Chapter 14 - What His Father Built
The stranger's name was Laila, and she had been locked in the building for four days after refusing to sign a statement that she had quit her job voluntarily.
"They keep moving us," Laila told Mara. "They say we'll get our papers back when we pay the debt. The debt keeps getting bigger."
"How many people?"
"I saw five here. More at the other place."
Mara grabbed her hand. "We're leaving together."
In Manhattan, Nico finally opened the archive his father had kept off the company's servers. It was a steel filing cabinet in a storage unit paid for in cash. Inside were shipping ledgers, photographs, and letters from a union organizer who had complained about dangerous working conditions twelve years earlier.
The organizer had warned that Riverton's management routinely forged time sheets and threatened immigrant workers. Nico's father had written in the margin: Keep it quiet until after the sale.
Nico sat on a packing crate, sickened.
"I thought Gideon invented this," he said.
Dahlia read the letter. "Your father taught him how to hide it."
"And I gave him a cleaner logo and a nicer office."
His father's idea of loyalty was never embarrassing the family. He had rejected the guns and street collections, but he had kept the rule about silence.
"Copy everything," he said. "Give it to Simone."
Dahlia hesitated. "Some of this could put your father in the middle of other investigations. It may put you there too."
"He's dead. The workers aren't."
Simone called with news from the pier. Officers had found the scratched marks and were waiting for a specialist to open the locked refrigeration corridor safely.
"There's a generator running on the other side," she said. "We can hear voices."
Nico gripped the phone.
"Is Mara one of them?"
"I don't know."
May you like
A crack of gunfire sounded through the call. Someone shouted for everyone to get down.
Then the connection broke.
