Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
JACE
The deck at Sutter House faced north, and on a clear night the Atlantic stretched out to the horizon and beyond, the kind of view that made the rest of the world feel small.
Tonight the cloud cover had come in, so there was nothing to see, only the murmur of surf breaking somewhere below the dune line, the air carrying the cold salt scent of open ocean that had traveled a long way before it got here.
I’d grown up with that sound. I’d spent my adult life in places where the water, when there was water, smelled and sounded different, and I was still getting reacquainted with this version of it.
I sat on the top step of the deck and thought about Halston Ashmore.
Not for the first time since the property records.
The name had been sitting in the back of my mind in the way names did when they didn’t quite fit the space they’d turned up in—a little wrong, a little insistent, refusing to be filed and forgotten.
An Ashmore Holdings LLC with property on the south end of Hatterwick, acquired twenty years ago.
No obvious connection to anything we’d been tracking.
Clean on paper. Registered in Virginia. The kind of holding that might be the wealthy family’s vacation property it appeared to be and nothing more. Or it could be something else entirely.
My gut told me it was the latter. That instinct had been right often enough in my career that I’d convinced my superiors to give me the freedom to investigate the bigger picture of trafficking in the region my way.
I’d run the standard searches already—public records, corporate filings, what the internet would give up without being pushed. What I needed was someone who could go considerably deeper than standard.
I pulled out my phone and found the contact.
It rang twice. Dax Gregory never answered on the first ring, regardless of circumstances. He considered it a matter of principle.
“Hollingsworth. You’re calling from outside.” There was no particular inflection on it, just the flat delivery of a man cataloguing information. “Who are you hiding from?”
I didn’t even blink at the observation. Given his particular skill set, I wouldn’t have put it past him to have already triangulated my position via satellite imagery before picking up. “Nobody. I needed air.”
“It’s forty degrees.”
“You know I’ve got thicker blood than that.” I stretched my legs out on the step, crossed them at the ankles. “Where are you?”
“Does it matter?” The faintest trace of Georgia crept into the question—the tell he never quite buried, no matter how many years and time zones put distance between him and where he’d started.
“Guess not.”
“Zurich.”
Middle of the damned night for him, then. The math wasn’t complicated. “Sorry to call so late.”
“S’fine.” He didn’t sound like he’d been sleeping.
Keys clacked in the background—Dax in perpetual motion, which had always been his default state, no matter the hour.
He’d been out of Naval intelligence for four years and had constructed a private sector career that nobody outside a tiny, vetted circle had a clear picture of.
He moved constantly between cities, billed extremely well, and maintained a studied vagueness about his current projects that I respected on principle and occasionally found professionally convenient. “What do you need?”
“Background on a family. The Ashmores, originally out of Virginia. Edmund and a son named Halston. There may be other family members worth pulling. I’m not sure of the full picture yet.
I want the complete financial architecture—any connections to shell companies operating out of North Carolina, specifically a Wilmington law firm called Calloway and Pierce and an entity called Tidewater Marina Group LLC. ”
“Ashmores.” I heard him turning it over, fingers already moving at blinding speed across whatever setup he had in front of him. “Edmund Ashmore with the endowed chair at UVA?”
“That’s the one.”
“Buildings named after him at two universities, a string of foundation boards, the usual apparatus that accumulates at that level of generational money. I don’t know the details of their private holdings offhand.” He paused. “Why are you looking at them?”
“Their LLC has property on Hatterwick. I’m working an investigation into a trafficking ring that’s been running on the island for at least fifteen years. The name surfaced in a property records search.”
“Might be coincidence.”
“Might be. I want to know for sure whether it is.”
Dax slipped into a thinking quiet. I’d learned the meaningful difference between that and the performance of consideration a long time ago, during a posting that had thrown us together for six weeks under conditions that required learning to read the people around you accurately, or suffering the consequences.
He was operating now somewhere in whatever gray space existed between legitimate private intelligence work and the things that never got written anywhere, and he was exceptional at navigating both sides of that line.
“How deep do you want me to go?” he finally asked.
“As deep as it goes. If there’s nothing there, I want to confirm it’s nothing. If there’s something, I want to know exactly what I’m looking at before I decide what to do with it.”
“That’s going to take some time. Men like Edmund Ashmore spend a great deal of money structuring their holdings specifically to be difficult to follow.”
“Take the time you need. I’d rather have it right than fast.”
“A week, maybe two.” He paused, and when he continued, the easy, transactional quality had gone out of his voice.
“And Hollingsworth. If it is their operation, and it’s been running for that long without attracting serious attention, there’s a reason for that.
People like that don’t get where they are by being careless about loose ends. ”
“I know.” I’d spent enough of my career getting close to groups like that from the inside to understand how they thought about exposure.
“Eyes open.”
“Always.”
Something creaked over the line. Dax leaning back in his chair. The keys went quiet. “Anything else?”
“That’s it for now.”
“How’s Willa?”
“Good. Better than she’s been in a long time.” I said it simply because it was true and because with Dax there was no need to embellish.
“Good.” Warmth surfaced in his voice—genuine without lingering long enough to become a moment he’d have to manage.
He’d met Willa once, under circumstances that had been complicated for everyone involved in different ways, and somewhere in the course of that single meeting he’d decided she was someone who mattered.
That was how he operated. Quiet, efficient, and without making a production of it. “Tell her I said so.”
“I will.”
“Best to Sawyer and the rest of the guys, too. And get off the deck. It’s December.” He was already gone before I could answer.
I sat with the phone in my hand and looked out at the Atlantic. The cloud cover was solid. No stars, no moon, just the surf breaking below in the dark and the cold salt air coming off three thousand miles of open ocean. No satellite imagery, then. The man really did know me.
Rather than moving, I continued turning Halston Ashmore over in my brain.
I hadn’t had cause to think of him in years.
Not since my freshman year of college, when he’d been frat president.
He’d been a prick. Charming, connected, well-resourced, but underneath all of it, a prick.
One with the kind of magnetism that organized a room around himself without appearing to try.
I’d had a year of being at the same events, the same parties, before he graduated and was gone.
I’d watched him work people with the ease of someone who’d understood from childhood that his family name was a tool and had decided to use it accordingly.
I’d kept my distance because I’d had decent instincts even at eighteen, and my instincts about Halston had been clear enough.
That kind of entitlement often led to questionable things.
I didn’t have anything concrete at this point.
Nothing I could put my finger on, nothing I could write down and call evidence.
I didn’t even have a specific reason I could spell out for having Dax do the deep dive on the Ashmore family before anyone else on the list. It was nothing more than a persistent niggling in my gut, the quiet kind that didn’t announce itself so much as settle in and refuse to leave.
That niggle had kept me alive doing intelligence work for years, so I wouldn’t start ignoring it now.
Either way, until Dax came back with something worth looking at, the Ashmore name was just a name on a property record. One of dozens. I had no business sitting out here in the December cold, treating it like anything more than that.