Lena’s stomach did a slow roll. Was she caught in something more dangerous than a simple theft? When Sato returned, he looked grimmer. “The dye is a match for the batch stolen in a transit robbery three months ago,” he said quietly. “This isn’t just about Mrs. Marrow’s eighteen thousand.”
The blue fiber was a specific material used by ‘Swift-Drop,’ a local independent courier service. If the money in that purse had been in contact with that fiber, it hadn’t just been “sitting” in the bag; it had been moved. The purse wasn’t just lost property; it was a transport vessel.
Lena realized she was a pawn in a much larger game. If she hadn’t picked up that bag, she’d be sitting in her apartment right now, worrying about rent. Instead, she was the primary suspect in a money-laundering or robbery case. “You have to find that cyclist,” she pleaded. “He must be the one who put it there. He was waiting for me—or someone like me—to pick it up.”