Provenance
PATRICK
Patrick’s lips curled into a smile, reliving the moment the day before when he’d taken Morgan in his arms and kissed her. He’d caught her off guard. Her eyes had widened. Her lips had parted. For a moment, he’d worried he’d gone too far.
But she’d softened almost immediately. Fitted her body perfectly against his. Returned the kiss with equal fervor.
His body responded now like it had then. Hardening. Craving more.
But they weren’t there yet.
She was so in control all the time. Maybe—and this was just a theory at this point—she appreciated handing over the reins once in a while.
Sometimes strong women appreciated not having to be strong all the time.
At least, that was what Riley had told him once in a soul-baring moment after the guy she was seeing turned out to be a dick.
Tag. You're it.
Maybe not his smoothest line, but accurate. He was putting the ball back in her court. Letting her set the pace.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Morgan: Are you up?
He chuckled, glancing down at the visible tent in his sheet.
Patrick: Yes
Dots appeared and disappeared as Morgan typed and erased, typed and erased. Then finally…
Morgan: I can’t stop thinking about yesterday
He grinned.
Patrick: Which part?
Three dots. Gone. Back again. Gone.
Yeah. He knew exactly what she was thinking about.
Patrick: Me too.
The VIN came back mid-morning, registered to an LLC in Delaware with a mail forwarding address in Wilmington. No employees, no operating history, no web presence. Yet another shell built for a single operational window, functional and deliberately thin.
He cross-referenced the filing patterns against the network Riley had mapped from Varro's constructed identity.
Same patterns. Same process.
He sat back and thought about what that meant.
Anthony Varro had a cover that worked—neat, tidy, legitimate on the surface.
That cover had been built by someone who knew how to remain under the radar.
An organization that maintained assets, constructed identities, deployed people for specific jobs and then managed the cleanup afterward.
This wasn't freelance work. Varro had been sent. By whom, was the question. Everything pointed to Morgan’s supervisor and the case that had gotten Morgan an LOA. That was where he needed to focus his attention.
Declan entered the makeshift office and sank down into a chair.
“What did you find out?” Patrick asked.
“Crickets,” Declan said. “A cursory search on missing persons matching the vic came up empty. No one’s come forward to claim him, and without a next of kin to notify, it’s a dead end.”
“So no further investigation.”
“None. The coroner’s satisfied calling it a cardiac arrest. They’re transferring him out to the county for indigent burial after thirty days in storage.”
“Is that normal?”
“It’s not unusual,” Declan said. “Unlike Philly, we don’t have an ME, we have a county coroner.”
“What’s the difference?”
“ME’s are appointed, licensed physicians, usually a forensic pathologist. County coroners are elected officials, no medical training required.
They have legal authority to investigate deaths and sign death certificates, but they rely on contracted docs to perform autopsies when deemed necessary.
Spoiler alert—autopsies cost money and aren’t deemed necessary often.
In a case like this, without obvious evidence of foul play… ”
Patrick applied what he knew about small town politics. Elected translated to political. Contracted implied favors and quiet phone calls.
Organization. Infrastructure.
The silence around Anthony Varro's death had been maintained—not just by whoever wiped the car, but inside the Pine Ridge PD itself. Whoever was behind Varro's cover had a long enough arm to quiet a small-town police department, or knew someone who did.
Riley was going to have a field day with this.
Patrick pulled up the file he’d started on Morgan Sullivan.
He wasn't particularly proud of that, in the sense that he'd never told her, but he wasn't ashamed of it either. It was what he did. Part of his process.
Frank Sullivan's granddaughter, on administrative leave from the Philadelphia ME's office under circumstances that had looked wrong from the outside and looked worse the closer you got.
He'd pulled her professional record, of course.
It was squeaky clean and decorated with commendation that came from four years of exemplary performance prior to the leave.
He’d looked up her Philadelphia address, confirming a small studio rental in the Fairmount section of the city. Followed the thread further to her mother and stepfather, their house in DelCo.
It was all there in black and white. Factual. Accurate.
But it wasn’t Morgan.
