Meeting with T.F. tomorrow. He says I'm seeing patterns that aren't there. Maybe. But the numbers don't lie.
T.F.
Ronan pulled up his notes from the police station meeting. Chief Tray Fielding. Army veteran. Twenty years on the force. Real estate holdings that Caleb had flagged as interesting.
Daniel Bennett had met with Tray Fielding. Three weeks before he died. And Fielding had told him he was seeing patterns that weren't there.
He typed a message to Caleb.
Daniel Bennett met with Tray Fielding before his death. Fielding dismissed his concerns. Prioritize Fielding's property acquisitions. I want to know who sold to him and under what circumstances.
The response was immediate.
On it. Also—Hendricks. That name appears in our existing files. Real estate attorney with an office on First Street. Handles closings for a lot of waterfront property.
How much is a lot?
Seventy-three percent of coastal transfers in the past decade.
Seventy-three percent. In a town this size, that wasn't market dominance. That was something else entirely.
Get me everything on Hendricks. Personal finances, client list, and any connections to Caldwell or Fielding.
Already running. You'll have it by morning.
Ronan leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen. The pieces were starting to connect. Falsified surveys. An attorney who handled most of the coastal property transfers. A police chief who'd dismissed a dead man's concerns. And Warren Caldwell, the respected pillar of the community whose name appeared everywhere, but whose fingerprints never touched anything directly.
Someone had built a system. Careful, methodical, designed to operate in plain sight while funneling protected public land into private hands. The question wasn't whether it was happening. The question was how deep it went and who sat at the top.
He thought about Lila, alone in her parents’ house with her father's files and her two years of quiet investigation. She'd gotten closer to the truth than anyone else, and she'd done it without resources, without backup, without any of the tools that Shadow Ops took for granted.
She was also the most visible target they could have asked for. If whoever was running this operation figured out how much she knew, she wouldn't just lose her job. She'd end up like her father—another convenient heart attack, another closed case, another question that never got answered.
He couldn't let that happen.
The thought came unbidden, too fierce and too certain to be purely professional. He pushed it away. Focused on the files. On the mission. On the work that needed to be done.
But the thought stayed with him, lodged somewhere behind his ribs, as the night deepened and the evidence accumulated and Blossom Springs slept peacefully under its picture-perfect facade.
He couldn't let anything happen to her.
He wasn't sure anymore if that was the mission talking, or something else entirely.
Chapter Four
Lila spent the night second-guessing every decision she'd made in the past twenty-four hours.
She lay in her grandmother's four-poster bed, staring at the ceiling fan as it turned lazy circles above her, and mentally cataloged all the ways this could go wrong. She'd handed over two years of research to a man she'd known for three days. A man who'd admitted—without really admitting—that he was some kind of federal agent working off the books. A man who looked at her like he was solving a puzzle, and she wasn't sure if she was a piece or the whole picture.
“I work for a federal agency. Off the books.”
What did that even mean? FBI? CIA? Some alphabet soup she'd never heard of? He'd been deliberately vague, giving her just enough to trust him without giving her anything she could verify.
And she'd trusted him anyway.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She grabbed it, heart jumping, but it was just Delia.
Coffee at Mae's? 7 am? Need to gossip about the security consultant. He's HOT.
