Wells #2
I'm jealous of a name on a phone screen, and I don't even know who it is or what the context is. And beyond seeing where this goes, we've not defined any of this. Except no announcement at work.
The recognition makes it worse. I don't do this. I don't sit in my office wondering about people I don't know and whether they matter. I assess threats. and solve problems. I don't feel uncertain about things I could eliminate with ten minutes of work.
Except this isn't a threat. It's a text message. And Cera flipped her phone over immediately. Was she hiding it?
My cursor hovers over the browser icon.
I think about the night I traced Peoria's IP address and how easy it was. How completely I violated the one rule I built my life around because I wanted to know, and then how that knowing changed everything.
This is the same instinct wearing a different face. If I want to do this right, I can't keep doing this. This isn't how real relationships work.
I close my hand into a fist and pull it off the keyboard.
If I want to know who Cas is, I can ask Cera, how normal people do it, like someone who trusts her enough not to run surveillance on her past.
The idea feels awkward and inefficient, and nothing like the way I'm built. But I made a choice when I deleted Midnight's account. I can't build something real with Cera if I keep treating her like a file.
I stand and walk to the window. The sun is dropping toward the horizon, the river below turning gold at the edges. My reflection stares back at me from the glass, tension visible in my shoulders.
Then I return to the Jakarta file and force myself to work.
I stay late after Cera leaves for the day. She's going to the rec center for her work with the kids.
The office empties a desk at a time, voices trailing off down the hall, doors clicking shut. By 6:30, the floor is quiet enough that I can hear the hum of the server room three doors down.
I pull the file off my screen and open the directory I keep buried under encrypted layers. The Singapore breach sits at the top, flagged and filed. Below it, older and colder, is the folder I told Ridge I closed.
I open it.
The offshore trail stares back at me, every shell still climbing toward an origin I can't reach, the same wall I've hit since Dad died.
I'm done throwing myself at it from below.
Ronnie turning up clean and dead was all the proof I needed that this thing is still breathing, so tonight I come at it from the only direction nobody ever guards.
I close the account trees and open a blank document.
Ten million dollars bought something. Equipment. Manpower. Staging. Time. Those things had to move somewhere, sit somewhere, and be paid for. That is the trail I understand better than anyone because it lives in lanes, manifests, vendor arrangements, terminal access, and operational routing.
I start with the vendor records.
Stone Intermodal runs on contracts. Every lane, every shipment, every piece of equipment that touches company operations gets logged. I pull the manifests for the month before he died and cross-reference them against known staging windows.
Two anomalies surface within the first hour.
A refrigerated container left the Port of New Orleans three days before the murder, routed through a vendor arrangement Stone uses for pharmaceutical transfers. Clean paperwork, a licensed carrier, nothing that would flag.
Except the lane was active when it should not have been. The pharmaceutical client had paused shipments for a quarterly audit. I check the internal calendar. The pause was scheduled two months in advance.
Someone used a legitimate vendor slot during a window when no one was watching.
I pull the second anomaly. A storage lease in Metairie, paid through a third-party logistics provider Stone contracts with for overflow. The lease ran eight weeks, starting six weeks before the murder. It terminated the day after.
I run the address. Industrial park. Gated access. No security cameras on file with the city permit office.
The staging moved through Stone's own footprint. It used Stone lanes. It sat under a vendor arrangement, unremarkable enough that the company itself hid it.
And when I pull the payments behind both the slot and the lease, they don't trace to the Duvalls or to any rival who wanted our lanes.
They thread back toward the same offshore structure I could never crack from above.
The money I lost chasing up, I just caught coming down, the night it touched our own operation.
I sit back in my chair and stare at the screen. My heart kicks against my ribs, faster than it has any business going for a conclusion I saw coming and hoped I had wrong.
Inside access. Not a rival or an outside enemy who broke in and took what they wanted.
Someone bought the kind of access it takes to move staging through our own lanes without a flag.
That doesn't have to mean one of us. Half the senior operations floor could route a container and lease overflow space without anyone blinking, and any one of them has a price if the buyer is patient enough and the number is high enough.
The man I've been chasing didn't break into this company. He reached into it and rented a hand.
I open my own notes from after the murder, the version of that night each man gave while Ridge was still piecing it together, and set them next to what Dane told me in Florida.
There's one snag. Vin said the guards summoned him that night, that he went alone, found nothing, and left, and that Dad turned up separately afterward, walking into a trap.
Dane tells it differently. He says nobody called Vin, and that Vin came in around the same window as the birthmarked man, Juno.
Two men arriving close together isn't the same as two men arriving together, and a terrified drunk's memory of who walked in when, two years gone, isn't something I'd hang a man on.
It almost certainly means nothing. But I want it closed before I build anything on top of it.
And there's one person who can close it.
Vin has run these walls longer than anyone alive.
If someone on the inside sold us out, he'll know whose access fits the lanes I'm staring at, and he'll know whose call could have pulled him there that night if it wasn't the guards.
He's thorough, he's loyal, and he wants whoever did this as badly as I do.
I'll bring it to him before I take anything to Ridge, who'd sooner leave it buried. Whoever reached inside my father's company to do this, Vin will help me put a name to him.
My phone lights on the desk.
Hey. You still want takeout? I'm done at the rec center and can grab it on my way. No worries if you're still buried at work.
I read it twice, and the cold room loosens its hold on me. A month ago, I'd have answered her on autopilot and stayed at this screen until the sun came up, because that's what I do. I pull a thread until there's nothing left of it. The trail isn't going anywhere.
She's the only thing tonight that is.
Don't pick it up. I'll grab it and meet you at your place. Twenty minutes.
I close the folder, kill the monitors, and leave the dead and the money and the questions sitting in the dark where they've waited this long. For the first time I can remember, walking away from that file doesn't cost me a thing, because there's somewhere I'd rather be.