Chapter 3 - A DEAD MAN'S NAME
The police arrived at the Foundry just before dawn, after the last gamblers had climbed into their cars and the cold outside had stripped their excitement into exhaustion. They entered through the service door, accompanied by a prosecutor Sadi had never met and a woman whose badge identified her as Investigator Dana Wexler of the Illinois Attorney General's office.
Dana had a gray braid tucked beneath her coat and the unsettling habit of listening until people said more than they intended. She looked at the numbered lockers, the burned paper, the scattered training equipment, and the red speed bag on the evidence sheet.
"Who located this?"
"He did," Sadi said, pointing toward Mateo.
The boy stood beside Jo, clutching a paper cup with both hands. Jo had borrowed a sweatshirt for him. He looked smaller without the Foundry uniform.
"And who knew the area existed?" Dana asked.
Dominic did not look away. "My operations manager. Possibly members of my security staff. I didn't know about the holding rooms."
"You're responsible for the building."
"Yes."
Dana made a note. She did not congratulate him for honesty.
Sadi liked her immediately.
At six thirty, Dana took the library card into evidence, photographed the hidden berth number, and arranged separate statements. She told Mateo he was not under arrest and asked whether he had a safe adult to call. He gave her his aunt's name, though his face changed when he explained how long he had been hiding the truth from her.
"You can tell her now," Jo said. "Nobody here gets to decide otherwise."
Sadi waited until everyone else had gone to make her request.
"The name at that berth. I need the record."
Dana studied her. "Why?"
"My father was Hadi Rahman. He died in a Boston hospital six years ago after a stroke. Dominic says somebody filed a port death under the same name four years ago."
Dana's expression became carefully neutral.
"Did your father ever work in freight?"
"He managed a gym. Before that he balanced accounts for a neighborhood produce distributor. But he didn't have a port security credential. I know because I handled his paperwork when he got sick."
"I can request the underlying records. There are limits to what I can share during an active investigation."
"I'm not asking you to risk a case. I want to know whether a dead person was used to cover another death."
Dana nodded. "So do I."
By the time Sadi left the Foundry, morning traffic was making the city sound ordinary. A bus hissed to a stop. Someone complained into a phone about a late delivery. Sadi wondered how many people had passed that building without guessing what existed beneath their feet.
Dominic waited near a black sedan with two coffee cups. She had no idea when he had found time to buy them.
"Jo said you don't eat enough before your shifts," he said.
"Jo talks too much."
"She told me that too."
He offered a cup without coming closer. Sadi accepted it and discovered the coffee was plain, hot, and drinkable. He had not tried to guess how much sugar she preferred.
"I owe you an apology," he said.
"For the joke?"
"For that. For permitting the fight. For letting a man with an expensive watch point a weapon at you while my employees calculated how to avoid upsetting me."
"Those are different things."
"I know."
"Then don't pile them together as if one apology settles the account."
He nodded.
Sadi leaned against a brick wall. "Why did you really make that marriage joke?"
"Because I was bored and wanted the room to laugh. Because I saw somebody who wasn't intimidated and I mistook my interest for a reason to put her on display."
She had expected a charming answer and received something worse: a useful one.
"You don't get to make me your proof that you're changing," she said.
"I wouldn't ask."
"You already did when you signed those terms in front of everyone."
He considered that. "Then I'll have to keep them whether or not you ever speak to me again."
The seriousness of his answer made it possible for her to finish her coffee. She refused the ride he offered. He watched her board the bus but did not send a guard after her, at least not one she could see.
At her apartment, Sadi dropped her shoes near the door and found three missed calls from a number she recognized: Farah Rahman, her father's younger sister. Farah lived in Milwaukee and had been asking her to take a break from the search for years. Sadi called back.
"Where were you?" Farah demanded.
"Working."
"I saw a video."
Sadi closed her eyes. Of course. The Foundry's patrons had put clips online before anyone had gone to a hospital. An amateur commentator had titled one The Mafia Boss Meets His Match. In the thumbnail, Sadi appeared to be strangling a giant while Dominic stood by the open cage door. The comments were already debating whether she was an actress.
"I'm all right," she said.
"You were in a cage with a man bigger than our refrigerator."
"The refrigerator had better footwork."
"Sadi."
She stopped joking. She told Farah about the library card and the second ledger and the name Hadi Rahman appearing on a port record years after his death. Farah made a faint sound that might have been a cough.
"Auntie?"
"Your father worked at the docks one summer," Farah said.
"You told me he never did."
"I told you he stopped before you were born."
"He died six years ago. Someone recorded him dying again four years ago."
Farah was quiet so long Sadi thought the call had dropped.
