It took Gabe most of the night to piece the rest together, and even then it came in fragments, a name here, a date there, snapping into place like the pieces of something he’d built once and then forgotten.
The ledger was Patrick O’Reilly’s private record of the entire operation: the shell companies used to launder money through commercial properties, the warehouse addresses where kidnapped victims and stolen goods were kept, the dates and amounts paid to police, judges, inspectors, and politicians, coded references to missing women — Anna Taylor among them, and Patrick’s own handwriting authorizing more than one murder.
Anna’s father also appeared in the property records, but his signature had been forged. He was being framed. And Anna had been taken because she’d found the discrepancies herself.
Gabe hadn’t come back into Patrick’s life looking for a father. Anna Taylor was the case that had pulled him in; her father had hired him to find her, and Dan Haines had warned him that her disappearance was only a piece of something much larger. Several young women had vanished after private parties at properties Patrick controlled. Anna’s father, without knowing it, had leased buildings to O’Reilly shell companies, and when Anna started digging into the irregularities in his records, she’d found the money laundering, the weapons storage, the rooms where kidnapping victims were kept. Then she vanished too.
Dan claimed he could get Gabe the ledger — proof of the officials, the cops, the businesspeople who kept Patrick untouchable. So Gabe went in the only way that would work: as himself, Patrick’s estranged son, coming home to reconcile. Patrick had welcomed him carefully, hoping to make him a successor. Neither man had trusted the other for a second.
Dan was supposed to hand over the ledger in the alley. Someone found them first. Dan was murdered, Gabe was struck down, and the ledger disappeared with him. Patrick now believed his son had it, and that his son had betrayed him.
He hadn’t. Julian had taken it off Dan’s body before anyone else arrived, and he’d been sitting on it ever since, waiting to see what it was worth and to whom.
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