Chapter 16 #2
“It’s not Laura who concerns me, Kin.” Alex meant every word.
The sharp sting of his breakup with Laura Mitchell had dulled months ago, leaving only the occasional twinge when her name surfaced in conversation.
He’d made his peace with it, or at least he’d made enough peace to stop replaying their last argument every time he couldn’t sleep.
“What’s with this guy? I heard he’s been asking about you again. ”
“Serra is a bottom feeder,” Kinsley replied, and the dismissal came too quickly, too smoothly, like a line she’d rehearsed. “He thrives on other people’s misery. Makes his living packaging it up into stories with just enough truth to avoid libel suits. I’m not worried about him.”
Alex knew his partner well enough to recognize when she was deflecting.
Kinsley was one of the most direct people he’d ever met, sometimes to the point of bluntness, and evasion was not her natural mode.
When she resorted to it, it meant whatever she was avoiding was significant enough to make the truth feel dangerous.
Something about Serra bothered her more than she was willing to admit, and the fact that she wouldn’t discuss it over the phone, with him hundreds of miles away and unable to read her face, only sharpened his concern.
“Kin—” he started, but she cut him off with the practiced ease of someone who’d been ending uncomfortable conversations her entire life.
“Make sure you win big tonight,” she said, her tone deliberately light. “You’re going to need the winnings to buy my morning coffees next week.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s your turn to—”
“Stretch just walked out to help me carry in these bags, so I’ll talk to you later. Bye.”
The call disconnected before Alex could say another word.
He pulled the phone from his ear and stared at the screen for a moment, caught between amusement at the abruptness and a concern that had been building for longer than this single conversation.
Kinsley had become evasive in a way that didn’t match the person he’d worked beside for years.
Her quick dismissal of Serra felt wrong, especially given the journalist’s history of targeting their cases and the damage his reporting had caused during the Gantz trial.
Something was off, and Alex didn’t like being kept in the dark.
He trusted Kinsley with his life, and that trust was the foundation of everything they’d built as partners.
But trust didn’t mean blindness, and the pattern he’d noticed, the deflections, the subject changes, the careful avoidance of anything related to Serra or Gantz, had been accumulating for months.
Each individual instance was easy to explain away.
Taken together, they formed a shape that made him uneasy.
He stared out at the darkened ocean, observing the white caps of waves rise and dissolve into the shoreline, each one swallowed by the sand as though it had never existed.
Behind him, the glass door slid open, spilling warm light and laughter onto the deck.
Alex didn’t turn. He already knew who had come to retrieve him.
“You planning to join us this century?” Max asked, his voice carrying the easy confidence of their decade-long friendship.
He stepped onto the deck with two beers in hand, condensation running down the bottles.
“Chaz is already talking trash about taking your money. I grabbed you a fresh one, figuring you might need reinforcements.”
Alex glanced over his shoulder through the glass door at their three other friends already seated around the kitchen table.
Cards were being shuffled, chips stacked in neat piles before each player.
It was a scene he should have been eager to join.
The entire point of this trip was to relax and disconnect, to spend a week doing nothing more consequential than arguing about poker hands and who had to clean the grill.
Instead of rising from his chair, he tilted his head toward the empty seat beside him, the gesture subtle enough that Max understood immediately.
His friend’s expression shifted from casual to attentive.
He set one of the beers on the table, quietly slid the door closed behind him to muffle the sounds from inside, and took the chair.
“What’s up?” Max asked, his tone dropping automatically.
“I’m hoping you could look into someone for me.”
“Personal or professional?” Max replied, and the caution in his voice was the practiced caution of a man who understood the weight of the question.
Max was a criminal investigator with the North Dakota Attorney General’s Office, and he had access to databases and contacts that Alex didn’t, the kind of resources that could turn a name into a full portrait in a matter of days.
The waves continued their steady percussion against the shoreline. A distant fishing boat’s lights blinked faintly on the horizon, a small constellation against the vastness of the dark water.
“A little of both,” Alex replied honestly, trusting without question that this conversation would remain between the two of them.
Max had been his closest friend since their first year of college, and there were things Alex had told him that he’d never told anyone else.
This would become one of them. “I need a full background check. Not the surface-level stuff. I want the deep pull. Employment history, financial records, known associates, anything that’s been sealed or expunged. Everything.”
Max studied him for a long moment, the kind of searching look that measured the seriousness of a request by the expression on the face making it. Whatever he spotted in Alex’s eyes must have been enough, because he gave a single nod.
“I’ll make some calls tomorrow morning,” Max said. “Name?”
“Beck Serra.”
Max didn’t react, which told Alex he didn’t recognize it. That was fine. He would soon enough. Alex reached for the fresh beer Max had brought him, twisted the cap off, and took a long drink.
He’d give Max the full context over breakfast tomorrow, everything he knew about Serra’s history with Kinsley, the Gantz trial coverage, the wedge it had driven between Kinsley and her father, and the journalist’s persistent interest in cases connected to his partner.
For now, the name was enough to get things moving.