She ran two laps and headed home.
At 8:15, the burner phone lit up, it was Carmen Jones, via signal.
"Documentation will hold, call me at ten."
Mira read it thrice then set the phone face down on the counter, the documentation would hold, fourteen months of Diane Collier's work, shell company diagrams, transaction records, two sets of recorded conversations, all built carefully and precisely enough for someone in the know to confirm it was prosecutable.
At exactly ten o'clock, Mira called.
Jones picked up instantly, "The drive is exceptional work, she grasped the shell layering at a level most forensic auditors with twice her experience wouldn't catch. The pattern she spotted holds steady over fourteen months, no breaks in the method, no weak links in the chain of inference. The method she outlined to find the fourth man is repeatable, based on his structural position in the network, as she described, the pool of possible identities is small."
"How small?"
"With what's on the drive, we're looking at three or four possible candidates, based on what you've told me about the oversight inquiries and the Delgado case, that list gets even shorter. I need the recording from last night, if Aldric is on it, describing the network's operations the way you've outlined, I can match it to the financial structure on the drive and we'll have a solid evidentiary package." Jones spoke with a calm voice, but underneath was a tension forged from years of watching her work disappear into windowless rooms, only to reemerge in an altered form.
"Percy is delivering it to you this morning."
Jones paused for a moment and then asked, "Do you trust him?"
"I trust the wire; it was my idea."
"That's not what I asked."
Mira gazed out the window, "He identified Diane as an anomaly first, he reached out to her before she reached him. He's been inside it for four years and if he'd wanted to use that time to simply protect himself, there were easier ways to do it."
"People do complicated things for simple reasons."
"I know, I also know that the recording exists, that I was in that room, that what's on it is real regardless of what Percy does with it."
"Alright." Jones made her own calculations and arrived somewhere adjacent to trust, which was probably as close as either of them was going to get, "When I have the recording, I need thirty-six hours. After that, I can tell you whether we have something that can go somewhere that isn't already owned."
"That takes us to tomorrow evening." Mira calculated.
"Yes."
"Aldric's window on me closes tomorrow evening."
"Then we're timed correctly." Jones said it without apparent anxiety, she had survived worse scheduling, "One more thing, the fourth man, when I narrow it down to a name, be ready for the chance you might recognize it."
Mira thought she was prepared, but the name arrived before Jones did.
Not from Jones, not from Percy, not from any channel Mira had set up or expected. It came at eleven forty-seven in the morning from Henry Miller, who called the burner she'd used to contact him and said four words before she could respond.
"I know who it is."
She was at her desk, the bullpen doing its ordinary Friday noise around her, Reyes on the phone, someone from property crimes laughing at something near the printer.
She swiveled her chair toward the window, "Where are you?"
"Still in the city." Miller paused briefly, a moment laden with significance rather than uncertainty, "I wasn't completely honest with you in the parking garage."
"I know."
"What do you know?"
"You said you didn't have the name, you said Diane stopped trusting what was above you and I know that at some point those two things have to be connected." She watched a pigeon settle on the window, "You knew and you were deciding whether to give it to me."
"She told me six weeks ago, when she figured out who he was. She called before going silent, said his name, then told me I had to keep it to myself. If she was right, saying it too soon would ruin everything, tip him off before the paperwork was done and it would all disappear. I agreed, it was the smart tactical move, I've been reminding myself of that since 3 a.m. Thursday."
Mira stayed quiet, she let Miller sit with his thoughts and everything he was processing.
"His name's Richard Callow, Deputy Director of the Financial Crimes Coordination Unit. Nineteen years with the FCCU, the last seven in that role. He's the one who got the Aldric group listed as a cooperating entity in the second oversight inquiry, he set that up, he's why Diane's secure channel wasn't actually secure." Miller paused again, "He's why she went to the locker instead of coming to me."
Richard Callow, she searched the name in her internal system and came up empty, no face, no past connection. A Deputy Director of the FCCU was high-ranking enough to matter but obscure enough in his role that a Central Station detective handling transit homicides wouldn't have any reason to cross paths with him.
"Does Percy know?" She asked.
"Percy knows of him, I don't know if he has the name."
"Jones is building the evidentiary package, she said the drive narrows the fourth man to a small field, Callow fits the structural profile she described."
"He designed the structure, he'd fit any profile built from it." Miller said.
"I need you to come in, somewhere I choose." She said.
"I told you forty-eight hours."
"You've been in the city since Thursday, the forty-eight hours was a fiction you gave yourself, so you'd have the option to leave, but you haven't used it." She kept her voice clean of judgment because there was none.
"Where?" He asked.
She picked the university library, a public spot with plenty of exits, just enough people around to make a conversation blend in and that certain air of purpose that made everyone feel like they belonged. From the burner phone, she texted Chen and he showed up on the second floor reading room, carrying a canvas bag that gave a faint clink from the thermos she guessed he now kept in his car.
Miller showed up four minutes later, daylight didn't do him any favors, he glanced at Chen then at Mira.
"He can hear this."
Miller sat down facing her. Chen claimed the end of the table and opened his notebook, she walked them through it all, Callow's name, Miller's explanation of how Diane had traced it and the six-week timeline from identification to the station. She laid it out in order, without embellishment, just as she would present a case.
"Deputy Director of the FCCU." Chen sighed, "He had her killed."
To be continued...