Page 64 of Unlocked

Tatum hit the elevator button and stepped inside the moment the doors opened. Bunny was furious enough to call down to security and have them hold her, and Tatum knew it. She didn't look back, just focused on the rows of buttons. She hit the one for the garage.

When the doors opened, she turned left instead of going into the parking area. She went down the short hallway and stopped at the office door at the end.

"Hey, Carl."

"Hey, Ms. Tatum. How are you?"

"I'm good, Carl. How about you?" Tatum smiled at the man behind the desk.

"Doing fine, doing fine," Carl said, leaning back in his chair. Carl was a big man, well over six feet with a barrel chest and thighs like tree trunks. He was in charge of building maintenance and had been since before Tatum was born. He was also one of her favorite people in the world. She used to sneak down and eat lunch with him when she was in high school, and her parents made her come to the office. He'd taken pity on her and let her hide out whenever she needed to.

Carl was also one of the best-read people she'd ever met, brilliant and completely unimpressed by the Wellington name, and there wasn't a machine or piece of equipment in the building he couldn't fix. To her, he was the lifeblood of the place.

"I need a favor, Carl," she said. "I pissed off Bunny and Stuart, and I need to get out of the building without going past security."

Carl grinned. "Just like high school, huh? Some things never change."

Tatum felt herself smiling back despite everything. "Yes, only this time I really pissed them off. Bunny will have the security guys combing the building in no time. Can you let me out the back?"

Carl got to his feet and grabbed a set of keys off his desk. "It would be my pleasure, Ms. Tatum. And don't worry. Sometimes parents need to get a little pissed off. They have to remember you're an adult now. It takes some getting used to." He winked at her and led the way out of the office and through a door on the right. A minute later, he opened the door into the back alley.

"Good luck. Be safe," he said, holding the door.

"Thanks, Carl." She gave the big man a quick, impulsive hug. "You didn't see me."

"You're a ghost," he confirmed, his chuckle following her down the alley.

She walked quickly, the morning air sharp on her face, her mind already moving. She needed to call Archer. The thought arrived with a warmth she didn't quite know what to do with yet. Because hearing his voice had become, at some time in the last few days, without her fully noticing, something she looked forward to, and she needed some comfort at the moment.

That was going to require some serious thinking.

Later. First, she had to get out of this alley.

CHAPTER TWENTY

She grabbed a cab and ten minutes later was walking through her apartment door, locking it securely behind her. After making coffee, she carried her mug to the secret room.

She'd gone over the paperwork before, but now she decided to look at it differently. There were patterns she'd missed. Connections she hadn't seen.

She spread the files across her desk. Bank statements. Wire transfer records. Corporate filings for shell companies with names like Meridian Holdings, LLC, and Clearwater Investments Group. All of them were registered in Delaware or the Cayman Islands. All of them listed layers of ownership that led nowhere.

Classic money laundering setup.

She'd only really glanced through most of the paperwork before. She'd started with the corporate filings for Japan, but that had led nowhere. Now she would start over with the offshore accounts. There were dozens of them, scattered across three continents. The Caymans. Switzerland. Singapore. Each one lead back to a different shell company, and each shell company was tied to another in an endless matryoshka nesting doll of corporate structures designed to hide the money's true origin.

But whoever set this up had made mistakes. Small ones. Subtle even, but mistakes nonetheless. She found the first inconsistency in a wire transfer dated eighteen months ago. Five million dollars moved from Granite Industries to Meridian Holdings, then immediately split into three separate accounts. Two of those accounts she could trace back to North and Lebowitz. The third went to an account in Singapore registered to a company called Apex Consulting.

She'd never seen that name before. She pulled up the corporate filings for Apex. Registered in Singapore. Single director listed: a law firm in Hong Kong that specialized in setting up anonymous corporate structures.

Dead end.

But the money didn't stop there. She followed it through six more transfers, each one routing through a different shell company, a different country, a different bank. And then it landed in an account in Switzerland registered to a company called Silverline Capital.

Tatum sat back, her pulse kicking up.

Silverline Capital had three directors listed. Not anonymous law firms. Actual names. She didn't recognize two of them. She’d done various searches but couldn’t find anything on them. She wasn’t convinced they were real. But the third name. That was most definitely real.

She knew that name.