Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
While Jaz grabbed his laptop, Kenzie took a minute to pull herself together.
That peg in her mind labeled Jaz had more information on it now. Before, he’d been playboy and deadbeat dad. Then informant. And charcuterie board artist—she mustn’t forget that.
Now she had new information. Jaz was a good man, a good man who’d done some really bad things. But he was trying to make them right. His decisions certainly could ruin his life.
But should they? Should he lose everything—freedom, family, future—because of foolish choices made in his teens and early twenties? Not choices to break the law but just…stupid, youthful, arrogant choices?
If anyone could understand the need for second chances, it was Kenzie.
She’d made her own rash decision once. One terrible choice in a moment of terror that had marked her in ways she still didn’t talk about. Ways that made her freeze at doorways, made her heart race even when she was perfectly safe, made trust feel like a luxury way out of her budget.
But God had extended her grace, a chance to become more than just that one night, that one choice, that one scar.
Shouldn’t Jaz get the same?
Or was it too late for him? All his terrible choices were lined up like dominoes, and they’d already started toppling.
It was only a matter of time before the last ones fell.
The question was, what would happen then?
Would he succeed in exposing El Fantasma and find freedom, or would he wind up in prison? Or dead?
She didn’t know.
Jaz had been honest with her and asked her to do the same, and she hadn’t had the courage.
He set pens, highlighters, and his laptop on the table before digging into his backpack. “You okay?”
“Yeah, just…yeah.”
“Sorry I dumped all that on you.”
“I’m glad you told me.”
He pulled out her Bible and the photo album she’d taken from her apartment and handed them to her.
“Thanks.”
“Sure.” He grabbed all the paperwork she’d saved since she’d started her business and spread it out. “These are all out of order.”
The different jobs weren’t separated in file folders, which certainly would have made shoving them into those small bedrails a problem.
Instead, she’d just stapled the papers for each job together, then folded them longways.
“I had a system.” Well, sort of a system.
Fifty percent of a system, anyway. She slid the papers closer.
“I started with the front right and moved clockwise, so…” She started skimming the stapled packets, all stacked together now, checking the dates on the forms.
“What’s with the cloak-and-dagger stuff, anyway?”
She looked up from her work. “For such a time as this?”
He smiled, obviously remembering that he’d said the same thing to her about the chest of women’s clothes in his safe house. “Seriously, though.”
“I didn’t have an alarm system.” She continued separating the stacked, crinkled papers into four piles, representing the four bedrails.
“I noticed. Also, you need to get that window fixed.”
“Nah. Anybody who tries it will think it’s locked.”
“You hope.”
“My dad trained all of us to be cautious. Since so many people know what I do—meaning they know that when I’m not around, I’m usually gone for days, even weeks at a time, I figured I should hide my valuables.”
“Your paperwork is valuable?”
She stacked the sections in chronological order.
“It’s not precious, if that’s what you mean.
But it’s valuable to me. This is my client list, my business.
I probably could’ve taken photos of all this stuff”—she tapped the top of the pile—“to have an electronic record, but I figured paper was fine, as long as nothing happened to it.”
“Hence, the bedrails.”
“Hence?” She grinned. He didn’t seem like a hence kind of guy. “Thus, I needed a place to hide them.”
“Whereas, most people would have just put them in their filing cabinet.”
She tapped the bottom edges of the papers on the table to straighten them. “Notwithstanding, I am not ‘most people.’”
“I think that’s a foul—is that the right use of the word?”
“How would I know?”
Jaz grinned. “Alas, you are not ‘most people.’”
She set down the stack, now ordered chronologically, and scooted closer to him. “What are we looking for?”
Something shifted in his expression—surprise, maybe, or relief. Maybe he’d expected her to pull away after hearing his story. But who was she to judge his life, his choices?
He was a human who needed saving, just like her. Simple as that.
Normally, Kenzie was intensely private about every part of her life. Her business, her client files… Her past, her choices.
But she didn’t mind this. She trusted him in a way she’d never trusted any man who didn’t share her last name.
The realization should have terrified her. Instead, it circled around her like a warm breeze on a chilly day—unexpected, but not unwelcome.
“Here.” Jaz handed her back half the pile.
