At 2:47 in the morning, Puit's house in the Windhaven development in Marietta—a gated community of four-bedroom colonials with two-car garages and HOA fees that were paid in Puit's case with money that had passed through several layers of informal accounting before it arrived in his checking account—was dark and silent in the way that suburban developments are dark and silent after midnight, which is completely, as if sound itself respects the property values.
The home security system was a monitored ADT unit with motion sensors on the first-floor doors, contacts on all exterior entries, and a keypad in the hallway that beeped softly when the code was entered, and then confirmed the arm or disarm status with the second lower tone.
Puit woke to the second tone. Not the alarm, not the shriek of a breach, just the quiet confirmation beep of a system that had been voluntarily disarmed by someone who knew the code.
And Puit was out of bed and across the room with his Glock 19 in his hand before his eyes were fully adjusted. Because 6 years of doing what he did had built into him a reflexive response to unexpected sounds that was faster than thought, he swept the upper floor first, methodical, room by room, closets open—nothing.
Then came down the stairs with the weapon raised and his breathing controlled, and the specific terror of a man in his own house who is trying very hard not to fully understand what the absence of an intruder means in combination with the disarmed alarm and the fact that all the doors were locked from the inside.
In the kitchen, in the center of the granite island, standing upright on its base with the precise balance of something placed there deliberately, was a single unfired 5.56mm NATO rifle cartridge, and beneath it, folded into a 2-inch square, a piece of white paper.
Puit stared at the round for a full 10 seconds before he reached for the paper. And when he unfolded it, the block lettering was so clean and precise that it looked printed rather than handwritten, and there were four words: I want it back.
He took a photograph of the note and called Vance without putting the gun down.
At the same moment, across the city in a high-rise condominium in Midtown, Vance was sitting at his laptop in the specific panic of a man watching his financial architecture collapse in real time.
He had decided after the cigar lounge that the DoD block meant he needed to move his hidden assets immediately: $387,000 in a Cayman Islands account that existed under a shell company name that had taken him 8 months to properly obscure. And he was in the process of routing the funds into decentralized cryptocurrency wallets that would break the trail into irretrievable fragments.
When he clicked the transfer and watched the screen refresh, the balance read $387,000.
He clicked refresh. It read $387,000.
He initiated the transfer. The screen refreshed. It read zero.
The transaction history showed a single outgoing wire executed 14 seconds ago, routed through 11 intermediary accounts in a sequence that Vance recognized with the sick clarity of someone who understands financial obfuscation at a professional level as infrastructure—not an individual's work, but an operation's work. The kind of routing that requires systems and access and coordination that no mechanic on Bowen Street assembles on a Thursday night.
The memo line on the wire read: Restitution, one of two.
His phone rang. Restricted number.
He answered it and heard no voice heard. Instead, the sound of a combination dial being turned on a heavy floor safe. The specific clicking of tumblers engaging in sequence. Click, click, click—three times.
And then Marcus Webb's voice, completely unhurried, carrying none of the urgency of a man who has just committed a federal wire transfer, and none of the anger of a man whose $280,000 was taken from him 5 hours ago. Just a voice making an observation:
"You really should have checked my references, Stuart."
The line went dead.
Vance sat in the dark of his condominium for a long time, and when Puit called 30 seconds later, he answered and listened to the story of the disarmed alarm and the rifle cartridge and the four-word note.
And when Puit finished, Vance said, "Don't go back to sleep. Meet me in an hour. The strip mall on Candler."
He put the phone down and looked at his zero-balance account.
The man he had dismissed as a mechanic had wiped $387,000 from a Cayman account in 14 seconds, and walked through a monitored alarm system, and left a rifle cartridge on the kitchen island of a detective's house, and locked the door on his way out.
And all of it had happened in the 5 hours since they kicked in his door.
And Vance, for the first time in six years of operating with the confidence of a man who has never faced a consequence, understood that he was dealing with something he had not accounted for.
The strip mall on Candler Road had been half vacant for 3 years, and the security cameras on the remaining businesses had been nonfunctional since the previous winter, which was why Puit had chosen it as an emergency meeting point 18 months ago when they needed somewhere to talk that wasn't a bar or a precinct or either of their houses.
And it was still the right choice in the sense that no one was watching—except that Puit did not know about the camera Marcus had attached to the utility pole at the lot's north entrance 4 hours earlier, or about the microphone relay that Cole had activated through their cell phones, turning the devices in their pockets into live audio feeds that were currently routing through three countries and into the ruggedized tablet in the back of a black SUV parked in an office complex 2 miles away.
The rain had started around 3:00 and was coming down seriously now, and both men were damp and strung with the specific edginess of people who have not slept and are aware that their situation has changed in ways they do not yet fully understand.
"Puit bypassed the ADT," Puit said for the second time since they'd got in the car. "A monitored system, bypassed it without triggering the alert to the monitoring center, and then he locked everything on his way out from the inside."