Page 90 of Oath
“She’s not gonna break,” Bones said behind me as he came in, tracking snow onto the floor. “But she’s carrying more weight than she knows.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, not looking up from my screen. “She’ll keep walking with the knife in her gut until someone tells her to sit down.”
He grunted in agreement, then stepped around the table and crouched beside me. I angled the second laptop toward him. “Wanna help?”
“Depends on what I’m helping with,” he said, but his fingers were already flying over the keys, pulling up one of the dummy profiles we’d created.
“We got into Sinclair’s firm’s client portal using an old vendor login. Real estate partner in Colorado forgot to update his security after he quit. System still thinks he’s on the payroll.”
Bones snorted. “Rookie mistake.”
“Yeah, well, thank God for that. I’m in. Now I need to drill down into Sinclair’s schedule—meetings, hearings, conference calls, anything the firm tracks.”
I leaned forward and typed in a secondary search on the third laptop. “While you do that, I’m scanning the firm’s internal calendar and building access logs. If we can confirm what days Sinclair actuallyshows upto the office versus the bullshit he inputs in his calendar? We can start planning around where to intercept him.”
“Cornering a lawyer,” Bones said. “I like this job more and more.” The lack of humor in his voice decried that statement, but I got it.
“Not just any lawyer.Thelawyer.” The tone of my voice flattened, the weight of it pressing down behind my ribs. I kept my hands moving. Click. Scroll. Query. Execute.
I needed the rhythm. The focus. Because if I thought too long about the fact that Grace’s sister worked for this guy, and the more we looked, the more it seemed like he was involved, the more I thought about just scratching him off. The trash didn’t always take itself out, sometimes you had to burn it.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” Bones said without looking up.
“Don’t forget I can erase your entire financial footprint if you piss me off,” I shot back.
He smirked. “That’s adorable.”
Goblin huffed like he agreed with him. Little traitor.
“Okay,” I muttered, refocusing. “Sinclair logs into the firm’s internal system most mornings between eight fifteen and eight thirty. Same IP. Home office—Georgetown area. He doesn’t use the building keycard until around ten. That lines up with the data I’m seeing on the security logs. So either he works from home part of the morning, or he’s lying about it entirely.”
“He got court any of those days?”
“Only Wednesday,” I said, tapping a key to bring the docket onto the second screen. “Circuit court, family law case. Weird.”
“Why weird?”
“He doesn’t usually handle these types, he’s more corporate schmooze than family defender.”
Then again, maybe his client was one of his corporate schmoozes.
“He’s the rep on record, though,” I continued “That meanshehas to show up.”
“Where?” Bones asked.
“Alexandria Courthouse. Eleven a.m.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “That’s our window. Midweek, tight security at the courthouse, but he’ll have to park nearby. If we wanted to spook him into a mistake?—”
“We don’t spook,” Bones interrupted, his voice low. “We don’t warn. We watch. We wait. Public confrontation is going to be far safer than one in his office. Once we’ve got him, then we send her in to see him.”
I leaned back and blew out a slow breath. “Then we watch. And wait. Wednesday’s our best shot. Unless we get lucky and he walks into a bar alone.”
“He’s not the bar type.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s the suit who pours himself a double of whiskey in his home office after gaslighting his client into thinking she’s safe.”
Bones didn’t argue. Just went quiet. The kind of quiet that meant his brain was already cycling through scenarios and backups and the best way to apply just enough pressure to make a man crack.
The shower stopped upstairs. We both went still for a half-second. Goblin’s ears perked up, but he didn’t move from under the table. Then we heard the creak of the bathroom door and her footsteps padding softly down the hallway toward the guest room.
