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Chapter 4: The journalist who didn’t look away

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Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~9 min read

Chapter 4: The journalist who didn’t look away

DOMINIC

He had a rule about personal interest in professional matters.

The rule was: it doesn’t exist. You are interested in outcomes, in information, in the management of risk. You are not interested in the person across from you as a person. Personal interest was the fastest way to make a bad decision, and bad decisions in his line of work had a specific category of consequence.

He had made this rule at twenty-two and had kept it without difficulty for twelve years.

He was finding it slightly less easy to keep than usual.

He thought about this while reviewing the Wednesday briefings — three property acquisitions pending, a supply chain dispute that needed resolution, two political contacts who had become unstable in the past month and required a decision about continued usefulness. He thought about it in the specific way he usually thought about things that required attention: as a problem to be analyzed and contained.

The problem was: she had come back.

He had told Marcus — the security Marcus — that if she came back, show her to the north wall booth. He had said this with the full understanding that it was a choice, that he could have told Marcus to show her the door if she came back, that there was no professional reason to continue a conversation with a journalist who was following a thread that ran adjacent to his operations.

The professional argument for continued contact was straightforward: she was going to find Hargrove with or without him, and if she found Hargrove without him she would find the DK Holdings connection without context, which created unnecessary exposure. Managed information was safer than unmanaged information. He could give her enough to direct the investigation toward Hargrove and away from himself, ensure the story landed in a way that was accurate and contained, and end the exposure cleanly.

This was a sound analysis. He had made it before she walked in on Tuesday and he had made it again before she walked in on Thursday and both times it had been correct.

He was aware that it was also incomplete.

He had been in rooms with a great number of people who feared him, which was by design and had practical advantages that had compounded over years of cultivation. Fear was a reliable tool. It produced predictable behavior and it was easy to maintain once established.

She was afraid — he had seen it on Tuesday, recognized the specific quality of it — and she had come anyway. That was a different thing. Most people chose between fear and action. She had chosen both simultaneously, which required a particular kind of architecture.

He found himself wanting to understand the architecture.

He dealt with this by adding a task to his briefing list: *Winters background.* He gave it to his intelligence person, a woman named Chen who had come up through the city’s financial intelligence unit before concluding that the private sector offered more interesting problems. Chen could produce a thorough background on most subjects within forty-eight hours.

He received the briefing the following morning.

Sera Winters. Twenty-five. Born in Hartford, Connecticut. Parents divorced when she was eleven; mother was a social worker, father was a contractor who had done three years for fraud when Sera was fourteen. She had been raised primarily by her mother and had won a full scholarship to Northwestern’s journalism school, where she had graduated second in her class. She had come to the Tribune as a news reporter and had been promoted to the investigative unit after fourteen months, which was faster than anyone in the unit’s recent history.

She had been Marcus Webb’s mentee for two years before his death. According to Tribune staff records — which Chen had accessed through means that would not survive a legal review — she had taken three days of bereavement leave and returned to the investigative unit, where she had requested reassignment to Webb’s open case files within one week.

The panic attacks were not in any record. He had observed them; he had no data on the frequency or history.

He read the briefing twice and filed it and thought about a fourteen-year-old girl whose father went to prison and who had grown up to investigate the kind of men her father had been adjacent to, and he thought about the specific shape of that commitment — the ones that came from something real rather than from ambition.

He thought: *she’s not doing this for a career.*

He thought: *she’s doing this for Marcus.*

He thought: *she’s doing this because she believes it can mean something.*

He added this observation to his own internal briefing and then moved to the afternoon’s meetings, which were various and required his full attention.

He did not stop thinking about her.

This was noted and filed and did not, in any functional sense, change his calendar.

He saw her again on Saturday.

He had not expected her on Saturday. Their arrangement, such as it was, had been two conversations in a bar and an exchange of information that had been, from his end, more candid than he was typically candid with anyone who was not on his payroll. He had given her the name of Hargrove’s campaign finance director, who was the weakest point in the structure and the most likely to talk under the right kind of pressure. He had given her the dates of three meetings that would be corroborated by the parking structure camera records she wouldn’t be able to access herself.

He had not given her a schedule or an invitation.

She appeared at Obsidian on Saturday at nine, not ten, before the main crowd. She was at the bar when he arrived, and she turned when he came through the door in the way of someone who had been watching it.

He went to the bar.

She said: “I talked to Hargrove’s finance director.”

He said: “I know.”

She said: “He’s willing to cooperate.”

He said: “I know that too.”

She looked at him.

She said: “You’ve been watching my sources.”

He said: “I’ve been monitoring the situation.”

She said: “That’s the same thing.”

He said: “From a certain angle.”

She studied him with the journalist’s look — not hostile, not friendly, the look of someone running analysis. She had the legal pad in her bag. She had not taken it out.

She said: “I need the parking garage records. February fourteenth. The specific bay where Marcus left his car.”

He said: “Those records are in a private security system.”

She said: “Yes.”

He said: “Accessing them would be illegal.”

She said: “I’m aware.”

He looked at her.

She looked back.

He thought: *she’s asking me to do something she knows she shouldn’t be asking for and she’s asking anyway because she needs it.*

He thought: *she would not have asked Marcus this. She would not have asked anyone this.*

He thought: *she’s asking me because she’s decided I’m the only one who can get it and because she’s decided that’s a trade she’s willing to make.*

He said: “What you’re asking for would be inadmissible.”

She said: “I don’t need it to be admissible. I need it to know where to look for something that is.”

He said: “If I get you those records, you understand what that means.”

She said: “It means I owe you something.”

He said: “It means you’re in my world, even partially, which is a different kind of exposure than standing outside my club with a notebook.”

She was quiet for a moment.

She said: “I know what I’m asking.”

He said: “Do you.”

She said: “I’m asking you to give me information I can’t get legally, so that I can follow it to something I can get legally, so that I can print a story that tells the truth about who killed Marcus Webb.” She met his eyes. “I know exactly what I’m asking.”

He held her gaze.

He thought about the rule he had made at twenty-two.

He thought about a woman who looked at him without looking away and asked for the thing she needed with both hands.

He said: “I’ll have the records Monday.”

She said: “Thank you.”

He said: “Don’t thank me yet.”

She said: “I know.” She paused. “I know what this is. I’m not confused about what this is.”

He thought: *one of us is.*

He did not say this.

He had the records pulled on Sunday and spent an hour reviewing them himself before giving them to Chen to sanitize. The footage from the parking structure showed two things: the car arriving at seven forty-two AM, and a black sedan with a plate registered to a shell company that Chen cross-referenced to three other incidents in the previous eighteen months, all connected to a man named Garrett who worked — had worked, until March — as head of security for Councilman Hargrove.

He looked at the footage for a long time.

He thought: *she was right. It was Hargrove.*

He thought: *she’s going to print this.*

He thought: *good.*

He thought, underneath that, something more complicated that he did not immediately file: that a journalist was going to print the truth about what had happened to her mentor, and that he had helped her do it, and that none of the things he had told himself about managed information and professional risk had been the real reason he’d put the records in her hands.

He let Marcus know to expect her Monday.

He went back to his briefings.

The rule stood. He was simply adjusting its parameters.

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