She glanced at the dates, her earliest clients. “What are we looking for?” Kenzie studied a transport agreement for a fifty-foot yacht from St. Martin to Miami.
“Connections. Patterns. Something that links these yacht owners.”
“They’re all different people. Different companies.”
“On paper, yeah.” He tapped the paper in front of him. “But who are they really? Shell corporations? Fake identities? There has to be something.”
Kenzie scanned contract after contract, searching for connections she’d never noticed before.
Different yacht owners. Different yacht names.
Different ports of origin. Some were larger vessels, some smaller.
Some were for short hauls within the Caribbean and Gulf, some longer, though most ended in Miami or other American cities.
She’d never thought of that as unusual, but she did now.
Why hadn’t her clients wanted her to take the yachts from Miami to the Caribbean? Why always north, never south?
Jaz had pulled his laptop closer and was peering at the screen. “A lot of these yachts are registered in Panama.”
“Yeah?” She considered that. “It’s a good choice if you want someplace without crazy taxes, and especially if you want privacy.”
“Right, but it still seems like a lot.” He highlighted lines on a few packets, then wrote something on a notepad.
Kenzie reached for the next packet. These were her earliest contracts, from when she’d first started the business.
She’d been so proud of these first jobs.
Sure, she’d had a lot of help starting out, but she’d hired the crews, she’d successfully transported these vessels and delivered them safely to their destinations.
She’d done the work. Each job proved she could make it on her own.
Now, they might be evidence of how she’d been used. As much as she didn’t want to believe that, this was all the evidence they had. If it didn’t reveal anything, then how were they going to get out of this mess?
They searched for an hour, then another. Kenzie’s eyes burned from staring at documents. Her back ached from hunching over the table. Beside her, Jaz had gone quiet, his earlier energy fading until he seemed to have nothing left but persistent determination.
“Aside from the Panama connection, there’s no pattern.
” He sat back, shoving his stack of papers away.
“There’s nothing here. Different names, different companies, different—“ He stopped, running both hands through his hair. “Five years. Five years I’ve been chasing this guy, and I can’t find a single thread to follow. ”
Kenzie felt his frustration. This was it. This was all the evidence they had. If there was nothing here, then what? They’d risked everything, gotten Laguerre shot, for a stack of papers that led nowhere. “Maybe we should trade stacks, huh? Maybe we’ll see something.”
His sigh told her he was close to giving up, but he piled up the papers he’d been studying and slid them to her, then took the ones she’d worked on.
They went back to work.
The names and ports and businesses were starting to blur. She was so tired.
Had it really been that very morning when she’d woken up in that hotel room in St. Barts? This had been the longest day in recorded history.
She was stifling a yawn when Jaz straightened beside her.
“What’s this?” He tapped the corner of one of the contracts.
She pulled it closer and read what she’d jotted in the margin.
EC referral.
For a moment, she’d thought he’d found something helpful. “It’s nothing, except probably proof that that job wasn’t related to all this. It means my mentor referred that client to me. His name’s Edwin Cusack. He’s the one who helped me establish my business.”
Jaz adjusted the chair so he could face her. “How so?”
“He reached out to me not long after I got my ICC, the—”
“Your international sailing license. I’m with you.”
“Right. So Edwin is a friend of Cal, who was my sailing instructor for years. Cal and my dad worked together back in the day.”
“CIA, then?”
She nodded. “I assume so.”
“Edwin…Cusack, did you say?”
“Right. He’s older than Dad and Cal, maybe in his late sixties? A semi-retired businessman with contacts in the Caribbean. Basically, he knew a bunch of rich people who owned yachts.”
Jaz’s eyes narrowed. “That’s…convenient.”
Her defenses rose. “It was, actually, very convenient.”
Jaz lifted a hand. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just saying… I’m not used to getting that kind of help.”
“Well… I’m sorry to hear that. Help is…” She groped for a word, finally shrugging. “Helpful?”
He chuckled. “You have quite the way with words.”
“Goofball.” She thought back to those exciting days when she’d turned her dream into a reality.
“Edwin didn’t just help connect me with people.
Long before I got to that point, he spent time with me, teaching me how to run a business.
Not just this business, but any business.
I knew sailing, but I knew nothing about payroll and spreadsheets and all that…
boring stuff. Edwin walked me through it. He was amazing.”