My mother phoned Odile’s own parents and told them it was already too late for anyone to come.

She picked up my wife’s phone and answered Signe’s worried texts with it, pretending to be Odile, so that no friend would come knocking before the lid was closed.

And Calderon — when my mother called to tell him what had happened in that house, my boss did not gasp, did not grieve, did not ask a single human question.

He asked whether Warrick had gotten the ledger and the keycard.

Then he gave the order to keep me dark for the rest of the assignment, whatever it took.

A dispatcher at the transport hub had actually taken a call about an emergency at my home that morning and started to reach me — and Calderon told the man he’d be fired on the spot if he did.

So while my front yard filled with folding chairs and wreaths, the man who signed my paycheck was using my own credentials to pull the classified routes and set up an armed hijacking of a ten-million-dollar shipment, with a plan already in place to hang the leak on me: the disgraced insider who’d sold out his company after his poor wife’s tragic death.

Odile’s hidden SD card was the one thing in the world he hadn’t accounted for.

It took his whole plot apart.

Chapter 16 — Everyone Turns