CHAPTER NINETEEN
Paul Daniels stared at the coffee ring staining the manila folder in front of him and wondered, not for the first time, if he'd made a mistake coming to Flagstaff.
Tonight, it felt like they were just rearranging information they'd already reviewed three times over.
"This is pointless," Paul said, tossing his pen onto the desk.
It rolled off the edge and clattered to the floor.
"We're not finding anything Anna didn't already find.
We're just confirming what she already knew—that there's something suspicious about these land sales and someone's gone to a lot of trouble to hide their involvement. "
James didn't look up from the computer screen where he'd been cross-referencing property records for the past two hours. His face was drawn, exhausted in a way that went beyond just physical tiredness. Paul recognized that look—the weight of regret, of guilt, of all the things left unsaid.
"So we stop looking?" James asked.
"I didn't say that."
"Then what are you saying?"
Paul stood, needing to move, needing to do something other than sit in this cramped home office that smelled like stale coffee and old paper. He walked to the window, staring out at Flagstaff's darkened streets.
When Paul had suggested to Kari that they involve her father, he'd imagined the two of them going back to the glory days of their former partnership, brainstorming together and looking at the case from a thousand angles until they found their way in.
They hadn't always gotten along well, but they'd always produced results, and when it came to solving crimes, that was all that mattered.
But now, as the excitement petered out without any fresh leads to ignite it, Paul was beginning to wonder whether this had been a mistake.
"I'm saying," he said carefully, "that maybe we were a little too optimistic to think we were just going to put our heads together and crack this thing. Maybe we didn't give these people enough credit."
"I didn't ask for this," James said, sounding edgy. "You brought me into this. Now you're getting cold feet?"
Paul turned from the window and sighed. "Look, we've been at this for three days and we haven't found anything actionable. No smoking gun, no concrete evidence, no clear path forward. At some point we have to—"
"We have to trust that Anna knew what she was doing.
" James stood abruptly, the chair scraping against the floor.
He moved to the wall where they'd pinned up a timeline of events: land purchases, suspicious deaths, corporate filings.
His hand traced the connections Anna had documented, twenty years of evidence carefully compiled.
"She wouldn't have spent this long on it if it was nothing. She wouldn't have—"
He stopped mid-sentence, and Paul saw the pain cross his face before James could hide it. Wouldn't have died for it. That's what he'd been about to say.
The silence stretched between them, thick with things neither of them wanted to acknowledge. Paul and James had been close once, the kind of partners who could read each other's thoughts in the middle of a tense interrogation or a dangerous operation. They'd trusted each other absolutely.
But that was before James's marriage to Anna had fallen apart, before his drinking had started affecting his judgment, before he'd turned in his resignation and disappeared from Paul's life without so much as a real conversation about why.
They'd barely spoken in the five years since. A few awkward phone calls, a handful of terse emails when their paths had crossed professionally. Nothing like the friendship they'd once had.
"I'm sorry," James said finally, still not looking at Paul. "For snapping at you. You came all the way up here to help, and I'm being an ass."
"You're being human." Paul moved back toward the desk, picking up his pen from where it had fallen. "You lost your ex-wife. You're trying to make sense of why she died. It's completely normal to grieve."
James's voice grew bitter. "I left her, Paul. Walked away from our marriage because I couldn't handle the work, couldn't handle the pressure, couldn't handle being married to someone more dedicated and brilliant than I was. And now she's dead because she kept doing the work I abandoned."
Paul sighed, unsure what to do with his partner's complicated emotions. "You think if you'd stayed, you could have protected her?"
"I think if I'd stayed, I would have been there to help her.
To watch her back. To make sure she didn't end up dead in a car accident that wasn't really an accident at all.
" James finally met Paul's eyes. "But I wasn't there.
I was here, retired and useless, while she was out there alone trying to stop a conspiracy that got her killed. "
The raw honesty in James's voice made Paul's chest tighten. This was the James he remembered—before the drinking, before the bitterness, before the resignation. The man who cared too much, felt too deeply, and tried to hide it behind analytical detachment.
"You couldn't have known," Paul said. "None of us knew. Anna kept her investigation quiet, worked alone. That was her choice."
"Because she knew I couldn't be trusted.
Because I'd already proven I bail when things get hard.
" James turned back to the computer, his shoulders rigid.
"So yeah, I'm going to keep looking through these files, even if it seems pointless.
Because maybe if I can finish what Anna started, I can make up for even a fraction of what I failed to do when it mattered. "
Paul wanted to argue, wanted to tell James he was being too hard on himself. But he understood that sometimes guilt needed an outlet, a purpose. And if channeling that guilt into solving Anna's murder helped James cope, then Paul would stay here and help him do it.
"All right," Paul said, sitting back down at the desk.
"Then let's keep looking. But we need to be smarter about it.
Anna disguised her investigation for a reason—she knew someone might find these notes, and she didn't want them falling into the wrong hands.
Maybe we're reading them too literally. Maybe she coded the important information somehow. "
James went very still. "Coded how?"
"I don't know. But if she was as careful and brilliant as we're saying, and if she knew the danger she was in, she wouldn't have left her real findings sitting in plain sight for anyone to stumble across.
" Paul started gathering the pages of Anna's handwritten notes, the ones that had seemed like a rambling conspiracy theory.
"These pages, the ones Kari said didn't make sense—what if they're not random?
What if there's a pattern we're missing? "
James moved closer, studying the pages with new intensity. He was quiet for a long time, his eyes tracking back and forth across the handwritten lines.
"Give me some space on the desk," he said.
Paul cleared a section, and James began sorting the pages into groups, laying them out side by side. At first Paul couldn't see the logic—James would study an entry, frown, then move it to one pile or another, occasionally shifting one back.
"What are you looking for?"
"Anna had a system when she was working cases.
She'd mix her real notes in with routine stuff—grocery lists, appointment reminders, personal observations—so that if anyone found her files, they'd see a disorganized mess and stop reading.
" James's hands moved faster now, more certain.
"She told me about it once. We were still married, and I asked her why her desk was always such a disaster.
She laughed and said the mess was the point. "
He paused over a page, then placed it carefully to the left. "Three categories. That's how she worked. Two layers of camouflage for every layer of real information."
Paul watched as three distinct piles took shape. James went through them twice more, rearranging a few entries, then pulled the smallest pile toward him.
"These are the real ones. The dates aren't chronological—they jump around. But if you take every third entry..." He grabbed a notepad and started writing. "The dates form a sequence."
Paul felt his pulse quicken as James worked, extracting every third entry and arranging them in order. Slowly, a pattern emerged—dates that corresponded to specific land sales, names that weren't people but places, numbers that might be coordinates.
"She coded it," James breathed. "She made it look like paranoid rambling, but she embedded the real information in a way that only someone who knew how she thought would find it."
"Someone like her ex-husband."
James's hands moved faster now, the exhaustion and frustration from earlier having completely vanished. He pulled out more pages, started cross-referencing, building a picture from fragments that had seemed meaningless an hour ago.
"God, Anna," he murmured. "You brilliant, careful woman."
As they worked, it occurred to Paul that they may very well have just discovered the truth Anna had died protecting.
Now they just had to survive long enough to make sure her death hadn't been in vain.