"Did he ever tell you about an insurance claim?" Farah asked at last.
"What claim?"
"The summer the produce company closed. A worker fell from a loading platform. Your father was asked to sign a statement. He refused. He kept copies in a tin under the floorboards of his gym."
"We sold the gym."
"I know."
"What happened to the tin?"
"He sent it to me after he got sick. He said no one should look at it unless Amir got himself into trouble with the wrong people. I thought that was his way of worrying."
Sadi stared at the phone. "You had evidence that might have helped find my brother?"
"I had a tin full of old invoices and letters from a man who was frightened for reasons he would not explain. When Amir disappeared, I tried calling the number on one page. Somebody warned me that people get hurt when they confuse an old industrial accident with a criminal investigation."
"You should have told me."
"Yes," Farah said. "I should have."
The admission did not erase the years. It did make Sadi trust that her aunt was finally telling the truth.
"Don't mail it," Sadi said. "Let Dana Wexler collect it. I'll give you her office number."
She arranged the introduction and went to the bathroom to examine her injuries. A purple bruise was spreading under her ribs. She called an urgent-care clinic and scheduled an appointment. She also sent two photographs of the Foundry's wage slips to the legal aid office, including the deduction for a broken serving tray she had never broken.
By afternoon, a video of her victory had passed a million views. A gossip account had built a story around the imaginary marriage. Somebody had located her full surname. Somebody else had posted an old tournament bracket from a Midwest wrestling championship eight years earlier.
Sadi Rahman. First place, 135-pound division. Disqualified from nationals for striking an official.
That last claim was false. She had withdrawn after Amir's first hospitalization, but strangers preferred the version that made her sound dangerous.
Jo called as Sadi was staring at the screen.
"Don't read the comments."
"Too late."
"Rafe just told me Voss is telling everybody you planted the library card."
"He thinks I forged Amir's handwriting?"
"He thinks the public will believe anything if he repeats it enough."
"What about Dominic?"
"He's cancelled next Thursday's fights. Half the investors are threatening him."
"Good."
"And the other half are threatening worse."
Sadi put the phone on speaker while she opened her father's old notebook. The cover had split at the spine. Between shopping lists and boxing drills, Hadi had written a simple instruction in the corner of one page: Follow the duplicates. The first copy tells a lie; the second tells you who needed it.
It had been his method of checking accounts. It was also, she realized, the phrase Amir had disguised in the speed bag.
A knock sounded at the door.
Sadi stopped moving. She had not ordered anything. Her landlord usually texted before visiting. Through the peephole she saw a woman in a navy coat holding a folder.
"Sadi Rahman? Dr. Lena Park," the woman said. "Jo told me you might need to speak to me. I'm not alone. An investigator is waiting downstairs."
Sadi opened the door a cautious few inches. Lena Park was in her forties, with a tired face and the posture of someone who had learned to stand through long emergencies. She showed identification from a local clinic and a message from Dana confirming their meeting.
"I used to examine the fighters," Lena said. "Before Voss fired me for keeping separate records."
"What kind of records?"
"Injuries, repeated concussions, untreated infections. The ages they gave on the forms compared with the birth dates patients told me privately."
"And Amir?"
Lena's hands tightened around the folder.
"I was told he'd gone home. Three months later I treated someone with a severe infection in a locked room at Larkspur. He was brought in after midnight. They called him Daniel Reed. He asked me whether a person could change his name without changing who was waiting for him."
Sadi held the doorframe.
"What did you tell him?"
"That the person waiting would know his voice."
"Was it Amir?"
"I didn't know then. I have a photograph of his medical chart. The date of birth matches the one on the missing-person poster Jo showed me."
Sadi took the folder with both hands. A medical chart was not proof of survival today. It was proof that someone had been alive when the police insisted he was gone.
"There's something else," Lena said.
She unfolded a second page. It was a transport authorization signed on behalf of Hadi Rahman—two years after Hadi's death. The signature was a practiced imitation, but the final loop of the R fell in the wrong direction. Sadi knew because she had watched her father sign school permission slips all her life.
"They used him as a guarantor," she whispered.
Lena nodded. "The transport document says he assumed responsibility for a patient sent to a private facility called Northpoint Annex. But the signature is false."
"Where is Northpoint?"
"The address is hidden behind a company number."
Sadi looked at the eleven digits printed below the signature. She recognized the beginning from an invoice she had seen during her first week at the Foundry.
May you like
For years she had searched for a grave. Now, at the end of an ordinary hallway in a cheap apartment building, she had a reason to search for a living man.
And somewhere in the city, Adrian Voss was learning that a daughter had recognized the small mistake in a dead father's signature.
