15. hunter #2
The first page was ugly in the way useful information usually was: dates, payment records, fragments of requests that had survived because nobody had bothered cleaning every system they touched.
Ronan had arranged them chronologically and left his notes in the margins, short enough that I could follow the trail without reading his conclusions first. The earliest entry was several months old and tied to a private investigator outside Seattle.
The next came through a security subcontractor.
Two more used different names but the same billing structure, and by the time I reached the fourth, the pattern was obvious enough that I stopped caring about the individual companies.
Someone had spent money finding Echo.
The requests were specific without being revealing.
Old addresses. Vehicle sightings. Hospital admissions.
Rental records. Traffic-camera pulls. Nothing that said why she mattered, only that somebody with resources had wanted her location badly enough to keep paying new people whenever the previous trail went cold.
I opened one of the supporting files and found a mileage claim for three separate trips through Washington.
Another investigator had billed for records access at two hospitals and a private clinic.
The dates stretched far enough apart that this was not somebody panicking after a single incident.
Whoever had been looking for her had maintained the search.
Ronan came in while I was reading the third attachment and took the chair on the other side of my desk. He glanced once toward Echo before lowering his voice. “There’s more, but that’s the cleanest section. I left out anything I couldn’t verify twice.”
“That many contractors?”
“Enough to avoid building a single trail.” He reached over and scrolled past one of the payment records. “Different names, different companies, different reasons given for the searches. But the timing overlaps too neatly.”
I kept reading while he explained where the records had come from.
Most were not Quorum files. That mattered.
He had pulled them from old business accounts, investigator databases, insurance logs, and one county access request that should have disappeared years ago.
Whoever organized the search had known how to keep the work distributed.
Malakai looked over from beside Echo. “How far did it spread?”
“Seattle first. Then north. A few pulls farther east once the local trail went dead.” Ronan turned the laptop slightly so Malakai could see the date range without leaving his seat. “Nothing recent enough to matter now, but it wasn’t casual.”
Echo’s pen slowed across the page.
She did not look up immediately. That was probably why Ronan noticed before I did. He stopped talking, and the quiet drew her attention more effectively than another question would have.
“What?” she asked, still looking at her notes.
I closed one of the attachments but left the timeline open. “Ronan found people searching for you after the warehouse.”
That got her eyes on me.
There was no visible alarm. Echo leaned back in the chair and rested one arm across the top of her notebook, waiting for the rest as though I had told her somebody had checked her credit.
“How many?”
“Enough that I’m not calling it random.”
She nodded once, more acknowledgement than surprise. “I knew somebody kept looking.”
Ronan’s attention sharpened. “You knew for certain?”
“I knew I stopped using places more than once because somebody showed up after I did.” Echo reached for Malakai’s water without asking and took a drink before continuing. “Could’ve been the same person every time. Could’ve been different people. I didn’t stick around to ask for business cards.”
Malakai took the bottle back when she set it down. “Did they ever make contact?”
“Not after Seattle.”
That answer carried enough weight that none of us needed to ask what she meant by Seattle.
I went back to the timeline. “Did you know who was paying them?”
“No.”
“Any names?”
“Nothing useful. One guy used Mitchell. Another never gave me one. There was a woman in Tacoma who pretended she was looking for somebody else until she realized I wasn’t stupid enough to believe her.
” Echo flipped her notebook closed, giving up on pretending she was still working.
“If you’re asking whether I can hand you a neat list, no.
If I had that, I would’ve handled it already. ”
Ronan pulled the county access request closer and tapped one of the dates. “This was filed almost three weeks after the first confirmed search. Whoever was behind it kept spending money after losing you.”
Echo’s expression did not change, but she looked at the screen longer this time. “That tracks.”
“With what?”
“With them being annoying.”
I ignored the phrasing and watched her instead. She was not withholding out of fear. If anything, she seemed irritated that the subject required enough attention to pull her away from classwork. That made the missing motive more important, not less.
“You never figured out what they wanted from you?”
“I knew why Nichlas had enemies interested in me. That was enough at the time.” She rubbed her thumb across the edge of the notebook, then stopped. “After I got hurt, staying alive mattered more than interviewing the people following me.”
Ronan leaned back and let the silence sit rather than pushing her. It was the right choice. Echo answered direct questions when she saw a reason for them. Cornering her only made her decide the question itself was the problem.
I opened the oldest payment record again and compared the account structure to the later ones.
The names changed, but the spacing between transfers was consistent enough to suggest somebody authorizing work rather than several unrelated people acting independently.
It did not tell me who. It did not tell me what they wanted.
It only told me the search had organization behind it.
That was enough for now.
“Keep digging,” I told Ronan. “I want the people behind the payments, not just the contractors. Start with whoever owned the accounts before the shell companies were dissolved and work backward from there.”
He nodded and pulled the laptop toward himself long enough to copy the account numbers into his own notes. “I can also check whether any of these names touched Quorum-adjacent businesses, but I’m not assuming they did until something actually connects.”
“Good.”
Echo looked between us. “You’re very serious about this for people who met me five minutes ago.”
“You’ve been here longer than five minutes,” Malakai said, still reading over one of the old address records on my second screen. “And somebody spending that much money to find you matters if you’re operating here now.”
Echo did not answer immediately. She looked at him, then at me, and something in her face suggested she understood the distinction even if she had no intention of rewarding it with gratitude.
I closed Ronan’s file and moved it into the same private folder as the Primrose material.
The two investigations stayed separate for the moment.
One concerned the history somebody had buried around Echo’s family.
The other concerned the people who had once spent months trying to locate her.
I did not have enough to connect them, and I was not interested in manufacturing a pattern just because both were inconvenient.
Ronan stood and took the copy of the payment list with him, already scanning it again as he headed for the door.
Malakai remained beside Echo long enough to pull her charger farther from the edge of the table when she nearly caught the cord with her sleeve.
Echo noticed, frowned at him, and moved it back an inch as though that somehow restored control over the situation.
I watched the exchange, then turned back to the Primrose file.
Runo’s name sat in the center of the screen beside a history that should have been easier to verify.
Somewhere behind those missing years was the reason Echo had grown up knowing how to move through rooms like ours without needing instruction.
Somewhere behind Ronan’s payment trail was the reason strangers had kept spending money to find her long after she disappeared, and I needed the next name.