Chapter 20
Twenty
LAYLA
For once, technology was on our side. The Dare County Register of Deeds had digitized its records back to the early nineties, which meant the marina sale was right there in black and white.
We followed the trail from there to the North Carolina Secretary of State’s registration of the LLC that had made the purchase.
In an hour, we’d collected a list of names and entities to take to Rios.
The police station was only five minutes away, and the chief was in.
I noted the tension before we even made it through the door.
The officer at the front desk sat too carefully, her eyes moving between us and the two men at the corner table in a way that said she was tracking more than one thing at a time and had been doing it for months.
The men at the table wore the kind of business casual that wasn’t quite civilian.
One of them looked up when we came in, ran his eyes over Jace, over me, over Koa, and went back to his documents.
The other didn’t look up at all, which was its own kind of looking.
The front desk officer obviously recognized Jace, but it didn’t melt into the easy flirtation I’d seen him get other places. Her gaze shot once more to the agents in the corner.
“Chief’s in his office,” she said. “Go on back.”
The hallway felt like a held breath. Another man came out of a side room carrying a banker’s box, angled past us without acknowledgment, and disappeared.
Koa’s eyes tracked him and came back to me.
I kept my pace even and my face neutral as I noted the storage room door propped open with a box of files, the yellow legal pad on the breakroom table with handwriting I couldn’t read from this angle, the way the two officers we passed in the hall both registered Jace first and me second, and neither of them stopped to chat the way people usually did with him.
Whatever this department had been before, it wasn’t that anymore. It was a place where everyone was being looked at. Everyone knew it, and nobody wanted to be painted with the stink associated with Carson.
Rios’s office was the last door on the left. He was at his desk, a furrow dug between his brows as he frowned down at an open case file on his desk. One of many, judging by the small mountain at his elbow.
He glanced up as we came in. “Close the door.”
Jace did. The ambient sounds of the station went muffled.
Rios leaned back. “Nice to see a pair of friendly faces.”
“SBI giving you grief?” Jace asked.
“Less than the others, since I wasn’t part of this department under Carson’s reign. Nobody’s suggested I offed him in order to get my hands on this mess.” He spread those hands to encompass the files burying his desk and both visitor’s chairs. “Y’all have something?”
Jace straightened, legs braced, hands folded at his back, as if he were reporting to senior naval personnel.
Did he realize he was doing that?
“The marina was sold eleven years ago to a company called Tidewater Marina Group LLC,” Jace said. “Registered in Wilmington about a month before the sale closed.”
“Who’s behind it?”
I picked up the thread. “The registered agent is a law firm out of Wilmington—Calloway and Pierce. They’ve handled every annual filing since the company formed, which means they’re actively managing it, not just serving as a formality.
Managing members aren’t listed on the public record, which is standard for that structure.
” I set the notes on the desk. “But the firm has other clients, and some of those clients are starting to appear in more than one place in what we’ve been pulling together. ”
Rios picked up the notes and read without speaking. “Such as?”
“A real estate LLC that bought two waterfront properties on the island the year after Miles took office,” I said.
“And a company whose listed principal shows up in the correspondence around the Strand development proposals. We can’t get to the beneficial ownership layer through public records. But the connections are there.”
“Sale price? Financing?”
“Slightly below market. Not enough to flag on its own. Commercial loan out of a bank in New Bern.”
“Paid off in full inside two years,” Jace added.
Rios looked up. “That’s fast.”
“Very,” Jace agreed. “Which either means significantly more capital on hand than the loan suggested, or money was coming in from somewhere that accelerated the payoff considerably.”
Rios set the notes down and was quiet for a moment. Outside his closed door, a voice said something in a clipped and professional tone. Rios’s jaw worked. No doubt the SBI babysitters were interfering with his efforts to correct whatever mess Carson had left behind.
“I can run these names,” he said. “I won’t pretend I have unimpeded access to everything right now, but I can work with what I’ve got.”
He didn’t elaborate on what unimpeded access meant in a department where state law enforcement agents were sitting twenty feet away going through files that used to belong to his predecessor. He didn’t need to.
“Any movement on getting access to the original case files?” Jace asked.
“Still waiting on the judge. The SBI has everything locked down, and I have to go through them to get to my own department’s records.” The frustration was controlled, but definitely there. “I’ve followed up twice. I’ll go back tomorrow.”
“Miles’s files? The prosecutor’s records?”
“Request is in. Nothing back yet.” He looked at me. “I know that’s not the answer you need.”
“It’s the answer I expected,” I said. “We work around it in the meantime.”
He nodded once. I had the sense that he appreciated not being apologized to about a situation that wasn’t his fault and that he was clearly doing everything in his power to navigate.
The door opened without a knock.
One of the men from the front room leaned in, did his quick inventory of the space, and landed on Rios. “Carrera. Need the Galef file when you get a chance.”
“Twenty minutes,” Rios said.
The agent left the door open. Rios came around the desk and reached past us to close it again. The set of his shoulders said everything his face didn’t. When the tap-tap-tap sounded before he even made it to his desk, a muscle jumped in his jaw.
“Yeah?”
The door opened, and a woman stuck her head in. “Sorry to bother you, Chief, but you said you wanted an update on that single-vehicle crash call we had earlier.”
He blew out a breath. “Yes.”
