The university's parking lot was half empty at this hour, the kind of sparse that made every car feel watched.
Mira sat in hers for ninety seconds before getting out, an old habit from her first year undercover that she'd never quite managed to break, she counted vehicles, noted positions and filled them without thinking about filling them.
The drive was in her inside jacket pocket, pressed against her ribs like a second heartbeat.
Carmen Jones taught like someone who had stopped caring whether the room kept up. She was mid sentence when Mira slipped in through the back of the seminar room, something about beneficial ownership opacity in multi jurisdictional holding structures, she didn't pause or glance up, just kept moving along the whiteboard with a marker that was nearly dry.
There were eleven students, most of them were taking notes, one was asleep, Mira sat in the back row and watched.
Jones was somewhere in her late forties, compact, sharp boned with close cropped natural hair and the kind of stillness that wasn't stillness at all but compressed attention. She wore no jewelry except a single analogue watch, her suit was good but not new, the kind of woman who had decided that she would not perform the version of herself that other people found more comfortable.
At ten past the hour, she capped the marker and picked up her bag, "Read chapter nine and eleven, the case study at the end of eleven is wrong on purpose, find where."
She was almost at the door when she stopped and looked at Mira, "You're not a student."
"No."
"Police."
"Detective Mira Cooper, Central."
"There's a coffee shop two blocks east, the one with the broken sign, I'll meet you there in ten minutes." Jones was already heading down the hallway before Mira even turned around.
The place was called Elara's, except the second a had burned out of the sign sometime in the previous decade and nobody replaced it, Jones had already chosen a table, with two coffees waiting.
"You're not going to show me a badge and explain what this is about because if this were official, you'd have called ahead, there'd be a second detective and I'd already have a lawyer's number pulled up on my phone."
"It's not official."
"And the envelope."
"Evidence that isn't logged."
Jones wrapped both hands around her cup, "The Delgado case ended my contract with the Financial Crimes Coordination Unit. They took three years of my work, reattributed the methodology and had me walked out with a form letter and a handshake. I wrote up everything I found, sent it to four separate oversight bodies, you know what I got back?"
"Acknowledgement receipts."
Something shifted in Jone's expression, the recognition of a particular kind of tiredness, "What's in the envelope?"
Mira set it on the table, "A note 'They own the investigators' and a photograph, three identified men and one redacted."
"Who is the source?" Jones didn't touch it.
"A woman named Diane Collier. She was a financial intelligence consultant, fourteen months undercover in the compliance division of the Aldric group. She was found dead at Central Station at approximately 3 a.m. this morning, arranged, no defensive injuries, single laceration across the throat."
Jones was quiet for a moment, "I know the Aldric group."
"I thought you might."
"It wasn't from the Delgado case. Two years earlier, I spotted a shell layering pattern that kept popping up in three separate investigations, same pattern, different names. The kind of structure that takes a very specific kind of legal mind to build, someone who understands both the regulatory framework and exactly where its blind spots are. I wrote a report, it went to my supervisor and I never saw it again."
"Your supervisor, his name was listed in one of the oversight inquiries."
"Which inquiry?" Jones's jaw was very still.
"The second one, financial crimes, the Aldric group was listed as a cooperating entity."
The sound of the coffee shop continued around them, cups, a low conversation near the window, someone's phone vibrating against wood.
"You said there's a drive." She asked finally.
"Fourteen months of documentation, transactions, shell company diagrams, two sets of recorded conversations and the methodology Diane used to identify a fourth man whose name she kept off the record because she didn't trust what was above her handler."
"Smart woman."
"She's dead." Mira said it without softening it, "She spent her last minute making sure what she knew had somewhere to go."
"If I read what's on the drive, I need it to go somewhere. I'm not a crime scene detective, I need to know there's an endpoint."
"I don't have one yet."
She smiled, "I can review the architecture, determine if it's sound, pinpoint the methodology behind the shell structures and provide a professional assessment that could stand up in court if you ever get that close, but not through your department."
"Understood."
"And not through any federal body until we know how deep the fourth man goes."
"Agreed."
Jones picked up her coffee and finished it in two swallows, "You have the drive on you?"
Mira reached into her coat and set it on the table, no bigger than a thumbnail but impossibly dense with everything Diane Collier was prevented from accomplishing before her death.
"I need forty eight hours, don't call me. I'll reach out when I have something." Jones pocketed it, tore corner from a paper napkin and wrote a string of numbers, "It's a signal app account, set up a fresh install on a device that hasn't touched your department network."
"One more thing." Mira pocketed the napkin and slid her phone across the table with the three frames Chen had pulled from the concourse footage. Jones looked at them and something passed through her face, the same movement Miller's face had made on the parking garage floor when he'd looked at the paragraph.
"Arthur Percy, he's a private legal consultant with a very specific reputation in certain financial circles." Jones stood, collected her bag and looked at Mira once more with something that might have become trust, "Diane Collier was watching the right walls, she just ran out of time."
Mira sat for a moment with two empty cups, the napkin in her pocket and the weight of everything that was not yet written down press against the inside of her ribs. Outside, Thursday was fully underway, the city moved through its ordinary business, oblivious and efficient.
A minute later, her phone buzzed, it was Chen.
"Tell me the part I need to hear." She answered.
"He's here, Mira. Percy is in the building, with Lieutenant Soane."
"On my way." Mira hung up, she thought about what it meant that Arthur Percy had chosen this morning to pay a social call on the man who had reassigned the Calloway case, then she stopped thinking about it and started moving.
To be continued...