Sienna took that without a flinch, which I've learned is how she flinches. "Then the Galway records aren't a someday," she said. "They're a race."
"They're a race." Cormac nearly sounded like he approved. "And he's been running it longer than we have."
Then he straightened, took the four of us in, and started, and for the next while he walked us through the worst night of Sienna's life like a man reading a train timetable, which is exactly the mercy it sounds like. No drama. Each piece set down in the order it earned. He's good at this. It's an ugly thing to be good at, and thank God one of us is.
The night of the massacre. The method. The timing.
"Incendiaries," he said. "Military grade. Not something you pick up at the corner shop. Whoever did this had a line into a military supply chain, or a black market slick enough to reach the same hardware." He tapped a photo. "It was built to look like overwhelming force. It wasn't. It was precise. The fire was there to burn evidence as much as people."
The photo was Sienna's childhood home, four years on, the way she'd found it when she went back for it. I made myself look at it. I made myself not look at her while I did.
"They knew the layout," she said.
"They knew exactly which parts to hit to sell an all-out assault while they put the real work into a few rooms."
"Which rooms," Ronan said.
"Your father's study." Cormac said it to her, careful the way he's only careful with load-bearing things. "The records room. The safe room off the master bedroom." A beat. "They were hunting something."
"What."
"Don't know yet. But wiping out the family wasn't the whole job. If it were, they'd have done it simpler. This was thorough ina pointed way. They wanted a thing destroyed or carried off, and the family dead was second on the list. Or the price of the first."
I watched her turn that over, and I watched it cost her, and I kept my mouth shut, because sometimes the only useful thing you can hand a person is quiet, and I've learned to tell when it's that kind.
"My father's records," she said, slow. "He kept them the way your father kept his." She looked at Ronan. "Recordings. Documents. Contracts."
"Yes."
"Someone didn't want those records to exist."
"Working theory," Cormac said. "Which means whoever did this believed your father had something on them. Big enough to be worth all of this."
And that was where it turned over in me. I'd been drifting the edge of the spread, half listening, the way I do when my hands need work and my head runs better sideways. Something in the money had been itching at me since I first read her files a week back, and I hadn't been able to put a word to it. Now I could.
"Or was about to," I said.
They looked at me. I picked up the page I'd been circling and brought it into the middle of the table.
"What if it isn't about what he already had," I said. "What if it's about what he was about to find."
"Explain," Ronan said.
I spread it out. Her own files, the financial ones. "These transactions you flagged, the eighteen months before the attack. This isn't noise. Somebody was running money through your family's accounts and nobody the wiser. Small amounts, odd intervals. The kind of thing you'd never clock unless you were already hunting it."
She leaned in over the paper, and I felt the exact second she saw what I saw, because her whole body went still.
"They were laundering through us," she said.
"Through your family's accounts. And your father was auditing his own books, there are notes right here on a discrepancy he'd flagged, so he'd have found it."
"And followed it back to whoever was doing it," Cormac said.
"Which finishes that person," Ronan said, dead even. "Liam Madigan had a line into every major family in the country. If he named someone laundering through his accounts and took it to them, that man was done."
"Completely." Sienna laid a flat hand on the documents like she could hold the shape of it down. "Nobody does business with you. Nobody shelters you." She looked up. "So they killed him first."
"And burned his records," Cormac said. "And painted it on us."