice was careful.
"Her name was Patricia Osei.
She moved to London.
I haven't heard her name in years."
Patricia Osei.
I thought of my father's handwriting.
The pencil.
The hesitation.
"Alessandro," I said.
"I don't think the second witness is in Chicago."
Reyes arrived twenty minutes later with two agents and an evidence kit.
She bagged the envelope and the photograph and stood in our kitchen looking at the table with the expression of someone recalculating.
"Hale had a partner," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"Someone not in the files," I said.
"Someone my father may have known about but didn't name directly.
Or couldn't name."
"Patricia Osei," Alessandro said from the doorway.
He had come with Reyes.
"Former Vitali board member.
She left eight years ago.
I believe she may have been the original source — the person who first identified the irregularities, before Richard Harmon did."
Reyes looked at him.
"Do you have contact information for her?"
"My father might.
His personal correspondence is at the family home.
I can have it retrieved tonight."
"Do it." She looked at me.
"Ms.
Harmon, you and Mr.
Carter cannot stay here tonight."
"I know."
"I have a safe house address.
It's used for witness protection situations.
You'll both be comfortable and you'll be secure." She handed me a card with a handwritten address.
"Pack what you need for two days.
We leave in ten minutes."
I went to my room.
I packed the nursing school textbook — the hollowed-out drive was gone, with Reyes, where it belonged, but I packed the book anyway.
I packed two changes of clothes, my phone charger, and the photo of my parents that sat on my nightstand.
My mother at the kitchen table, laughing at something off-camera.
My father standing behind her with his hand on her shoulder, looking at her like she was the most interesting thing in the room.
I put it in my bag and zipped it shut.
In the hallway, Liam was waiting with his own bag, his coat already on.
He looked at mine.
"You packed the book," he said.
"Yes."
He didn't ask why.
He understood.
We followed Reyes out into the night.
In the car, Alessandro sat beside me again.
He didn't speak for several minutes.
Then, quietly: "My father is going to need to know all of this.
About Hale.
About what was done in the company's name." He looked at his hands.
"He built that company from nothing.
He spent his life on it.
Finding out that someone used it—"
"He'll be angry," I said.
"Yes."
"Good," I said.
"He should be."
Alessandro looked at me.
Something shifted in his expression — not quite a smile, but close to one.
The first one I had seen from him that wasn't careful or controlled.
"You're very direct," he said.
"My father was direct," I said.
"I learned it from him."
The safe house was a brownstone in Lincoln Park, warm and quiet, with a kitchen that smelled like someone had recently made soup.
Two agents were already there.
Reyes showed us the rooms, reviewed the security setup, and then stood in the living room doorway.
"Get some sleep," she said.
"Tomorrow is going to be a long day.
Hale's arraignment is at nine.
And we need to locate Patricia Osei before whoever sent that envelope does."
She left.
The agents settled into their positions.
Liam disappeared into his room almost immediately.
I heard his door close, then the quiet of someone who had held it together all day finally letting go.
I sat in the kitchen with a glass of water and my phone and the photograph of my parents.
Alessandro came in after a few minutes and sat down across from me without asking.
He looked at the photograph.
"Your mother?" he said.
"Yes."
"She looks like she's laughing at something very good."
"She usually was." I set the photo down.
"She was the one who kept the porch light on.
My father always forgot.
She never did."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"For what happened to them.
And for the fact that my family's name was used to cover it."
"That wasn't your fault."
"No.
But it was my name." He looked at the table.
"I intend to make sure that matters."
I looked at him across the kitchen table in a safe house in Lincoln Park, with federal agents outside the door and a case breaking open somewhere across the city, and I thought: I still don't fully trust you.
But I was beginning to understand why my father, who was the most careful man I ever knew, might have looked at Alessandro Vitali and seen something worth protecting.
I put my hand flat on the table.
He looked at it, then at me.
"Get some sleep," I said.
"You said it was going to be a long day tomorrow."
"I did say that."
"Then go."
He stood.
At the kitchen doorway he paused.
"Elizabeth," he said.
"The baby.
I meant what I said.
Whatever comes next — I'm not going anywhere."
I looked at him for a long moment.
"I know," I said.
And I was surprised to find that I meant it.
He went.
The kitchen was quiet.
I sat alone with my parents' photograph and my glass of water and the particular stillness of a night that had not yet finished deciding what it was going to cost me.
My phone lit up on the table.
A message from a number I didn't recognize.
*Patricia Osei knows the name of Hale's partner.
She has been waiting for someone to ask.
She says: tell Elizabeth her father sent her a letter.
She has kept it for three years.*
My hand went still on the phone.
May you like
My father had sent a letter.
There was still one more piece.
