“Now we wait for Derek to do the only thing cornered men ever do.”
“Which is?”
She folded her hands.
“Something worse.”
He did not disappoint.
At 5:40 p.m., Derek called Jamal from a burner phone.
By then the Office of Professional Responsibility had looped in a joint task group through a public corruption channel far enough outside Derek’s professional orbit to reduce the chance of warning him. They did not trust local sympathy. They did not trust gossip. They trusted timestamps, recordings, banking records, and a very frightened wealth manager in Tysons who had just documented Derek’s threats.
Derek’s call to Jamal came through one of the surviving audio feeds in the house.
I listened in real time.
“I found her,” Derek said.
The lie was smooth enough that if I had not known him so well, I might have believed it myself.
“Where?”
“Old shipping yard off the south branch. She still thinks she can run. She has the trust token with her.”
There was a pause.
Jamal’s voice, when it came, was flat.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Why call me?”
“Because I need someone who can finish a job.”
I felt Naomi’s gaze flick to mine.
Jamal waited a beat too long.
“Last night was your setup, Derek. Not mine.”
“If you’d done what you were paid to do, none of this would be happening.”
Paid.
There it was. Clean as a signature.
Naomi made another note.
Jamal said, “You don’t have the money you promised.”
“I will once I get the trust released.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting. Pier Four. Thirty minutes.”
The line went dead.
I looked at Naomi.
She looked at the federal supervisor beside her, a broad-shouldered man from the corruption team with a wedding band and tired eyes named Special Agent Ethan Cole.
He said, “We take him there.”
Naomi nodded.
“And we let him talk.”
Twilight had settled over the river by the time the first unmarked vehicles rolled into position around the abandoned shipping yard.
I did not go to the pier. Agent Cole would not allow that, and for once I didn’t argue. I stayed in the observation van with Naomi, a federal technician, and two live feeds—one from a long-lens camera trained on the dock, another from a directional microphone pulling their voices back through the evening wind.
Pier Four looked like the end of the world.
Rust, black water, stacked containers, bare flood poles, and the white skeleton of an old crane against the sky.
Derek arrived first in a dark sedan and stepped out scanning the yard with the jittery alertness of a man who no longer knew who might be hunting him.
Jamal came from between two stacks of containers five minutes later.
His left sleeve was dark with blood at the forearm. Not a gunshot, Agent Cole guessed. More likely a cut from rusted metal, broken glass, or some earlier scramble gone bad. Jamal carried himself like pain was an inconvenience he hadn’t had time to hate yet.
They stopped twenty feet apart.
Neither man trusted the other enough to pretend anymore.
“Where is she?” Jamal asked.
Derek spread his hands a little.
“Inside the container row. She ran when she heard my car.”
Jamal did not move.
“She called me,” Derek lied. “She wants a deal. She thinks she can bargain.”
“With what?”
“The trust.”
Jamal laughed once.
A hard, ugly sound.
“There is no deal. There is no trust money for you.”
Derek’s face tightened.
“She told you that?”
“I figured it out when your wife sent me proof you were never planning to pay anyone.”
That got Derek’s attention.
“You heard from Allison?”
