Chapter 3 - A Fire With No Victims
I canceled dinner with Victor.
Not because I feared him. Because if I had watched him pour wine in my dining room that evening, I might have forgotten every rule Helena had ever explained about evidence, testimony, and the usefulness of keeping my hands to myself.
Victor took the cancellation badly.
“My nephew,” he said over the phone, “you've been avoiding me for weeks.”
“I've been working.”
“On what?”
“Buildings.”
He laughed. “Leave the buildings to me. You're better with people.”
That had always been the arrangement. Victor managed legitimate papers; I managed the dangerous men attached to them. It had allowed me to believe I was modernizing the Ferraro family. It had also given him a hundred locked doors and no one watching the keys.
“Tell me about Camden Storage,” I said.
His silence lasted less than a second. I heard it anyway.
“What about it?”
“It burned.”
“Bad wiring. Old property. Insurance will handle it.”
“Who worked there overnight?”
“No one. Why?”
I pictured Wren eating soup while Button slept against her boots.
“I'm asking because two families are looking for people who haven't come home.”
“Then let the police find them. Surely you have larger problems.”
“I do,” I said. “I'll talk to you soon.”
I ended the call before my voice betrayed me.
Helena brought in a forensic accountant named Priya Das, and together they traced the warehouse through four shell companies. One led to Harbor Renewal. Another led to a nonprofit called Better Blocks, which supposedly assisted displaced tenants. The money moved in circles: purchase, inspection, emergency evacuation, demolition, reconstruction. Every stage generated fees. At every stage, a different subsidiary profited.
“It may be fraud,” Priya said. “Or a spectacularly wasteful business model.”
“What's the difference?”
“The signatures and the intent. We need both.”
I disliked how patiently she said it. I was used to demanding answers and getting them. But the more I looked at the papers, the more I understood that command was not proof.
At three, Owen brought me security footage from a shop opposite Camden Storage. The camera pointed toward the sidewalk, not the warehouse doors. It showed Daniel Hart entering the gate at 9:11 p.m., carrying a canvas satchel. At 9:36, two gray trucks drove into the alley. At 9:44, Daniel ran out through the side door. A man followed him. The recording ended in a bloom of light and smoke.
I watched it four times.
“He got out,” I said.
“Before the fire,” Owen agreed.
“Then where is he?”
“We don't know. But there's something else.”
He moved the video back and enlarged one frame. On the door of the first truck was a white circle containing a black gull.
I knew the symbol. Northline Freight. One of the shipping companies I'd ordered dismantled after learning it transported stolen goods. Victor had told me liquidation was complete two years earlier.
“Who owns Northline now?” I asked.
“On paper? An independent logistics firm.”
“And off paper?”
Owen looked away. “The same people who worked for us before.”
I put my palms flat on the desk. I'd been congratulating myself for cleaning the family's hands while other men quietly put the gloves back on.
“Get the vehicle registration. Then call the investigator assigned to the missing workers. No private detentions.”
Owen nodded. “You're serious about doing this through the authorities?”
“I'm serious about those workers coming home alive.”
I stepped into the kitchen that evening and found Wren drawing with colored pencils Rosa had found in an old cupboard. Button lay beside her, his ribs less sharp after two proper meals. She quickly turned the paper face down when she noticed me.
“You can keep drawing,” I said.
“It's not finished.”
“I won't look.”
“You already did.”
“Then I'm sorry.”
She studied me as if apologies from grown men were unusual. She turned the sheet back over. It showed a yellow house, a crooked apple tree, a woman with brown hair, and a man with square glasses.
“That's our old home,” she said.
“Where was it?”
“On Mercer Street before the yellow notices.”
“Do you remember who put them up?”
“A lady in a red coat. She told Dad all the houses were dangerous. Dad said they weren't. He checked them.”
I asked whether she remembered the woman's name. She shook her head, then added, “She wore a ring like a green eye.”
A green stone. A detail, not an identification. I wrote it down anyway.
“You know what my dad did when I got scared?” Wren asked.
“What?”
“He counted backward from ten with me. It made things smaller.”
I sat on the floor despite the expensive trousers I'd worn all day. “Want to try?”
She nodded. We counted slowly together. By four she was breathing more easily. At one she rested her head against Button's back.
I thought of all the men who would have laughed if they saw me sitting there counting with a child. I had spent my adult life making men fear me. Wren trusted me a little more because I had made myself small enough to sit on the floor.
Later Helena arrived with news. The fire department's preliminary report described a defective electrical panel. Yet the site had been inspected only five days earlier and deemed safe. The inspection was signed by Daniel Hart.
“That's wrong,” I said. “He went there because something frightened him.”
“We need to establish what he found.”
“Can you?”
“I'm trying.”
She showed me the scanned signature. Daniel's full name, flowing in elegant cursive. Beneath it, a date and a digital reference number. Priya had found that reference number on four other reports, all allegedly issued at different locations within the same hour.
“One of these was copied,” Helena said. “Possibly all of them.”
The kitchen lights dimmed when a storm rolled over the city. Wren was asleep upstairs. I looked at the fake report and thought about her father running out of a burning warehouse.
Then Owen called from the gate.
“We found the man who chased Daniel in the footage.”
“Who?”
“His name is Colin Rusk. He works for Victor.”
“Bring the information to Helena.”
“Matteo, he's already dead. They found him in a parked car this morning.”
May you like
I stared at the rain streaking the window.
Someone was making witnesses disappear. And that someone now knew Daniel Hart had left a child behind.
