Priya was still at her desk when Andre arrived, the office's single lamp throwing long shadows across a wall now more index card than wall at all. She took one look at the ledger in his hands and cleared a space on the desk without being asked."Sara thinks the shipping corridor in here might run through Meridowe Freight specifically," Andre said, setting it down carefully. "Not just Harlow generally. I need you to check it against whatever records actually survive."Priya pulled the ledger close, scanning the relevant pages with the quick, practiced eye she brought to every dense document that crossed her desk. "Give me the date range."They worked through most of the night, Priya cross-referencing Edward's cargo classifications against what little remained of Meridowe's old shipping manifests, buried deep in the same archive of Harlow filings they had already spent weeks combing through. The work was slow and exacting, numbers against numbers, dates against dates, no shortcut availa

The original filing, it turned out, no longer existed in any form either of them could simply request. Cresthaven's registered agent had dissolved its own practice six years earlier, its archived records sold, according to a terse phone call Priya made the following morning, to a document storage company that charged by the retrieval rather than the hour."Four hundred dollars," Priya said, hanging up. "To pull one box from a warehouse and photograph whatever is inside it. I do not know yet if Cresthaven's actual founding documents are even in that box, or if we are paying four hundred dollars to learn they were shredded years ago.""Pay it," Andre said. "We will find the money."It took three days for the box to arrive, shipped to Priya's office in a plain cardboard container that looked considerably less significant than its contents eventually proved to be. Inside, beneath a decade of unrelated filings from clients whose names meant nothing to either of them, they found Cresthaven'

Harlow's boardroom felt smaller than Andre remembered from his preliminary hearing, the long table ringed with the same faces, Draycott's cold scrutiny, the chair's careful neutrality, Ashe's quiet, watchful calm at the far end. The empty chair near the door, reserved for Sterling Transportation's representative, did not stay empty long.Gerald Finch arrived precisely on time, a tall, silver-haired man in an impeccable suit, his expression carrying the particular ease of someone who had spent decades in rooms exactly like this one and never once doubted his right to occupy them. He nodded to the chair, to Draycott, and finally, with a flicker of something unreadable, to Andre."Mr. Reyes," he said. "I understand you have become quite the student of this company's history.""I have," Andre said evenly. "I imagine you have too, given your own history with it."Something flickered behind Finch's composed expression, gone before anyone else could have caught it. He said nothing further, t

The vital records office occupied the third floor of an unremarkable municipal building, fluorescent lights humming over rows of gray cubicles, nothing about it suggesting the careful, flagged caution of the message Priya had received the night before.Andre waited across the street, in a coffee shop with a clear line of sight to the building's entrance, his phone in his pocket, Priya's number ready at a touch should she need him.She was gone forty minutes before she reappeared, walking briskly, her expression unreadable until she reached the coffee shop's door and sat across from him, setting a slim folder on the table between them with the particular care of someone handling something fragile."Well," Andre said. "What happened.""I met a woman named Theresa Okonkwo," Priya said. "Supervisor, vital records division, twenty two years with the office. She was polite. Careful. And she told me, almost immediately, that she was not going to answer my question about why the request was f

Priya had Corrow Protective Services' full client list within two days, a patchwork of modest contracts assembled from public filings, business registries, and the careful cross-referencing she had turned into something close to an art form over the last two months."Twenty-three current clients," she said, spreading the list across her desk. "Small, mostly. Estate security, a handful of warehouses, two private archives. Whoever runs this firm is not interested in volume.""Interested in what, then," Andre asked."Discretion," Priya said. "Look at the client profile. Whitcombe, before the trust took it over. Harlow's East Yard. A storage facility registered to a name we have not seen before, Linden Archive Services, which turns out, after an hour of digging, to be a records storage company that caters almost exclusively to law firms and private estates wanting something more secure than a standard self-storage unit." She tapped the entry. "That is the closest thing to a pattern I can