“Aren’t I always?” Kinsley’s voice shifted to the tone she used when she was about to change the subject. He could always tell. It was a subtle lift, almost bright, as though she were physically turning away from something she didn’t want to face. “Other than planning to fleece your friends at poker, how’s the vacation going? Caught anything worth mounting on your wall?”
“We spent most of yesterday on a charter. I caught a forty-pound tuna that the captain said was the biggest he’d seen this season.” Alex took another sip of his beer, which had grown warm in his hand. “And Max got a decent-sized mahi-mahi, but nothing worth bragging about. The rest of the time we’ve beengrilling on the deck and drinking more beer than men our age probably should.”
Kinsley’s laugh came through clearly, and it sounded genuine for the first time in the conversation.
“Sounds exactly like what you needed.”
A comfortable silence settled between them, filled only by the steady rhythm of waves against the shore on his end and the faint idle of the Jeep’s engine on hers. He set his beer bottle on the arm of his chair and stared out at the receding tide, studying the foam retreat across the wet sand in the last of the daylight. He could picture her parked in front of the high school, staring at the building through the windshield, already running through tomorrow’s interview in her head.
“I heard Serra was at the station,” Alex finally said, keeping his tone neutral despite the immediate tension that filled the line.
A beat of silence.
Then another.
“I was going to tell you after you got back,” Kinsley admitted softly. “I didn’t want to spoil your time off.”
“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 ofanything 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 understoodthe 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.”
