Because I had the Social Security number, along with his adoptive mother’s birth name and the street he’d grown up on, they finally told me the account number. I promised I’d take it up immediately with their security office in Atlanta.

When I hung up, I wondered if I might be a sociopath, I lied so glibly, so easily. At least I’d gotten what I needed. When I went back to Stella’s accounts, sure enough, the account that had covered her bills while she was in prison had belonged to Uncle Jerry.

I stared at the screen for a long time. Fugher was connected to Stella, but who was pulling those strings? Except for the money he got from Viola and Sebastian through their debt to Sleep-EZ, and the occasional payout from his betting account, all his deposits had been made in cash, some in the high four figures.

I made up a spreadsheet, showing both Fugher’s and Stella’s accounts, with a paragraph summarizing where Fugher’s money came from, and sent it to Murray. I didn’t like being the only person to know something about a man with ties to Nabiyev.

I was pacing around my office when my phone rang, an unknown caller.

“Is this the detective? . . . I’m Aliana Bartok. At the Virejas Tower project.”

Oh, yes, the promising young engineer with beaded braids. “What’s up?”

“You know how we were all trying to figure out what Sebastian was doing here so early in the morning the last day we saw him? I think I know. It’s—I can’t explain it on the phone. Can you come to the job site?”

SOUND CHECK

Aliana met me at the entrance to the hoist. She’d refused to answer any questions on the phone, just saying that I had to be at the computer to understand it. While we waited for the hoist, she fiddled nervously with the ends of her braids, looking aslant at my bruised face.

The hoist operator remembered me. “You go ten rounds with Nabiyev?” he asked jovially. “He was in early this morning looking same as always, so you must not have landed any of your punches.”

“I hit the kidneys,” I said. “My face looks spectacular but it’s blows to the kidneys that leave the other person limping for a week or two.”

The operator laughed more heartily than the comment merited, expanding on the fight theme all the way up.

They’d poured three more floors since I was last here. When we got off at twelve, the rough work on the walls was done and carpenters were marking off spots to start building interior walls. As she led me across the floor to the engineers’ room, Aliana asked if I’d really been in a fight with Nabiyev.

“No. Your hoist operator seems to have a one-string guitar that he likes to keep plucking. I was jumped by some street punks and fortunately the cops drove up before they murdered me. You know Nabiyev?”

“Not personally, but when he’s on the job site everyone gets tense.” She knocked on the door to the architects’ and engineers’ room, which had a sign on it that read “Temporarily Off-Limits to All Personnel.”

A couple of the engineers I’d seen the first time I was here were hovering nearby and were infuriated when Tyler, the senior man, unlocked the door for Aliana.

“Hey, man, what gives?” one of them demanded, trying to muscle past us into the room. “I need to get to my machine. There’s an array whose specs I have to check—”

“The room will be open in fifteen minutes, Clay. I’m sure you can do the calculations on your tablet, right?” Tyler pulled the door shut behind Aliana and me, and slid the dead bolt home.

“Aliana brief you on what she found?” he said.

“I didn’t think I could explain it on the phone,” Aliana said.

She took me to one of the computers set up on a work counter that ran the length of the far wall. “We each have our own laptops, of course, but these are machines we can all access during the project to see what everyone is doing—the files are shared pretty much among the design and structural people. The computers aren’t assigned—anyone can use any machine—but we all get in the habit of sitting at one particular spot, set up our coffee mugs there, that kind of thing.”

The cloth board that lined the wall behind the computers was filled with photos and cartoons. Personal items—coffee mugs, pencil cups, action figures—sat on the shelf that ran the length of the counter. A faded photo of Cubs legend Ryne Sandberg, signed to Sebastian, was pinned behind the computer where Aliana was standing.

“So this was the machine that Sebastian mostly used. And this morning Tyler asked me to go through the files, make sure anything Sebastian worked on was, well, was correct and to get it uploaded to the project database if Sebastian hadn’t already taken care of it.”

She tapped the keyboard and the monitor came to life. “It all looked straightforward, and then I found this audio file in a hidden sector. When I heard it, I got Tyler and he said I should get you.”

She clicked on the play icon. The recording was scratchy; two men were talking, but the mike had been fairly far from their mouths. The recording was too muffled to follow well; I had Aliana replay it several times but still couldn’t get it all.

“All we want is a chance to bid [words unclear],” the first one said.

“We’re not talking to new [players?] now,” the second man said.

“[Unclear] permits are [unclear] and even for this job there can be [unclear] obstacles. We can [unclear] for you.”

“Is this a threat?”

“Of course not, but everyone has to pay to play. No one gets something for nothing.”

A pause, then the second man said, “I don’t make these decisions. I’ll have to get back to you.”

Another pause, longer, then the first speaker said, so quickly that he was even harder to understand, “You work with us and we work with you. You don’t want to work with us, just remember we gave you [unclear—maybe ‘a chance’].”

That was the end of the file.

I looked at Aliana. “Was that Sebastian?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know who either of them was.”

“Would you know Nabiyev’s voice?” I asked.

“He has a very heavy accent, Russian, Uzbeki, whatever,” Tyler said. “And his voice is deeper.”

“Where could this have taken place? Is there some project your engineering firm is trying to bid on?”

“I don’t know either of those guys,” Tyler said sharply. “And my firm doesn’t do business that way, not with threats. There’s plenty of work for construction engineers in this city. We don’t get one project, we go after a different one.”

“Any idea where the original of the recording is?” I asked.

“It’s not in this room—it would be on a thumb drive, likely, not in the Cloud,” Tyler said. “Otherwise, Sebastian wouldn’t have been in here early to upload it. But after I heard it, I shut this office. Aliana and I scoured the place. While she was waiting for you, I checked the contents of all the drives we found.”

He pointed at a carton that held a good thirty or more USB drives. “I discovered that some of our architects and engineers are too bored—I saw a staggering amount of porn as well as video games—but not the audio file.”

It hadn’t been in the gym bag he’d left in his locker, so either someone had taken it from the room, or Sebastian had been carrying it when he disappeared. Or it had been taken by the person who ransacked his and Viola’s apartment last week.

Uncle Jerry had promised if Sebastian did something difficult for him, he’d make sure the debt was forgiven. Fugher and his handlers hadn’t asked Sebastian to deliver the threat, but they must have had some assignment connected with the threat, otherwise why had he recorded it? Or had the assignment been to record the conversation so that someone—Fugher? Nabiyev?—could use it for blackmail?