Page 91 of Unlocked

In this case, she suspected both.

The fictitious signatory kept appearing across documents spanning different years and different countries. A name used consistently enough to suggest habit rather than strategy. James R. Hollis. She saw it three times before she stopped and stared at it. Her heart pounded, and sweat broke out across her back.

James R. Hollis.

She knew that name.

Not from any document. Not from the investigation. She knew it because she'd heard Gil Bennett use it as a joke once, years ago, at a firm Christmas party, slightly drunk and making fun of the kind of name someone would invent for a fake identity. Something boring, he'd said. Something like James R. Hollis. Nobody questions a James R. Hollis. He said he used it on dating sites and occasionally as his name at fast food or coffee places.

She sat back in her chair. Her mouth had gone dry.

Gil Bennett. The nice guy from work. Someone she’d joked with many times. Gone on dates with. It just couldn’t be.

But there it was.

James R. Hollis, Gil's throwaway joke of a fake name, appearing as a signatory across documents connected to the same offshore structures that fed money to Lou Anderson and from Anderson up to whoever was running this whole operation.

She stared at the river.

Gil and Anderson. She'd seen them together. More than once. Drinks at a bar on the Upper East Side that Anderson liked, the two of them laughing about something, comfortable in the way that people were comfortable when they'd known each other for a long time and had things in common they didn't discuss in public.

She'd never thought anything of it. Gil was affable and well-connected. He moved in the same circles as half the legal community in New York. Of course he knew Anderson.

But Gil wasn't representing Anderson in the lawsuit. That had struck her as odd when she first heard about it because they were friendly and Gil was good and would have been the natural choice. She'd assumed her parents were controlling the case assignment, keeping her close to it so they could pressure her into taking it.

Maybe that wasn't why at all.

Maybe Gil couldn't represent Anderson because Gil was already too close to the thing Anderson was trying to make go away. Or maybe Gil wanted to represent Anderson but couldn’t exactly tell her parents the truth.

She picked up her phone and then put it back down. She wanted to think through it a little more before she called Archer. This was crazy. Insane. She genuinely liked Gil. He couldn’t be involved in this, could he?

What was the old saying? When you’ve eliminated all which is impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

She went back to the files.

The second thing she found hit her differently. She almost missed it. It was buried in a transfer record, a payment that didn't match the pattern of the others, a different amount, a different routing structure, a different timeline. She almost scrolled past it. Then something made her stop.

The account it came from.

She cross-referenced it twice to make sure. Then she sat very still for a long moment.

The account that had paid Davis his twenty million, or the first installment of it at least, was the same account that had funded a payment to a private contractor in Brooklyn. A contractor that the notes identified, with the careful neutrality of someone who documented things without editorializing, as the cleanup crew at the Obsidian Club.

The same account.

Davis and the cleanup crew. Funded from the same source.

Which meant Davis wasn't just connected to the scheme. A straight line connected Davis to the Curator's operation. He was being paid by the same hand that had cleaned up Lebowitz's murder and walked out of that club without leaving a trace.

Cold nausea crawled up her throat, and she shivered. It was one thing to suspect Davis, it was another thing entirely to know it. If she had any doubts about the human trafficking, they all went rushing by like the East River outside her window.

She was still sitting with that when she heard a knock at the door. Locking and closing her laptop, Tatum went to the door.

Archer stood in the hallway holding a tray. Covered plates, two glasses, a bottle of wine. When he looked at her face, his expression shifted almost imperceptibly.

"You found something," he said.

She nodded. "Come in." Stepping back to let him pass, she took a deep breath to steady herself. It was all becoming so real.