Lucas arrived at thirty-six hours.
He set his laptop on my hotel table, turned the screen toward me, and said nothing. Just let me read. I read every line of the internal audit he had run quietly through Bennett Capital’s New York communications, the kind you run when you already suspect what you’re going to find and need the paperwork to confirm it before you let yourself be angry.
The name at the bottom of the trail was Priya Mehta. Junior associate. Twenty-six years old. Hired fourteen months ago through a recruitment firm that, when Lucas traced it back three layers, had ties to a consulting company that had ties to another company that had, somewhere in its structure, a retainer arrangement with a firm that received money from Victoria Lancaster-Blackwood’s personal accounts.
Fourt
