2. The Shape of the Deal
Chapter two
The Shape of the Deal
Marco arrived at eight fifty-three carrying a gas station coffee in one hand and moving carefully enough that Lila guessed his back was still bothering him.
“Morning,” she said, holding the door open.
“Morning.” He glanced toward the back of the house. “Danny said exterior trim today. North corner and fascia on the garage side.”
“That’s the plan.” Lila said stepping aside to let him in. “The coffee’s fresh if you want a real cup.”
He looked down at the paper cup in his hand. “Pretty sure this one was fresh yesterday.”
Lila smiled. “There’s a muffin on the counter. Help yourself.”
He looked over. “Blueberry?”
“Lemon poppy seed.”
“That’ll do.” He picked it up and took a bite, calling out “thanks” on his way through the back door.
Lila listened to the familiar rhythm of him setting up outside. The truck door shutting. The ladder sliding off the rack. Tools clinking together. A few minutes later the compressor kicked on.
“I am not going to miss the sound of that,” Lila mumbled as she went back to the kitchen table.
The file had started with a handful of newspaper clippings and the name of a corporation Ray Calhoun had given her over coffee in his quiet white house outside Pelican Cove.
Now it spread halfway across the table in organized stacks—corporate filings, copied articles, property records, handwritten notes clipped together with color-coded tabs she’d added sometime last month without consciously deciding to.
She opened her laptop and pulled the notebook closer.
Suncoast Land Partners had incorporated in 1984. Coastal land acquisition. Development consulting. Permit facilitation. It was the kind of language designed to sound legitimate while saying almost nothing at all.
By 1987, they were moving permits through three counties faster than should have been possible.
Environmental assessments approved in weeks instead of months.
Wetland restrictions bypassed with signatures from inspectors who, according to later testimony, had never physically visited some of the sites attached to their names.
Lila highlighted another date in yellow.
Outside, the compressor cycled off. She could hear Marco repositioning the ladder, moving carefully.
Thomas Simmons surfaced in the records around 1986.
Not as an owner. Not as a partner. His name didn’t appear anywhere near the center of the company structure.
He showed up first as a consultant, then later as a project coordinator.
Far enough from the top to believe, at least initially, that he was working inside a legitimate business. Close enough by 1988 to know he wasn’t.
Lila wrote in the margin of her notebook: 1988—point of no return. Then underlined it twice.
The deeper she dug, the less the story felt abstract. For most of her life her father had existed as absence. Then as mystery. Then questions.
Now he was becoming something else entirely.
A man sitting in conference rooms. Signing documents. Reading numbers. Watching lines get crossed slowly enough that maybe he convinced himself they weren’t really lines anymore until it was too late to step back cleanly.
That felt worse somehow. And more human.
The federal investigation had started building in early 1989. By then, the principals at Suncoast were already insulating themselves—Thomas didn’t have that protection.
He appeared often enough in the internal records to become useful to investigators and exposed enough to become dangerous to the people above him.
Lila flipped to a photocopied deposition transcript she’d printed two days earlier. Halfway down page fourteen, she found the line again.
A meeting was held at which the terms of continued cooperation were made explicit.
No names attached. No elaboration. Just the sentence.
Lila leaned back in the chair.
“That can’t be good,” she said quietly.
She had spent enough years inside Kevin’s family business to recognize language like that. Corporate phrasing designed to sound neutral while carrying something sharper underneath it.
Terms of continued cooperation.
Not a request. A warning.
Outside, the compressor kicked back on.
Lila turned to the financial records next. That was the piece she understood best.
She’d spent the past week reconstructing deposits into Eleanor’s account at First Coast Bank—small amounts appearing irregularly over several years.
Nothing large enough to attract scrutiny.
Nothing obvious enough to matter on its own.
But lined against the letters Thomas sent Eleanor, another pattern emerged.
The deposits continued after the letters stopped.
Lila stared at the spreadsheet. Eleanor’s bookkeeping job at the church would have covered groceries, utilities, the ordinary costs of living. But not the years the roof needed replacing or the AC unit. It didn’t cover everything.
Her father had kept helping financially long after he disappeared from every other visible part of their lives.
Gone and still here. Both things true at once.
The back door opened, and Marco leaned inside with sawdust streaked across one forearm. “You got a level I can borrow? I left mine in Danny’s truck.”
“Utility drawer,” Lila said. “Left side. Toward the back.”
He found it and held it up. “Perfect.”
“How’s it coming?”
“Good. Whoever did the original install actually knew what they were doing.” He pointed toward the back corner of the house. “Your back corner trim’s another story.”
“What’s going on?”
“Looks like maybe there was a leak at one time, and someone tried to make a repair.” He winced slightly. “Let’s just say, someone got real ambitious with the caulk.”
“That sounds messy.”
“It is,” he said. “I’m gonna have to pull the whole thing and reset it.”
“How long?”
“Couple hours.” He paused. “Do you want to see it?”