The file told him what she'd done and where she'd been and who she'd worked for, but it said nothing about the way her mind worked behind those bright, intelligent eyes or the sound she made when something almost made her laugh.
Those were the things he was most interested in.
And the file, thorough as it was, shed no light on the question taking up most of the space in his brain now: who had protected Morgan by eliminating Varro before he could do what he’d been presumably sent to do?
Who knew about Varro? About the situation that had sent him to Pine Ridge?
Who had both the means and the motivation to intervene?
He opened the forum. NorthStar had posted another question.
Cold War provenance. The method is the message. Ask who benefits from the silence.
A chill ran the length of Patrick’s spine. Saxitoxin had been used in CIA experiments as a covert assassination and suicide weapon during the Cold War.
The tox result had never been posted to the forum.
Not by him, not by Riley, not by anyone.
The Thread knew Anthony Varro had a constructed cover and a professional signature.
It did not know he'd been killed with a CIA-developed assassination compound that hadn't seen active use since the Cold War and required specialized knowledge to synthesize and deploy.
But NorthStar knew.
How? The only reason Patrick knew was because Michael and Nicki had identified it based on samples Morgan had obtained, and it hadn’t been documented anywhere.
Which meant either NorthStar had looked at the evidence and made one hell of an educated guess…
or NorthStar was personally involved in the case somehow.
Means. Motive. Opportunity.
He thought about his uncles and his grandfather. Former Navy SEALs who had been working private covert operations for longer than he’d been alive. Michael and Nicki had the chemical knowledge to identify the compound.
Was NorthStar a member of his own family?
The specificity of the post—Cold War provenance, the method is the message—was the language of someone who understood what a CIA developed neurotoxin meant operationally.
What it signaled. A frozen dart that left no trace, designed to mimic cardiac arrest, developed specifically so that a death could happen and no one would look twice.
That was not general knowledge. That was experience.
Cold War, CIA operative level experience.
His phone buzzed.
Riley: Are you seeing this?
Patrick: Yep
Riley: One of us?
That was one of the reasons he and Riley got along so well. Their brains operated on the same frequency.
NorthStar was a guiding figure in the forum, encouraging thought through questions like their fathers often did. He never provided the answers outright, instead treating each case like an opportunity for teachable moments.
And yet, it didn’t feel like one of them. Close, but not quite.
Patrick: Or someone adjacent
He looked at the post again.
Ask who benefits from the silence.
The obvious answer was Morgan. Varro’s death had protected her.
But Patrick had already moved past that answer, because Morgan hadn't killed anyone and the method eliminated every civilian option.
This was an operative. Someone with specific skills, specific training, specific access to a compound that had no commercial supply chain.
Someone who was, or had been, close enough to act quickly.
Someone who might still be in Pine Ridge.
Jack’s comment came back to him. There's no place safer for her than where she is.
That wasn’t simply reassurance. It was specific, weighted knowledge.
Patrick thought about Morgan’s grandfather. About how he'd built his life on the edge of a small town under the radar. How there was no record of him prior, save a property deed transfer from Eamon Sullivan’s estate.
He thought about NorthStar’s previous questions. Looking into the who owned the campground question had indirectly led him to Frank—and Morgan. Researching Varro had led him and Riley to crime scenes being investigated by the Philadelphia ME’s office—and Morgan.
Everything came back to Morgan.
Suddenly, the need to see her again rose up in a wave he was no longer trying to hold back. He grabbed his phone, wondering if she was still thinking.
Patrick: Are you busy?
Morgan: Just reading about Cold War era CIA programs
Her answer made him smile. Clearly, she’d seen NorthStar’s post too. Had she connected the dots and arrived at the same conclusion?
Patrick: Have dinner with me?
The reply took so long in coming, Patrick checked his phone several times to make sure he was still connected. Then:
Morgan: Okay. Where and when?
Patrick: My place, about 6?
Morgan: That works. Want me to bring anything?
Patrick: Just yourself
As soon as he hung up with Morgan, he made another call. “Hey Mom, got any suggestions for a chef-quality meal I can prepare in under three hours?”