I woke up at six in the morning having slept maybe three hours.
That was fine. I had built my entire adult life around not needing much. Not much sleep, not much company, not much noise. Most people filled their days with things that didn't matter because the silence made them uncomfortable. I had gotten comfortable with the silence a long time ago.
I made coffee, stood at the window for a while watching the city pretend it had somewhere important to be, then sat back down at the desk and opened the Hargrove file.
By nine I had added four more pages of notes.
Vincent Caro had no social media presence, no LinkedIn, no public records beyond a single business registration from 2011 for a consulting firm called Caro Advisory Group with no listed clients and no verifiable revenue. The kind of company that exists on paper to explain income that comes from somewhere else. His home address wasn't listed anywhere public but property records in Manhattan showed a unit in a building on the Upper East Side purchased in 2013 for two point three million dollars cash. No mortgage. A man with a paper thin public profile paying cash for Manhattan real estate.
That told me everything about what Vincent Caro actually did for a living.
Robert Fenn was easier to research because public officials always were. He had been a city council member since 2006 and a deputy commissioner of the Department of Buildings since 2014, which explained exactly how Hargrove's construction projects sailed through permit approvals that took other developers years. Fenn had a wife, two kids in college, a house in Westchester, and a lifestyle that a city official salary could not realistically support. He drove a car that cost more than most people's annual salary. His wife's Instagram, which was public and updated daily, showed vacations in places that cost serious money.
People like Fenn always left trails because they couldn't resist showing off.
I closed the laptop around noon, changed into running clothes and went outside.
I wasn't a person who ran for enjoyment. I ran because it kept the body functional and because an hour of physical effort was the only thing that reliably cleared my head when thoughts started piling up on top of each other. I had a route I followed three times a week that cut through a small park about six blocks from my building.
The park had a garden section near the east entrance. Flower beds, a few stone benches, old trees. Not the kind of place anyone interesting went, which made it peaceful.
I slowed to a walk when I reached it.
There was a rose bed near the far bench, deep red ones that had bloomed early this year because of the warm March. I stopped in front of them without meaning to.
I saw the red rose petals shining like wine.
Emma used to grow roses in a plastic pot on the windowsill of the apartment we grew up in. She said flowers made small spaces feel less small. I told her she was being dramatic. She laughed and told me I wouldn't understand beauty if it sat down next to me and introduced itself.
She was probably right about that.
I thought about the million dollars our parents accepted to stop asking questions about how she died in a hotel room at twenty two with no real explanation and a case file that closed itself in less than two weeks. I thought about how my father never spent a single cent of that money, kept it in an account he never touched, like spending it would mean he had actually agreed to the deal. He died in a car accident two years later still pretending the money didn't exist.
I thought I had too much time.
That was the thing nobody told you about being financially free at twenty three. Time was supposed to be the reward. The whole point. Work smart, build systems, earn while you sleep, buy back your hours. That was what every productivity article and finance influencer said like it was the secret to everything.
Nobody mentioned what happened when the hours came back and you didn't know what to fill them with.
These thoughts always cross our mind.
I sat down on the bench next to the rose bed.
A month ago I would have sat here and thought about nothing in particular, maybe run a few numbers in my head about the digital business, checked what was selling, what wasn't. Normal things. Small things. The kind of thinking that kept the days moving without asking too much of you.
Now I had Twelve pages file on a web of corruption and a dead compliance officer who had probably sat at his own desk thinking similar thoughts before someone made a different kind of decision about his future.
In the end we regret and die.
I stood up.
The roses looked the same as they did a minute ago. They didn't care about any of this. They just grew toward whatever light was available and bloomed when the temperature was right. There was probably something to learn from that but I wasn't in the mood to learn anything poetic right now.
I started running again.
By the time I got back to the apartment I had made a decision. Research had a point of diminishing returns. I had enough on Vincent Caro to start moving. His consulting office, if it could be called that, was listed on the business registration as a suite in a commercial building in Midtown. I had driven past it once already just to see what I was dealing with. Third floor, corner unit, one visible entry point from the lobby.
I didn't know yet exactly what I was going to do or how I was going to do it.
But I knew I was going to stop sitting at a desk and start showing up in the same physical spaces as these people.
You couldn't learn everything about a man from a screen.
Some things you had to see for yourself.