Page 77 of Dominion’s Collar

I open the PDF. It's a set of bank statements, partially redacted, showing a series of cash deposits in the months surrounding Claire's death. Large, irregular amounts. No source identified. The implication is obvious: Tomas was paid for something.

It looks like misdirection. Tomas has a temper and a history of boundary issues that I already documented and deprioritized. Pointing me at his finances feels designed to pull me back toward a suspect I've mostly discarded.

But Gaudet is too smart to send me something I can dismiss on sight. The best misdirection contains truth, and unexplained cash deposits around the time of Claire's death are worth verifying regardless of who brought them to my attention. I save the PDF to my case files, tag it as probable misdirection, and add it to the list of things I need Andy to look at quietly.

Whoever sent this knows enough about my investigation to understand that Tomas is a plausible target. They know I've been asking about Elysium's inner circle. And they have access to financial records that would take either institutional authority or significant personal resources to obtain.

Stephanie's refusal and the vanished records arrive within hours of each other. The Tomas email follows soon after. That's coordination, and coordination requires a person who understands exactly what I've been building.

I pick up my phone and call Vivienne. She answers on the fourth ring. "Natalie."

"How are you?" I keep my voice neutral.

The pause lasts two beats too long. "I'm fine. Just busy."

Vivienne Thibault doesn't hesitate. She's a woman who carries silence like a tool, but this isn't her silence. This is the caution of someone measuring how much to say.

"Has anyone contacted you?" I ask. "Since we last spoke?"

She pauses again. "Why do you ask?"

The non-answer is the answer. "Vivienne."

"I received a message," she says. "Through the community network. Very polite. Very thoughtful. Expressing concern about the emotional toll of revisiting difficult memories."

The words are innocuous. The delivery tells me everything. Someone reached out to Vivienne using the language of care to communicate a threat. The message was wrapped in therapeutic vocabulary that anyone in the lifestyle would recognize as appropriate concern. The genius is that Vivienne can't point to a single word that constitutes intimidation. She can only feel the shape of what was communicated underneath.

"Did it come from someone you know?" I ask.

"It came from someone everyone knows." Her voice drops. "And that's all I'm going to say about it."

The line goes silent. I hear Vivienne breathing, the rhythm of a woman deciding whether to hang up or speak.

"Be careful, Natalie."

She said the same thing at the end of our last meeting. The repetition doesn't feel like a verbal habit. It feels like emphasis.

"I will."

"No," she says. "I mean be careful about who cares about you. The ones who care the most can see the most. And some of what they see, they'll act on."

She disconnects. I hold the phone against my ear for two seconds after the silence starts.

I set the phone down. The case board I've built in my head is shifting, the pins moving themselves into new positions. Stephanie silenced. Records erased. Misdirection planted. Vivienne warned.

The name forming in my head is Gaudet. Not proven. But the pattern keeps pointing the same direction, and the direction has stopped feeling like coincidence.

If I'm right about him, he didn't do any of this with a weapon or a threat. He did it with relationships. He reached out to Stephanie as the concerned mentor he's always played. He warned Vivienne through the language she'd trust. He pointed me at Tomas using evidence that looks damning until you understand it's been manufactured.

That's a big "if." But the if is shrinking.

A consent predator's methodology, applied to evidence instead of bodies. Hide inside the system. Use the access everyone gave you. Let the institution do the work.

A new message appears in my inbox. An address I've never seen, routed through what looks like a temporary hosting service. The sender left no name, no identifying information. Four words.

Stop looking for me.

My fingers freeze on the keyboard. The first thought is Cécile. But I've been getting anonymous messages all morning. Whoever is erasing my trail would love nothing more than to make me stop looking for the one witness who might confirm the pattern. I let the question sit: Is this genuinely from the woman I've been searching for, or from someone who knows I'm searching and wants me to stop?