The door was locked. Of course it was. He was arrogant, but he had not gone careless. I crouched in front of it and drew on forty years of mechanical experience, working the simple residential lock carefully until, after several tense moments, it clicked. The door swung open.
The door closed against my back. I stood still for a moment and let the room come to me. Leather and the ghost of expensive scotch. The overhead stayed off. The burner phone's flashlight gave me what I needed.
I walked the beam slowly around the walls. A mountain range painting. Below it, the safe. I lifted the canvas aside and leaned it against the wall. The digital keypad threw a faint blue glow into the dark.
Getting into the room had been the easy part. This was where it got difficult. Too many possible combinations to guess blindly. Whatever code he'd chosen would come from somewhere inside the way he thought about himself. Declan was a narcissist, a man who had constructed his entire sense of worth around his own image.
I keyed in his birth date. Nothing. The year he graduated from TCU. Still nothing. Ingrid's birthday.
Red flash. I stepped back and worked through it differently. He had never been capable of real love for another person, but his grief was genuine, and he'd been careful to keep it well polished. For years, he'd cultivated the role of the most devastated survivor of his mother's passing, deploying that wound whenever he needed to soften me or lower my defenses. My fingers returned to the keypad.
I entered Marion's birthday. A soft click. The green light blinked on the door swung open. Something turned over inside my stomach. He had locked away the proceeds of what he'd stolen from her husband behind the day she was born.
There is no measure for that kind of cruelty. I swallowed the sickness and reached into the dark interior of the safe. A thick stack of documents came out in my hands, a complete ledger of everything he had done. I spread them across the desk and moved the light over each page. The power of attorney sat on top.
I trained the beam on the signature, Walter Dunore. But the ink was wrong, too flat, pressed too uniformly into the paper. The letter forms didn't match mine. Competent enough to move past a busy bank clerk, but a forgery all the same. I photographed it.
Then the bank records statements from a Cayman Islands institution. Balance: $18 million. The holder was a shell company, Crest Line Capital. I worked through every page. Transfer receipts documented the money's journey out of my accounts and into his account numbers, routing codes, the complete scaffolding of the theft.