Smiley emoticon back. I knew not to push it. Didn’t think to ask why my husband was out in the yard. “Patrolling.” He hated yardwork. We had someone for that.

Two hours to kill and I felt brave enough for risk again. Time to analyze Vilcapampa property holdings. Had to get ahead of this thing. Had to carve a path forward.

Didn’t I?

The Vilcapampa “umbrella,” or “octopus,” looked straightforward because it was so crude at times. A classic autocratic, top-down, family-run company that happened to produce net revenues of just under one trillion dollars a year. Blunt, in how organized, at least from public records. The senior Vilcapampa served not just as the founder and owner but also as CEO. The CFO was his younger brother. The ruling board was riddled through with other relatives. Anywhere Vilcapampa could promote from within the family, he did. This had clearly hurt them in some areas, as the expertise of those appointed didn’t match up with the responsibilities.

Wince-inducing: there was even a Vilcapampa Institute in Peru that traded off the faux indigenous connection to “help” traditionally oppressed Indian groups in the mountains, near ancient Incan ruins. Just enough distance from Argentina that the institute could, with apparent impunity, help launder monies from the less savory of their side businesses, as far as I could tell.

In addition to the main corporation and its subsidiaries, there were, as always, a flurry of shell companies and investments in other corporations. (Incorp Corp, Inc., was my favorite.) Which was where the crude and the blunt became a knot.

I wasn’t yet ready to undo the knot. I just needed to know what company names Vilcapampa had operated under in the Pacific Northwest, to get a sense of other physical locations that might hold the clue to a hummingbird, a salamander.

The easiest thing was to locate the properties Silvina herself held or leased. What was in her name? The storage palace, until recently, because so unprofitable, no doubt. The history there was fraught. Her father had basically bought the whole mountain, fenced off most of it, and had briefly intended to continue an abandoned mining operation near the summit. Except permits had been difficult to get due to community concerns, and he’d withdrawn from the effort after a year or two. Contented himself with some halfhearted logging.