“Not especially.”
She gave him a smile and a shrug which made Marco laugh once under his breath.
“I’ll let you know when it’s fixed.”
“I appreciate that.”
He disappeared back outside, and the compressor started again a minute later.
Lila worked through the afternoon in the rhythm she’d settled into over the past several months.
An hour of documents. Notes. Cross-referencing dates.
Then a break to refill coffee or stand at the back door looking toward the Gulf until her eyes stopped blurring together columns of numbers and legal language.
The phone stayed on the counter the entire time. She never touched it.
At two o’clock, she carried her coffee outside. Marco was loading the ladder back onto the truck.
“North corner’s done,” he said. “Fascia’s clean. Back trim’s reset. Give the caulk twenty-four hours before you paint.”
She looked up automatically toward the repaired corner. The line was straight now.
“Looks good.”
Marco shut the truck bed and nodded toward the kitchen windows. “You’ve been hard at work in there. You solving the world’s problems or just your own?”
“A little of both, I guess.”
He grinned. “Danny said you’ve been at that table for weeks.”
“Months, technically.”
“That healthy?”
“Probably not.”
“Fair enough.” He pulled the keys from his back pocket. “Well. Good luck with whatever it is.”
“Thanks, Marco.”
She watched him back down the driveway before going inside again.
By six o’clock, the kitchen table looked worse than when she’d started. More notes. More tabs. Another stack of copied filings.
She looked at the file spread out in front of her.
Public records had given her a shape. Not the whole thing. Not the part that mattered most. But enough to understand the outline of what Thomas had stepped into and why stepping out of it might not have been as simple as walking into an office and telling the truth.
He had made choices. Bad ones. Maybe frightened ones. Maybe greedy ones at first, or careless ones, or simply the kind people made when opportunity arrived dressed as something reasonable.
But by 1989, he had known.
Lila could see that now.
The fraud had not happened around him. Not entirely. He had been inside it. Not directing it. Not protected by it. Not innocent of it either.
She rested her elbows on the table and pressed both hands over her face.
“Okay,” she said into her palms. “Okay.”
The next step was Forsythe.
She had known that for weeks, though she had been pretending she was still gathering enough information to justify it. Frank Forsythe’s name had been sitting in her notebook for weeks, circled in blue ink from the margin of a 1990 Tampa Bay Tribune article.
Special Agent Frank Forsythe, FBI field office, Tampa.
At the time, he had been a name attached to a quote. Now he was the only living person she had found who had stood close enough to the investigation, and her father, to know what the public record did not say.
She opened her laptop and started a new search.
Finding him took some work, but not as much as she’d expected. Old newspaper references led to a federal retirement announcement. The retirement announcement led to a community profile. The community profile led to a facility outside Tampa and, eventually, a phone number.
She looked at the number for a long time. Then she picked up the phone and dialed before she could decide she wasn’t ready.
It rang four times. She was composing the voicemail in her head when someone answered.
“Hello.”
The voice was older than she expected and slightly scratchy.
Lila straightened in her chair.
“Is this Frank Forsythe? Retired Special Agent Frank Forsythe?”
A pause.
“Who’s asking?”
“My name is Lila Simmons.” She swallowed. “Thomas Simmons was my father.”
“I see.”
The words arrived slowly.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Simmons?”
“My mother passed recently. Going through her things I found letters—letters that raised questions about my father’s disappearance.
Questions I’ve been trying to answer.” She paused.
“I’ve been researching the Suncoast Land Partners investigation.
Your name appeared in a newspaper article from 1990.
And, as far as I can tell, you may be one of the few people left who can answer my questions. ”
He coughed once, a dry sound, and took a moment before he spoke again.
“How much do you know?”
“Enough to know I don’t have the whole picture.”
He made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “No,” he said. “I don’t suppose you would.” A pause. “I’ve thought, in recent years, that some things probably should have been handled differently.”
“If you’re up for a visit, I’d like to come see you.”
“I’m at a facility outside Tampa,” he said. “I don’t get around the way I used to.”
“That’s fine. I can come there.”
“Next Tuesday,” he said. “Morning. We’ve got a common room here that’s usually empty on Tuesdays.”
“Tuesday morning,” she said. “I’ll be there.” She wrote the address in her notebook as he gave it. “Thank you, Agent Forsythe.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said. And hung up.
Lila sat there with the phone still pressed against her ear, listening to the empty line. Then she lowered it slowly and looked at the calendar.
Tuesday morning.
One week away.
She typed the appointment into her phone, then wrote it again in the notebook.
The file on the table was thick—thick enough that she needed two binder clips to hold sections of it together.
Lila rested one hand on top of it.
Somewhere on one side of the state, a retired agent was carrying whatever information the public record left out. And on the other side was the man who answered the phone last night and said nothing at all.
She didn’t know how long she sat there. But long enough for darkness to settle over the Gulf.
Lila stood, turned off the kitchen light and went to bed.