Page 51 of Reckless

Chapter Eleven

GHOST

The Next Night

Every night, I run the trace, and it takes less than three minutes, most of it automated now, but I still watch it from start to finish.

It’s a habit. Maybe paranoia. But I’ve never seen much difference between the two.

Most nights the report comes back clean.

Tonight… it doesn’t.

I’m cross-referencing shell companies attached to the group home network, the same tedious work I’ve been doing for three weeks, when a name repeats itself in a configuration I haven’t seen before. I sit forward and pull the thread. Calloway’s management companies, the ones sitting two and three layers removed from his name, intersect with the group home funding structure through an oversight committee that should never touch private management contracts in the first place.

I follow it back twenty years, and the pattern holds the whole way through. Money moving through a committee structure built to look like oversight, when what it actually does is redirect funding into accounts that trace, eventually and painstakingly, back to Calloway himself. It’s clean work, the kind that took someone real time to make look legitimate, but legitimate and clean have never meant the same thing, and once you know what you’re searching for, the evidence shows itself easily enough.

I build the map across three separate screens because one screen isn’t large enough to hold twenty years of this. And by the time I sit back, my coffee has gone cold, my shoulders ache from holding the same position too long, and the map in front of me isn’t a theory anymore. It’s proof, laid out in a way that would hold up in front of anyone who understood how to read it.

She’s spent three years building her half of this story from the human side—the families, the testimonies, and the weight of what it looks like when a system fails the people it’s supposed to protect. I’ve built the other half from the architectural side, showing exactly how that failure was engineered and who profited from it. Neither half means much without the other, and together they mean almost everything.

I don’t send it to her tonight, and it isn’t because I’m protecting her from it, or because I think she can’t handle what’s sitting on these screens. I hold it back because I want to hand her something complete, not a fragment she has to sit with alone while the rest of it comes together. She’s carried enough alone lately, and I’ve noticed it in the way her phone makes her flinch now, and that flinch disappears before she thinks anyone catches it, but I catch it every damn time.

She thinks I haven’t noticed the change in her over the past few weeks, the way she used to leave her phone face up on the counter and now turns it face down.

I have said nothing.

Observation without evidence is just another way of making someone carry your worry.

There’s a second thread running beneath the first one, and it is the one that refuses to leave me alone.

Two months ago, while I was digging through Calloway’s financial network, I started logging encrypted traffic moving through several of the shell companies tied to him.

At first it looked like noise—routine background chatter buried beneath thousands of legitimate transmissions.

It isn’t.

I kill the mine reports and pull the live feed across all three monitors.

Same encrypted endpoint.

Same intervals.

Same signature every time.

Whatever is sitting on the other end of those transmissions has been built by somebody who knows exactly what they’re doing. The encryption is clean, and the routing changes often enough to frustrate anyone looking for an obvious trail, but not enough to hide the pattern underneath it.

And there is a pattern.

There always is.

I just haven’t found it yet.

The messages themselves are still locked behind encrypted layers I haven’t peeled apart. I don’t know what’s being said. I don’t know who’s receiving them. For all I know, it isn’t even a phone. It could be another server, a relay, a burner sitting in a drawer waiting for someone to wake it up.

Too many possibilities, not enough answers.

I lean back in my chair, eyes fixed on the stream of encrypted traffic scrolling across the screen.