Page 64 of Wells

I shift my gaze to the floor indicator.

"I'm thinking."

"About?"

"Work."

She makes a sound that is almost a laugh.

"Convincing."

The doors open on the ground floor, and we step into the lobby. I need nicotine, concrete, and ten minutes where I am not tracking the space between her body and mine.

"I'm grabbing lunch before the one o'clock with procurement," she says. "Care to join me?"

"Can't. I've got something I have to do."

Something, as if that something is not a cigarette, a locked car, and as much distance from her as I can get while still keeping her three feet down the hall.

We split at the main doors without saying anything else.

Back at my desk an hour later, my office door open, I hear her humming. The tune filters through the open door, a few bars of something I cannot name but recognize anyway. It catches on the edge of my brain, something heard before but not placed.

I pull up the Gulf-East terminal server to check for the tenth time since I shored everything back up, confirm the remote log, and drop into the encrypted partition. Looks like we are solid there.

Switching over to my current personal obsession, I open the original financial trace I ran after Dad's death. The ten million that came through three shell companies, landed in an offshore account, and paid for the hit itself. I followed it far enough to confirm what it bought, equipment and manpower staged weeks in advance, but never pushed past the structure hiding where it truly came from.

At the time, I didn't need to. Everyone already knew the Duvalls commissioned it.

I pull the shell companies back up now and start climbing. The first two layers peel easily, routing through the Caymans and a Panamanian LLC that dissolved six months after Dad died. The third layer hits a trust registered in Gibraltar, and the ownership structure fractures into four different entities that each own a percentage but none control.

I trace the entities. Two of them dissolve into more shells. One terminates at a law firm in London that handles institutional clients. The fourth loops back to a credit union in Louisiana that went under in 2019.

None of it resolves to a name.

I lean back and light a cigarette, the ember flaring in the dark.

Who backed that kind of capital? The Duvalls were Gulf logistics, mid-tier players with freight contracts and port access. They were comfortable, maybe, but not the kind of family that keeps ten million offshore for contingencies. Someone funded them. Someone with real money and a real reason to want my father gone, sitting a layer above a family too small to matter. That's who I'm hunting.

I pull the timeline from the night of the murder. Ronnie and Dane were paid through a cash drop, according to Dane, so there's no way to trace that. The call that brought Ridge in came from a burner, anonymized and routed through three towers. The staging around the warehouse, tools left in specific places, the setup clean enough to read as premeditated from the first sweep.

I chart it against the money, the timing, the precision.

I finish the cigarette and crush it in the ashtray beside the keyboard. My reflection stares back from the black screen to my left, pale in the monitor's glow.

I close the partition and open a fresh terminal, punching in the tracking protocol I set on Dane the morning I left Florida. His phone pings from the same apartment complex off I-275. There's been no movement logged since yesterday afternoon.

That's too still for his normal patterns I observed when I located him.

I pull his credit activity. One transaction at a gas station Saturday morning, nothing since. His work log shows him clocking out Friday night, on schedule, with no absences flagged. He'd be moving, buying food, using his phone. He'd be existing.

I run a deeper check, pulling his call history. Three outbound calls Thursday, two on Friday morning, and then silence. There are no texts, no data usage, even though his phone is on, pinging the tower.

I lean back, fingers drumming against the desk.

I trace the security feed from Dane's building. No cameras in the hallway, just the parking lot and front entrance. I scan backward through the weekend. Dane's truck sits in the same spot, untouched. No footage of him leaving or coming back.

He ran, or he is already dead.