THE MILLIONAIRE MOCKED A POOR WAREHOUSE WORKER—THEN HE SAW THE PHOTO IN HER HAND.

I slept in Nia's guest room with a chair wedged under the door. In the morning, she found me at the kitchen table surrounded by family photographs and blank paper.

"Tell me you're not doing what I think you're doing," she said.

"I'm comparing letters."

Mom wrote capital M with a deep second stroke. Her lowercase a often stayed open at the top. The note from my apartment had both habits. That didn't prove she wrote it. Anyone who had access to her old cards could copy them.

"You think she's alive," Nia said.

"I think somebody wants me to think that."

Nia dropped a flash drive on the table. "I brought you something better than theories."

"What is it?"

"Two versions of the same truck manifest. One from the archive, one generated yesterday. The original has forty-six boxes and a weight of nine tons. The new one has forty-seven boxes and twelve tons. The extra crate is listed as 'records.'"

"Why change the weight?"

"Because they're moving something big enough to matter."

She showed me an internal warehouse map. The sealed maintenance corridor behind Aisle Seventeen was shaded gray. It connected to a freight elevator no longer shown on current blueprints.

"Can you get us inside?" I asked.

"I can get myself inside. Your face is on every security terminal."

"Then I'll wear a helmet."

"That's not a plan. That's a bad joke."

She turned her laptop toward me. "Here's an actual plan. Saturday night, the alarm system gets a scheduled software update. We need permission from someone with the right clearance to enter legally. And I know who might give it."

Nia opened a contact labeled BEN HOLLOWAY — UNION REPRESENTATIVE. Ben had fought Bellwether over unpaid overtime, unsafe shelving, and a workplace injury that nearly cost one loader his hand. He hated Marcus Vale, and he hated Whitcomb more.

When he arrived that afternoon, he read both notebooks without interrupting. Then he said, "This isn't just a warehouse problem. This is evidence preservation. We bring a lawyer. No sneaking around."

"What lawyer takes on a billionaire?" I asked.

Ben smiled without humor. "One who has been waiting nineteen years to put this man on a witness stand."

He showed me a business card.