“The fire department is out there now helping with stabilization, but she’s critical. Medevac’s been called.”
Rios scraped one big palm down his face. “Who is it?”
“Diane Crowell.”
The name struck me like a fist, and I hissed out a breath.
We’d been with her just this morning. Asking questions just this morning. Questions about things she’d left her old job to escape, whether she’d been fully aware of it or not. What were the chances that she just happened to get into a critical car accident right after?
Koa pressed tight to my legs, shoving his head beneath my hands. My fingers automatically twined in his ruff, anchoring myself.
The door shut.
“Layla.” Jace’s voice was calm and even. His hand gently curled around my shoulder even as Rios shifted files to empty a chair.
“I’m okay.” My voice sounded distant to my own ears, and when Jace nudged me into the chair, I didn’t fight. “We just saw her,” I whispered.
“You what now?” Rios asked.
“She’s the bookkeeper at the ferry company,” Jace said. “We met with her this morning to talk to her about her work for the marina, back when she was employed there.”
“Y’all talked to her about work at the marina, where you suspect money laundering has been occurring for years, and now she’s in critical condition.” He didn’t pose it as a question.
The three of us sat with that. Outside, the SBI audit ground on. Someone’s keyboard clattered. A phone rang twice and stopped. The ordinary sounds of a department at work, indifferent to whatever had just landed in this office.
“We don’t know that it’s connected,” Jace said.
“We don’t know that it’s not,” I argued.
I had done this work long enough to understand that questions have weight.
That asking the right ones in the wrong place at the wrong time could set things in motion that you didn’t intend and couldn’t control.
I had sat in rooms like this before, after outcomes like this one, and I had learned not to call it guilt because guilt implied you’d done something wrong, and I hadn’t done anything wrong.
Neither had Jace. We had asked an old woman about fuel numbers and empty slips, and she had seemed relieved to finally tell someone.
That didn’t make the timing sit any better.
Then I thought about the conference room door swinging open. The apology. The spreadsheet question.
“There was a man,” I said. “While we were with her. He knocked on the door, said he was sorry to interrupt, and asked about a spreadsheet error. Something about column F on the quarterly variance report. Not Kevin, someone else.” I looked at Rios.
“Young guy. Dark jacket. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but is it crazy to look into him? ”
“Not crazy at all.” Rios picked up a pen and wrote it down. “I’ll ask around.”
We said our goodbyes and walked back out through the hallway, past the banker’s boxes and the legal pad and the officers who didn’t stop to talk, through the front room where the SBI men sat with their documents, and out into the cold.
I made it to the truck and stopped there with my hand on the door. I couldn’t make myself open it.
Questions had consequences. It was a key detail of this kind of work. Sometimes those consequences were something you hadn’t intended. After years of doing this job, I’d learned to hold that. To keep the professional distance that made it possible to keep doing the job.
I wasn’t holding it particularly well right now.
“Hey.” Jace came around the truck and stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to look up at him. Not touching. Just there, blocking the wind a little, his face open in a way I’d learned meant he was paying full attention. “Talk to me.”
“I keep thinking about her face when we left,” I said.
“She was relieved. She’d been sitting on those numbers for years, and someone finally asked, and she was relieved to tell us.
” My throat tightened. “And now she’s on a helicopter to the mainland, and I have no idea if she’s going to make it, and I was the one who—”
“You asked her questions,” Jace said. “That’s what you did. You asked her about fuel numbers and empty slips, and she told you what she remembered. That’s it.”
“The timing—”
“Is bad. The timing is bad, and it seems connected, and maybe it is.” He didn’t flinch from that.
Didn’t try to pretty it up. “But Diane Crowell has been inside this operation’s orbit for over a decade.
Whatever danger she was in, she was already in it before we walked through that door this morning. We didn’t put her there.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. But the people who run operations like this don’t move on someone because a reporter asked about fuel numbers one time.
They move on someone who is already a liability.
Someone who already knows too much.” He paused.
“If she’s a target, she’s been a target. We just weren’t aware of it.”
I looked at him. “That doesn’t make it better.”
“I know it doesn’t.” His hand came up to tuck a strand of hair that had come loose from my braid back behind my ear.
Just that one gesture, and something in my chest cracked open a little.
“It’s not supposed to feel better yet. It’s supposed to feel exactly like this.
And then you sit with it for a while, and you keep going because the alternative is that nobody asks any questions, and people like Diane spend the rest of their lives sitting on things they should never have had to carry alone. ”
I looked at him for a long moment.
“Is that what you tell yourself?” I asked. “After the things you’ve seen?”
“Some version of it.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Doesn’t always work. But it’s true, which helps.”
I exhaled. Let my forehead drop forward until it rested against his chest, just for a moment. His hand curved around my nape. The touch was somehow possessive and comforting at once. Neither was something I usually allowed.
“I think about her face,” I said. “That’s all. I just keep thinking about her face.”
“I know.” His thumb moved once, slowly, along the side of my neck, over the pulse that thrummed with dread. “I know.”
We stood there for a little while in the cold, outside the police station on a small island in December, while inside the SBI finished going through what was left of a corrupt department and somewhere over the water Diane Crowell was on a medevac heading for the mainland.
Neither of us said anything else because there wasn’t anything else to say. Not yet.