Page 38 of Close To You
“Office space.Unoccupied.Filing cabinets, computers, a project board.This is it.”
“Door?”
“Checking.”
The entrance was on the east face—a metal door with a keypad lock.Kari tried the handle.Locked.She examined the keypad.Standard four-digit commercial model, the type used on construction site offices and temporary facilities.The 1, 3, 7, and 9 keys were more worn than the others.
She tried 1379.Nothing.9731.Nothing.1397.The lock clicked.
Kari opened the door and went in.
The office smelled like paper and recycled air and the faint chemical tang of printer toner.She moved through the space quickly, orienting herself.Two desks with computers she didn’t have time to access.A printer.A coffee maker.And along the back wall, four filing cabinets, each one four drawers deep.
She opened the first drawer of the nearest cabinet.Hanging folders, neatly labeled.She tilted the bodycam down so Ben could see.
“Contractor invoices,” she read.“Monthly billing statements.Ridgeline Resources header.”
“Pull samples.Don’t try to photograph everything—take representative documents from each category.”
Kari worked fast, pulling a document from the front of each folder, scanning the labels as she went.Contractor invoices.Equipment leases.Personnel assignments.Survey authorizations.Each document was a thread in the network Daniels and James had been mapping from the financial side—the same corporate names, the same shell company structures, rendered here in the mundane language of purchase orders and billing codes.
The second cabinet was better.Operational logs—daily reports from site supervisors documenting equipment usage, personnel hours, and material extracted.Core sample inventories cross-referenced with grid coordinates.Transportation manifests showing where samples were being sent for analysis.A folder labeled SECURITY containing weekly patrol schedules, incident reports, and a list of personnel with radio call signs.
Kari photographed the security folder in its entirety, then pulled the patrol schedule and the personnel list and put them in her pack.If any of these names matched the contractor payments in Devco’s offshore accounts, Daniels could connect the security operation to the financial network—and from there, potentially, to the murders.
The third cabinet had what she was looking for.
The top drawer was labeled CORRESPONDENCE—CONFIDENTIAL.Inside were printed emails, memos, and letters between Ridgeline Resources executives and individuals identified only by initials.The content was operational—instructions for escalating extraction activities, directives to limit documentation, references to “the timeline” and “the board’s expectations.”One memo, dated six months ago, contained a line that stopped Kari’s hands mid-reach:
Re: the Tsosie situation.The asset has been briefed and materials are being prepared.Recommend an accelerated timeline given recent developments.Board approval obtained.
“Ben,” she said.“I’m looking at a memo that references your arrest.Six months ago.They were planning this before Whitmore was even killed.”
Silence on the radio.Then: “Copy.Get what you can and move.You’ve been inside for seven minutes.”
She pulled the memo and a handful of surrounding documents and moved to the fourth cabinet.The bottom drawer was locked—a keyed lock, not a combination.She pulled her multi-tool and forced it, the metal giving with a sound that was louder than she wanted.
Inside: a single accordion folder, thick and heavy.She opened it and fanned the contents across the nearest desk.Payment records.Not invoices—actual disbursement authorizations, signed, with account numbers and recipient codes.Amounts ranging from twenty thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, dated over a span of fifteen years.Some were flagged with handwritten notations:Completed.Confirmed.Asset relocated.
Asset relocated.The language of contract killings rendered in accounting jargon.
One of these pages authorized her mother’s death.Kari knew it with a certainty that bypassed logic and went straight to the bone.Somewhere in this stack of authorizations, between the account numbers and the recipient codes, was the entry that turned Anna Chee from a living woman into a line item.She couldn’t identify which one—not yet, not here—but she was holding it.The paper was in her hands.
She was photographing the disbursement records when the lights came on.
Not the office lights—those were still dark.The exterior floods, mounted on the portable buildings and the generator enclosure, blazing white light across the entire complex.A klaxon sounded twice, short and sharp, then cut off.
“Motion sensors,” Ben said in her ear.“East perimeter.Someone’s coming.”
Kari killed her flashlight and moved to the window.Outside, the complex was lit like a stadium.She could see the vehicles on the gravel pad, the trailer, the storage shed, all of it washed in flat, shadowless light.No movement yet.But the floods hadn’t triggered themselves.
“How much time?”she asked.
“Unknown.If it’s a patrol, they could be on you in minutes.Get out now.South wall, back to the culvert.”
Kari shoved the disbursement records into her pack and zipped it.She moved toward the door, opened it, and looked out.
A figure was crossing the gravel pad from the direction of the SUV.Moving with purpose but not running—the measured pace of someone responding to an alert, not panicking about one.He held a handgun low against his thigh.No uniform.Dark clothing, dark jacket, a build that was lean and efficient.
