The photograph in the manila folder was better-looking than Nora Voss had expected.

She'd been doing this job for eight years — six in homicide, two in financial crimes, which was a lateral move everyone else considered a demotion and she considered a promotion into the most sophisticated, least appreciated department in the building. She'd learned to expect a certain profile: mid-fifties, overweight, the kind of man who wore his wealth in inverse proportion to his taste. The kind of face that didn't photograph well because it had stopped trying.

Callum Reyes was thirty-six and photographed like someone had arranged him.

She looked at the surveillance photo — him coming out of a building on Alcott Street, winter coat, morning coffee in one hand, head turned three-quarters toward something off-camera. Dark hair that needed a cut. The strong, considered face of a man who was paying attention to something. Eyes she couldn't quite read at this resolution.

She set it aside and went back to the financial summary.

Reyes Capital Management. Founded eight years ago, currently managing approximately $340 million in client assets, primarily through the firm's flagship art acquisition fund — a vehicle that purchased contemporary art for institutional and private clients, held assets, generated paper returns, and turned over portfolio holdings at regular intervals. Clean on the surface. Audited annually. Every filing in order.

And underneath it: seventeen wire transfers over eighteen months, moving between Reyes Capital and a network of shell companies registered in Malta, the Cayman Islands, and twice, in an audacity she had to grudgingly respect, the Isle of Man. The receiving entities were owned, directly or through intermediary layers, by a man named Viktor Strand.

Viktor Strand, who ran the most sophisticated money-laundering operation on the eastern seaboard and who had not been successfully prosecuted once in eleven years of attempts.

Viktor Strand, who three years ago had been the last person to see a financial analyst named David Park alive before Park ended up in the Harrow River.

David Park's murder was still technically open on the books in homicide. Nobody in that unit worked it anymore.

Nora Voss worked it. She worked everything connected to Viktor Strand because she had been working toward Viktor Strand for two years and Callum Reyes was, according to her captain, the best lead they'd had.

She picked up the photo again.

"Voss." Captain Diane Holt appeared in the doorway. She was fifty-three and had the particular alertness of someone who had learned to be suspicious of everything, including quiet. "You've read the file?"

"Three times."

"And?"

"The money moves are good. Strand's fingerprints are on the receiving end — through the usual layers, but they're there." She paused. "Reyes is either the architect of the transfer scheme or he has no idea what his fund is being used for."

"Which do you think?"

Nora looked at the photograph. "I don't know yet."

Holt came fully into the room and closed the door, which meant the next sentence was the kind that didn't go in the formal file. "I need you close to him," she said. "Not surveillance. Close."

"Undercover."

"The gallery holds a private client event next Thursday. New acquisition showing, invitation only. We have a name we can put you in under — a collector, Alexandra Vane, based in London, recently relocated. Background is solid. Two days of prep and you're ready." She paused. "I need you to get inside Reyes Capital. Not the outer offices. The inner workings. His trust."

"That takes time."

"Then use it well." Holt picked up the photo and looked at it. "He's smart. Don't underestimate him because he looks like that."

Nora retrieved the photo. "I never underestimate anyone because of how they look."

"No," Holt said. "You underestimate people because you think you've already worked them out. Don't do that either."

It was, Nora would think later, the best advice she received and the advice she failed to take.