Page 76 of Silent Watch
"You don't know that."
"I've watched you work for weeks.You'll find it."
She looked at him over the laptop screen.Something passed across her face—not gratitude, something more complicated.The acknowledgment that someone was paying attention to how she worked, not just what she produced.
"Thank you," she said quietly, and went back to writing.
Caleb lefther to it and turned to his own work.
The evidence package for Diana needed to be airtight.Every corporate filing cross-referenced, every property transfer documented, every link in the chain between Montgomery and the Sattler brothers verified against public records.If Montgomery's lawyers found a single weak point, they'd drive a truck through it and bury everything else under an injunction.
He was mapping the chain of Coastal Venture Partners subsidiaries when his phone buzzed.
Graham.Hospital situation escalating.Sattler showed up unannounced this morning.Second floor, administrator's office.Stayed forty minutes.Left with a box.
Caleb typed back.
What kind of box?
File box.Records.He personally loaded it into his car.Didn't use a staffer.
Douglas Sattler was removing records from the hospital.That meant one of two things: he was covering his tracks, or he'd been told to cover them.Either way, it meant the network knew the walls were closing in.
Can you identify the records?
Working on it.Maren's on shift tonight.She might be able to check the administrator's office.
Caleb set the phone down.Across the room, Harper was still writing, her focus absolute.He watched her for a moment—the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was concentrating, the way her lips moved slightly when she was testing a sentence, the way she'd occasionally stop and stare at nothing, her eyes tracking something invisible while she worked through a structural problem in her head.
He turned back to his laptop.The subsidiary map was coming together, each layer connecting to the next in a pattern that was both elegant and predatory.Montgomery had built something impressive in the way that a disease could be impressive if you studied its architecture without considering its victims.
His phone buzzed again.Ronan this time.
Plates came back on the sedan.Rental.Paid with a corporate card traced to a security consulting firm in Tampa.Three guesses who owns the firm.
Montgomery.
Through two intermediaries, but yes.The men who attacked Harper were hired through Montgomery's own security apparatus.We have the chain now.
Caleb read the message twice.Then he stood and crossed the room to the couch.
"Harper."
She looked up, her fingers pausing on the keyboard.
"Ronan traced the plates on the sedan.The men who came to your bungalow were hired through a security consulting firm in Tampa.The firm is owned, through two intermediaries, by Montgomery."
Harper's hands went still on the laptop.She didn't speak for a long moment.
"He ordered it," she said.
"He paid for it.Whether he ordered it specifically or gave a general directive, the money trail connects him to the attack."
"That's the connection Diana needs.That's the top of the chain."
"Yes."
She closed the laptop and set it beside her on the couch.Then she pressed both hands over her face and sat like that for a long time, her shoulders rising and falling with deep, deliberate breaths.
