Page 26 of Velvet Vaughn

Tyler didn’t ask where it came from. “Use the exact phrasing, Anja. Lowercase with no spaces first, then the first letters of each word capitalized with spaces, and last the full sentence with a period at the end.”

Anja typed each in turn. The archive rejected the first and the second. The third made a hushed unlocking chime, and the padlock icon fell away. “We’re in.”

“Excellent. Open the top-level directory, but do not open any individual files yet. I want to see the folder structure before we touch anything.”

The directory opened, and Leo’s world got quieter. It was the same kind of silence he remembered from the operating room after his knee surgery, when the anesthesia started lifting, and the surgeon’s voice reached him through a thick layer of cotton. He’d understood, in a detached sort of way, that the conversation happening two feet from his head was about his life.

This was like that. Tyler was saying something. Anja was answering him. Leo was watching the screen.

Eight folders appeared, each one named with a number and a set of initials. 01-DCR. 02-MAS. 03-JTH. 04-RFG. 05-TCL. 06-KWB. 07-BSA. 08-DLM. They were arranged alphabetically by initial, not by number, suggesting they had been imported in the order they’d been added to the library, and the numbering reflected the order of collection.

Anja’s finger hovered over the trackpad. “Which one first?”

“Top of the list,” Tyler instructed. “Double-click and let me watch the container.”

01-DCR opened into a second folder tree with photos, financials, and medical info. Each subfolder was populated. The photos folder alone held what looked like forty files. Inside the medical folder were three PDFs. A folder labeled “family” held its own nested set.

Anja clicked on the photos folder. The thumbnails rendered in a slow cascade, and Leo stopped breathing.

The man in the photographs was Devonte Cross, and Leo knew him better than he knew most of his own extended family. Devonte was twenty-six years old, a two-time Pro Bowl wide receiver for the Tennessee Titans, and the kid Leo had personally walked through the draft process during Devonte’s final year at LSU. Leo had eaten dinner at his mother’s table in Baton Rouge the night before the combine. He had held Devonte’s firstborn son in a hospital room in Nashville eighteen months ago. Devonte’s wife, Andrea, called him Uncle Leo on her Christmas cards.

The photographs on the screen had been taken without Devonte’s knowledge. They showed him leaving a Nashville hotel early in the morning, at a backroom blackjack table in a private club Leo didn’t recognize, and in a car with a woman who was most definitely not Andrea. They showed his mother walking out of a bank in Baton Rouge with a well-dressed man and Andrea in a parking lot at an obstetrician’s office.

Leo’s hands were flat on the counter. He could see them, so he knew they were there, but he couldn’t feel them.

“Leo.”

Anja’s voice was close but not quite touching him. A butterfly fluttering away.

“Leo.”

He jerked at the barked command. She’d certainly roused him out of his stupor. “I’m here.”

She clicked out of the photos folder without asking and opened the financials instead. A spreadsheet unfolded across the screen. It had information on Devonte’s bank accounts, his mother’s accounts, his cousin’s in Shreveport, and an LLC in Devonte’s wife’s maiden name that Leo had never heard of. Transactions were highlighted in yellow. Patterns sketched in red. Someone had done this over time. A forensic accountant. A professional.

Medical came next. Devonte’s orthopedic records from an injury he’d hidden from the team two seasons ago. Andrea’s pregnancy history, including a loss Leo had known about because Devonte had told him in confidence over a bottle of bourbon on Leo’s balcony. That detail existed in only two places: Devonte’s marriage and inside Leo’s trust.

Family was the worst of the four.

There were profiles meticulous enough to have been written by a biographer on Devonte’s mother, his wife, his toddler son, his sister in college, his cousin the accountant, and the priest at the church where Devonte and Andrea had gotten married. Each profile listed addresses, workplaces, daily routines, vehicles, and known associates. His son’s profile listed his daycare, the pickup window, the name of his primary caregiver, and a photograph of the building taken from across the street.

Leo closed his eyes.

He did it slowly because if he moved too fast, he was going to lose the battle with his stomach, and the list of ways he’d imagined seeing Anja again had never once included projectile vomiting.

There were some things a man simply couldn’t recover from.

“Leo.”

“I’m here.”

“Take a breath for me.”

He took one.

“And another.”

He did as instructed.