Daniel Bennett. Deceased 2019. Official cause: myocardial infarction. File flagged in 2020 during initial pattern analysis but deprioritized. No direct connection to permit irregularities established at the time.
Ronan typed back.
Connection exists. Daughter has his research files. Surveys don't match original plats. Property lines adjusted to absorb protected coastal access.
Daughter. That's your local source?
Yes.
Lila Bennett. Event coordinator. The one you said was asking the right questions.
Yes.
Another pause.
Ronan. She's a civilian. If this goes sideways?—
I know.
Do you? Because your last two reports mention her more than any other contact. Your assessment of the police chief focused on his relationship with her. Your cover story puts you in direct proximity to her office.
Ronan stared at the screen. Caleb wasn't wrong. He'd been tracking Lila since the first day, cataloging her movements, her connections, her habits. Telling himself it was an operational necessity. Intelligence gathering. Due diligence.
But there was a reason he'd pushed her. A reason he'd watched her react and felt something other than professional satisfaction when she decided to trust him.
She's an asset. Nothing more.
Make sure it stays that way.
He pocketed the phone and stood in the alley for another minute, letting the evening air cool the heat in his face.
Caleb was right to be concerned. Emotional entanglement compromised operations. Made you hesitate when you should act, trust when you should suspect, protect when you should let go.
He'd learned that lesson the hard way. Three dead team members and a classified operation in Afghanistan that would never appear in any official record.
Lila Bennett was smart and brave and exactly the kind of person who got hurt when she stumbled into things bigger than she understood. His job was to use her information, protect his cover, and complete his mission. Not to wonder what her hair would look like down, or what her laugh would sound like when it wasn't forced, or what it would feel like to tell her the whole truth instead of carefully edited pieces of it.
He pushed off the wall and headed toward the cottage on Beach Road.
He had work to do.
The cottage was dark when he arrived. Good. His cover included being a man who worked late and kept to himself—the eccentric outsider who was friendly enough but didn't invite questions.
He let himself in and went straight to the laptop set up on the kitchen table. The cottage was undisturbed — no indicators of entry, no tells out of place. He'd checked every morning and every night since he arrived: a strip of tape across the bottom of the door, a hair balanced on the laptop hinge. Nothing. Which made sense, operationally. Caldwell had recommended his firm. In Caldwell's thinking, Ronan Cross was an asset he'd placed, not a threat he needed to contain. You didn't surveil your own people. That was the kind of blind spot that led to operations being dismantled. He plugged in Lila's flash drive.
The files were organized the same way her office was—color-coded, cross-referenced, meticulously labeled. She'd created a timeline that stretched back fifteen years, tracking property transfers, permit applications, and survey certifications. Names appeared and reappeared, connected by arrows and notes in her careful handwriting.
Her father's files were separate. Older. Rougher around the edges, the work of a man who'd spent decades in the field and developed his own shorthand for recording what he found.
Ronan opened one of the scanned documents. A survey map from 2017, with handwritten notes in the margins.
Boundary markers don't match '87 plat. Checked twice. Error or intentional?
Another note, on a different document.
Third property this month with an adjusted coastal setback. All different owners. Same attorney—Hendricks. Who's authorizing these changes?
And another, dated three weeks before Daniel Bennett's death.
