The next floor down wasn’t quite as desolate, but it wasn’t filled, either. A pair of hallways branched from the stairwell door and contained rows of office doors and windows. A few accounting offices, an architectural firm, all with stodgy names and minimal public faces. The lawyers were at the end of the hall.
Eliot had a set of lockpicks, it turned out, and he knew more about picking locks than what you saw in the movies.
“You came prepared,” Anna observed.
“It just seemed like a good thing to have if I was going to be running around at night.” He inserted a pair of narrow probes into the keyhole of the office door and wiggled them until the lock popped and the door swung in.
“So, you a vigilante hero or a cat burglar?”
“Trying to be a hero,” he said. “But I have some pretty wide boundaries.”
She wasn’t one to talk, considering all her heroing so far had involved breaking and entering. She didn’t have time to work through the philosophical implications.
Inside, she turned on the light with a gloved hand. The front receptionist space had a desk and a few chairs. No artwork, no magazines on a coffee table. Just the desk, chairs, and bare walls. She went through to the back office, which also had a desk and a few of chairs. At least the desk had a computer on it, and one of the walls had bookshelves containing an official-looking law library, all perfectly lined up. A diploma for a law degree from the university hung on the back wall. The name on it was Evan McClosky. Patterson’s degree didn’t seem to be hanging anywhere.
The office was sparse; it seemed wrong. Celia’s office in the penthouse was clean and spare, but it still looked lived in and used. Usually, a jacket was slung over a chair or a pen lay out of place. The shelves had books on them. This place didn’t look lived in.
Eliot rubbed his hands together and looked around. “Okay, where to dig for these files of yours?”
Anna looked for another door: a closet, access to another room, anything. But no, the place just had the two rooms, and the rooms weren’t enough.
“There aren’t any filing cabinets,” she murmured. As far as she could tell, except for the law books, there wasn’t a scrap of paper in the whole place.
“They must have everything on computer, and we’ll never get through the encryption,” Eliot said.
“No,” Anna said. “I don’t care how high tech a company is, there’s always a paper trail. People sign things, people turn in receipts, they make copies, they get forms and notices from the city.”
“You the business expert or something?”
She didn’t say anything, because she would have to talk about West Corp and what it was like growing up in the middle of the city’s largest privately held business. “It’s just common sense.”
“I suppose I can try hacking into their computer, just in case there’s something there.”
“No, you can’t,” she said and held up the monitor cable—which wasn’t plugged into anything. There was no CPU, just the monitor and keyboard for show. “This is a fake law firm.”
“That looks like a real diploma to me,” Eliot said, pointing at the wall.
“The guy’s probably a real lawyer, but the firm isn’t really doing any business.”
“So we’re dealing with a fake company fronted by a fake law firm? Now what?”
“Makes me want to hide out and see what really goes on here.” She pulled out her cell phone and started taking pictures. Not that it would do any good, but it might mean … something. She could send the pictures to her mother—anonymously, of course—and see if it meant anything to her.
In the meantime, Eliot opened and closed desk drawers. Pens and other office detritus slid on particle board, but for the most part the drawers seemed empty. Then he came to the locked drawer.
“What’s in there?”
“Let’s find out,” he said and got out the lockpicks. This one took even less time than the front door. Anna moved to look over Eliot’s shoulder.
The drawer was deep, but all that lay in the bottom was a file folder. Slim, not much in it. Eliot took it out and set it on the desk’s surface, and Anna flipped it open and scanned the scant handful of pages within.
“Anything good?” Eliot asked after a moment.
She couldn’t tell right away. The business jargon made her eyes blur at first, until she made the effort
to focus. She had to look them over a couple of times.
“They’re invoices. But they’re going the wrong way. They ought to be charging Superior Construction, not paying them.” But she wasn’t reading these wrong—Superior Construction hadn’t paid the law firm to file their paperwork and front the company. The law firm was paying Superior Construction, apparently for the mere effort of existing—but why?