Page 117 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Last known timeline. His car near the Mystic aquarium. Blood on the steering wheel.

Witness statement one, with the Russian accent.

Witness statement two, without it.

Daniel’s last text to me printed from an old phone backup because I could not stand keeping it only in digital form.

Then I kept looking because that was what I did. Ivan became peripheral. The apartment, the monitors, the pen, the sting still lingering beneath my legging—all of it moved one step back because Daniel’s file had always known how to take the center of a room.

I opened the archive from the drive, then the old note I had taken from my apartment. Daniel’s handwriting looked different on the screen when I scanned it in, too neat somehow and beneath a column of old entity names, he had circled one I had never been able to place.

Seaport Meridian Holdings.

I pulled the current Orlov map onto one monitor and moved Ivan’s cleaned file aside without asking permission and he let me.

Wise man.

Seaport Meridian had been inactive for years. That was why I had never loved it as a lead. Registered, moved money twice, disappeared, dissolved into three successor entities that led nowhere useful, but Ivan’s map had a Seaport branch. When I searched it, I found Meridian Harbor Services.

Ivan leaned closer.

“These are connected,” he said.

I did not look at him. “Show me.”

He moved to his own machine and pulled a corporate filing record onto the right monitor, then a property transfer, then an old port services permit. Light digital work. Nothing showy. Nothing that needed explanation beyond the documents themselves.

Seaport Meridian Holdings had dissolved seven years ago.

Three months before Daniel vanished.

One of its successor entities held a minority stake in a port services company that later became Meridian Harbor Services.

Meridian Harbor Services had one small contract tied to a Boston Seaport warehouse.

A warehouse Daniel had visited six days before he disappeared.

I knew that because it was in his mileage log, a line the police had dismissed as work-related and uninteresting.

My hands went cold.

“Kit,” he said.

“No.”

“You don’t know what I am about to say.”

“Yes, I do.”

He was going to tell me not to let the new connection make me reckless, and he would be right.

I hated that.

“I’m not running,” I said.

“I didn’t expect you to.”

“I’m not leaving.”