Sera's office obtained a limited warrant within two weeks, enough to compel Ferrand Administration's trustee law firm to produce its client intake records, though not enough, Sera warned, to guarantee the records would reveal anything beyond what the firm wanted known."They'll have anticipated this," she told Derek and Fae over the phone. "An organization careful enough to survive forty years without exposure doesn't keep records that implicate itself. What we're hoping for is a thread, not a confession."The thread, when it came, arrived from an unexpected direction.Catherine Park called Derek directly, the board member who'd stopped him at the elevator after the restructuring vote, who'd told him he had Elena's eyes. She asked to meet in person rather than by phone, and Derek found her in a quiet corner of a hotel lobby two days later, her composure carrying a different quality than it had in the boardroom, something more private, more uncertain."I need to tell you something," sh

Sera's office requested the exhumation of Jacob's father's medical records within a week, a process complicated by the forty years that had passed, the original attending physician long dead, the hospital that had treated him merged twice over into an entity that bore no resemblance to what it had once been.What they found, eventually, surprised no one and unsettled everyone."The original death certificate lists cardiac arrest, consistent with a stroke," Halloran reported, on a call that included Derek, Fae, and Jacob together for the first time since the investigation into Jacob's father had formally opened. "But the toxicology panel performed at the time, standard for a man of his position who died suddenly, was incomplete. Several categories weren't tested at all, categories that would have been standard practice even forty years ago for someone of his prominence.""Incomplete how?" Jacob asked, his voice even, though Derek could see, in the set of his shoulders, how much the que

Catherine Park remembered the ring.She said so on a call three days later, her voice carrying the particular steadiness of someone who had spent the intervening time quietly searching her own memory for anything useful, rather than waiting passively to be asked."I saw it exactly once," she said. "Not on the man himself — I never met whoever founded the Garden Account, he never attended meetings in person, not in my eighteen months at the firm. But one of the senior partners wore a ring that matched, he told me once, a tradition reserved for a small circle of clients who'd been with the firm since its founding. Gold, with a crest. I asked him about it, out of simple curiosity, the way you ask about anything unusual when you're young and new to a job." She paused. "He told me it represented an old family, originally Austrian, that had relocated its interests across several countries over generations. He called them, I remember distinctly, 'patient people.' I thought it was an odd comp

Halloran's team found her within three weeks, and what they found complicated the picture rather than simplifying it."She's not hidden," Halloran reported, on a call that had become a familiar ritual by now, Derek and Fae in the study, Jacob listening from the chair that had been Elena's and was now simply his. "Elisabeth Hartenstein is a public figure, in her own limited circle. Fifty-three years old. Runs a legitimate art foundation in Vienna, funds restoration projects across Austria and Germany, sits on the board of two museums. By every visible measure, she's exactly what she appears to be: a wealthy philanthropist with an old family name and a genuine interest in preserving cultural heritage.""That's not who administers something called der Schatten," Jacob said."No," Halloran agreed. "Which is precisely what makes this complicated. Either Reinhardt was wrong about her role, or she maintains two entirely separate lives with a thoroughness that makes Vael and Roos look amateur

Jacob carried the folder out of the gallery himself, refusing Victor's offer to take it, holding it against his chest the way a man holds something he's waited forty years to be given.Derek and Fae were waiting at the cafe when he arrived, both of them rising the moment they saw him through the window, and Derek crossed the distance in a few steps and pulled his father into an embrace that neither of them tried to make brief."You're alright," Derek said, pulling back to study him."I'm alright," Jacob said. "Tired. But alright." He set the folder on the table between them, and for a moment none of them touched it, as if it required a kind of permission first."She gave you everything?" Fae asked."She says so," Jacob said. "I believe her, though I understand that believing her is itself a kind of risk I'm choosing to take." He looked at the two of them. "She won't testify. She was clear about that, and equally clear she had reasons she wouldn't explain. But she said she'd stop inter