Page 17 of Carry on Wayward Son

I moved to the next item. “Gwen was taken as retaliation against her brother, Miles. There’s video footage of Miles being threatened. He was told to launder money through the marina and told someone he loved would pay the price if he refused.” I looked up. “And he refused.”

“He told them to go to hell,” Bree said quietly. “Miles was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a coward.”

“And three days later, Gwen was gone.”

Nobody said anything to that. What could they say?

“There’s a second video.” I kept my voice level. “Of Gwen in the hold of a ship.”

“Bound and gagged,” Madden said. “Objectively, it’s not the boat Willa described, but we still believe it to be connected.”

I looked back down at the notebook. I wrote the words and kept my breathing even, and I didn’t let any of it reach the surface, because the hold of a ship wasn’t an abstract concept to me. I knew what it smelled like. I knew what the floor felt like under my hands and how sound moved in a space like that. I knew what it meant to be in the dark, with the water pressing against the hull on all sides. I knew it, and I banked it and kept going.

With a little whine, Koa bumped his head against my free hand. I scrubbed at his ears and continued. “I’ll need to see both videos.”

“Of course,” Madden said.

“David Galef.” I looked at the next line. “He obtained the videos somehow and used them to blackmail Miles. Threatened to take them public. There was a confrontation, and Galef ended up dead. Miles disposed of the body and is currently serving time for it.” I looked up. “Do we know whether Galef was connected to the original operation, or whether he found the videos independently?”

“We’ve never been able to establish that,” Madden said. “It’s one of the things that’s never been answered.”

I made a note of it. An unanswered question at the center of everything, the kind that might matter enormously or not at all, depending on what else turned up. “And Miles refused to cooperate in his own trial proceedings.”

“Completely.” Madden’s jaw tightened slightly. The prosecutor in her still rankled at that, I suspected.

The room was quiet for a moment.

Then Madden leaned forward. “There’s one more piece. In the course of investigating all of this, we’ve found evidence of a much broader pattern. Disappearances going back at least fifteen years. I’ve got FOIA requests for more case files going back further, but we’ve concentrated mostly on Gwen going forward and found multiple cases across the region. We believe Carson actively suppressed them. Not just failing to investigate, but deliberately kept them buried.”

I looked down at the notebook.

I wrote the words. Neat bullet points that summarized an ugly reality.

Koa’s head came up from my knee and pressed harder against my leg. I kept my free hand on him, controlled my face, and kept the pen moving. Fifteen years. I knew what that pattern looked like. I knew it from the inside, knew the shape of it and what it felt like to be one data point in something that nobody had been connecting yet because someone had been making sure they didn’t. The operation had been running before Gwen. It had been running before me. And Carson hadn’t just looked the other way. He’d actively kept it buried. Every family who’d been told there were no leads. Every case that had gone cold without anyone looking hard enough. All of it a choice made deliberately. Maintained deliberately.

“How many cases?” I asked.

“We don’t have a full count yet,” Madden said carefully. “The audit is still working through the files.”

I nodded and wrote that down, too, to give myself a moment before I looked up at the room.

“What is it you’re hoping to achieve? I want to understand the objective before we go any further.”

The tenor of the room shifted. No doubt it was a question they’d all lived with so long they’d stopped considering the possibility of an answer.

“We know she’s most likely gone,” Willa said quietly. “We understand the probability of that.”

Good. At least they were prepared for that, insofar as they could be. “Then what does a successful outcome look like for you?”

Madden answered first. “Answers. Who made the call. Who built this operation and ran it. And accountability. Miles is in prison, but he was a victim in this as much as anyone. We want whoever gave the order.”

“The puppet master,” Gabi said. The word came out with an edge on it.

“Closure,” Willa said. She said it simply, and the simplicity of it carried everything. “She deserves to be more than a poster on a wall forever.”

I looked at each of them and accepted the full weight of what they were asking for. It was the hardest thing to deliver in a cold case. Not just answers, but justice. Not just information, but someone held accountable for it. Those two things didn’t always come together. Most of the time, they didn’t. But I understood wanting both. Understood it in a way that ran deeper than professional sympathy.

“Then you follow the money,” I said. “If someone had Gwen taken in retaliation for her brother’s refusal to launder money through the marina, finding out who wanted that money laundered leads you directly to whoever made the call. And given they fully carried out their threat and did exactly what they said they would do, chances are the laundering happened anyway, once Miles was sufficiently motivated. Which means the financial records from that period are where you start.” I looked at Madden. “Does anyone have access to the marina’s records from that time?”