Rachel stared at her.
“Gideon was stealing from the foundation?”
“He was moving money through temporary housing accounts. Fake contractors. Dead beneficiaries. Companies that existed for three months and vanished.”
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“I did.”
Rachel felt colder.
“What?”
“I spoke to Detective Crane.”
The officer who had originally handled Mara’s accident.
“He told Gideon.”
Rachel remembered him standing in her kitchen three days earlier, telling her there was no reason to suspect foul play.
Mara continued.
“Alicia copied the records before she disappeared. Gideon thought she had given them to me.”
“Had she?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they?”
Mara pointed toward Luca.
Rachel looked at the boy.
Luca touched the plastic digital watch on his wrist.
Mara smiled faintly.
“Not a watch.”
Rachel stared.
“It’s a storage drive inside a cheap watch casing. Alicia made it. Luca has been wearing the evidence for six weeks.”
Luca looked down at his wrist.
“My mom told me never to take it off.”
“She knew someone might search her apartment,” Mara said.
A sound came from above.
The greenhouse door.
Rachel froze.
Mara’s expression changed instantly.
“Turn off the lamp.”
Rachel reached for it.
Darkness swallowed the passage.
Footsteps descended the stairs.
Slow.
Unhurried.
A man’s voice drifted through the tunnel.
“Rachel?”
Gideon.
Luca gripped Rachel’s hand.
Mara whispered, “How did he get away?”
“He wasn’t under arrest.”
The footsteps came closer.
“Rachel, I know you’re down there.”
A flashlight beam swept across the passage.
“Come out,” Gideon said. “There’s been enough confusion today.”
Mara quietly reached behind a loose stone.
She removed a small metal object.
Rachel expected a gun.
Instead, Mara placed a portable audio recorder in her hand.
“Keep this.”
“What is it?”
“His insurance policy against himself.”
The footsteps stopped.
Twenty feet away, Gideon stood in the passage.
His flashlight illuminated the three of them.
When he saw Mara, his face became strangely calm.
“So,” he said.
“You really are difficult to kill.”
Luca recoiled.
Rachel moved in front of him.
Gideon lowered the flashlight.
There was a pistol in his other hand.
Rachel’s mouth went dry.
“You killed Alicia.”
Gideon looked at Luca.
Something almost like regret passed over his face.
“She made a decision.”
“She found out you were stealing.”
“She found numbers she didn’t understand.”
“My mother understood numbers better than you,” Luca said.
Gideon’s expression hardened.
Mara slowly pushed herself to her feet.
“You put Alicia’s body in my car.”
“I solved two problems with one accident.”
Rachel felt sick.
“You burned a woman and dressed her as Mara?”
“She was already dead.”
Luca made a broken sound.
Gideon glanced toward him.
“That came out wrong.”
Rachel stared at him.
“You think?”
He raised the gun.
“I never intended the boy to be involved.”
“Children usually become involved when you murder their parents,” Mara said.
“Still sarcastic.”
“Still stealing from charities.”
He smiled without humor.
“Do you know what people like you never understand? Institutions are built to lose money. Everyone expects waste. Everyone expects incompetence. A little disappears here, a little there, and nobody cares until someone decides to become heroic.”
“Alicia cared.”
“And now Alicia is dead.”
Luca lunged.
Rachel grabbed him before he could reach Gideon.
“Don’t.”
Gideon pointed the gun directly at Rachel.
Mara saw it.
“Gideon.”
He looked at her.
She held up her injured hand.
“You want the files?”
“I want the drive.”
“You can’t use it.”
“I don’t need to use it. I need to destroy it.”
Mara nodded toward Luca.
“Then you’ll have to shoot a child.”
Silence filled the tunnel.
Gideon looked at Luca.
Then at Rachel.
Then back at Mara.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t make me say yes.”
A bell rang above them.
Once.
Deep and enormous.
The church bell.
Gideon flinched.
Then came a second sound.
Not a bell.
Sirens.
Several of them.
Growing louder.
Gideon’s head snapped toward the stairs.
Mara smiled.
“I told Luca to stop the burial.”
Gideon stared at her.
“I never told him to come alone.”
Rachel suddenly understood.
The crowd.
The police.
The opened coffin.
The dead woman who wasn’t Mara.
A crime that could no longer quietly disappear beneath six feet of soil.
“You wanted witnesses,” Rachel said.
“I wanted seventy witnesses,” Mara replied.
Voices came from above.
Not just local police.
State investigators.
Gideon stepped backward.
Mara raised the recorder.
“And I wanted you to talk.”
His face changed.
He lunged.
Rachel slammed into him.
The gun fired.