Page 71 of Shatter

For the next hour, I watch her take the room apart.

She doesn't hesitate.

She moves through the files like she's walking through a house she grew up in, opening doors and pointing at things Dag and Vanir would never have found in a year of looking.

"This is a shell." She taps the screen. "Cascade Maritime Holdings. It doesn't own anything or do anything. It exists to receive freight charges for shipments that never ship."

"How much?" Dag's voice has gone tight.

"Last year?" She scrolls without looking. "About forty-one million."

Vanir lets out a low whistle.

Tor hasn't moved in forty minutes, and she keeps going.

Wire transfers to Vancouver.

Holding companies in Delaware and the Caymans, each one a room with a door leading to another room.

Her voice never rises, and her hands never stop moving on the keys.

I don't recognize her.

This isn't Katie, flinching at a coffee pot.

This isn't the woman who shook on my bed last night.

She sits straight-backed at a card table in a freezing room full of bikers and walks them through a hundred million dollars of dirty money like she's teaching a class, and none of them take their eyes off her.

Neither can I.

Then her fingers stop.

She's opened a new spreadsheet, shipping manifests, and she's staring at a column halfway down the screen.

"That's wrong." Her finger freezes over the trackpad.

Dag leans in.

"What is it?" He pushes his glasses up his nose.

"Reefers." She points at a line, then another. "Refrigerated containers, every month for nearly three years."

"So?" Tor's voice comes from the end of the table.

"So they're going the wrong way." She turns and looks at him for the first time since she sat down. "Carrow ships refrigerated freight out of Seattle all the time. Salmon and crab, up to Alaska and over to Asia. But these are going southeast. All the way across the country, by truck, to a seafood processor."

She turns the laptop around so Tor can see.

"Sawgrass Point Seafood." She reads it off the screen. "Apalachicola, Florida."

The room goes dead silent.

"Who ships frozen salmon to a shrimp town?" Her voice drops. "Nobody. Nobody does that. You'd lose money on every pound. It isn't fish in those containers."

Tor stands up.

He walks around the table and bends over the laptop, and I watch his face in the blue light of the screen.