Page 95 of The Voicemail

“This is outrageous,” he says.

I set the folder on the reception counter. He looks at it and stops talking.

“Where is Claire Bell?”

His mouth opens. I take one step closer. He shuts it again.

“I asked you a question.”

“I don’t know.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Two days ago.”

“Try again.”

His eyes flick toward Luca. Luca does not look up from the computer.

“Security feed shows Claire leaving the gallery at 8:42 p.m. last Tuesday. Two men forced her into a car fourteen seconds after she reached the curb. Your system marked the exterior feed corrupted five minutes later.”

Bellamy goes pale. I watch his face carefully.

“You knew she was taken,” I say.

“I suspected there had been an incident.”

“An incident.”

“She didn’t come in the next morning.”

“Yet you didn’t report it.”

His silence is answer enough. I almost smile. There is nothing kind in it.

“You called Bianchi,” I say.

Bellamy’s eyes close.

Luca looks up then.

“I had to,” Bellamy says. “You don’t understand what these people can do.”

“I don’t?” I ask. “Explain it to me.”

He knows better than to answer that. I take the file from the counter and open to the page with his signature.

“You moved crates for him. You hid intake gaps. You told Elena not to inspect shipments too closely. Then Claire disappears after initialing the wrong form, and instead of helping her, you warned the man who took her.”

“I didn’t know he took her.”

“You knew enough. Tell me every place Bianchi uses to hold things until he’s ready to move them.”

“I don’t know that.”

I put my gun on the counter, but don’t aim it at him. Not yet. Bellamy stares at it.

“I don’t know all of them,” he says quickly. “There were storage spaces. Restaurant basements. An old private viewing room in Queens. A freight office near the river. I never went inside most of them.”