Chapter 3

The booth in the back of Delancey’s Diner had a crack in the red vinyl seat that Camika had memorized by the third visit. She knew which side of the table got the draft from the kitchen door. She knew that the coffee was better after four o’clock when the afternoon shift came on and that the grilled cheese was always slightly better on Tuesdays for reasons neither she nor Nora had been able to determine.

She knew these things because she was there every day after school.

Her teacher Mrs. Albright had noticed she was tired on Thursdays. Her grandmother had noticed she was quieter than usual at dinner. Patrick had stopped asking questions and started leaving snacks on her side of the kitchen table without comment, which was his way of saying I see you and I’m here without making a thing of it.

Nobody at school knew. Nobody in the neighborhood knew. As far as anyone in Ten Pines was concerned Camika Foster was an eight year old girl in third grade who liked math and reading and was going to be a lawyer someday.

She was also systematically dismantling a billion dollar conspiracy in a diner booth between three thirty and five o’clock every weekday afternoon.

Nora was already there when Camika arrived on the first Monday after the jail visit, file open, coffee cooling beside her laptop, looking like someone who hadn’t slept enough but had thought plenty.

Camika slid into the booth, dropped her backpack, opened her notebook to the page marked Point A, and said, “Tell me about the shell companies.”

Nora told her. Three layers deep, each one owned by the next, money moving through them in increments small enough to look like ordinary vendor payments. The point of origin was a private equity fund with a name that meant nothing — Meridian Capital Partners — registered in Delaware, operating out of a post office box in northern Virginia.

Northern Virginia.

Camika wrote it down. Circled it. Drew a line from it to Steven Biggs’ name which was already on the page with three question marks beside it that were now becoming one very large answer.

“Northern Virginia,” she said.

“I know,” Nora said.

They looked at each other across the table.

Northern Virginia was where you registered a company when you didn’t want anyone to know who was really behind it but you needed it close enough to Washington to do business with people who worked in buildings without windows.

“He wasn’t just selling them software,” Camika said.

“No,” Nora agreed.

“He was building them infrastructure. The kind you build once and maintain forever. The kind that makes you indispensable.” Camika tapped her pen against the notebook. “Which means they needed him as much as he needed them. Which means when Sasha’s allegations threatened to blow everything open they had as much reason to want her gone as he did.”

Nora was quiet for a moment. “You’re saying the CIA didn’t just stand by while Steven committed murder.”

“I’m saying I don’t think Steven committed it,” Camika said. “I think he ordered it. And I think he had access to people who do that kind of thing because of who he’d been doing business with.”

The diner hummed around them. Dishes in the kitchen. Someone’s country music on the radio turned low.

Nora opened her laptop and pulled up a document. “I found something else. Three weeks before Sasha’s death there was a meeting. Off calendar, no record in the company system, but a parking garage attendant near the Meridian Hotel downtown remembered a black SUV with federal plates parked in the reserved section for four hours on a Tuesday afternoon. He remembered because one of the passengers tipped him a hundred dollar bill to forget he saw it.”

“He told you this?”

“People remember being told to forget things,” Nora said. “Especially when someone pays them to. It feels significant. They hold onto it.” She paused. “I have a description of the other passenger. Not the driver. The one who got out and went inside.”

“Steven,” Camika said.

“I can’t prove it yet.”

“What was he wearing?”

Nora looked at her notes. “Gray suit. No tie. And the attendant said he had a company lanyard around his neck that he tucked into his jacket pocket before he went inside. Like he didn’t want anyone to see it.”

Camika wrote it down. She was already three moves ahead. “Nora. Sandra Chen keeps the company’s financial records. All of them including the ones Mr. Forbes said Steven didn’t know he’d copied. If we can get Sandra to look for any payment — vendor, consultant, anything — that traces back to Meridian Capital Partners in the six months before the murder—”