Page 66 of Carry on Wayward Son

“Might be coincidence.”

“Might be. I want to know for sure whether it is.”

Dax slipped into a thinking quiet. I’d learned the meaningful difference between that and the performance of consideration a long time ago, during a posting that had thrown us together for six weeks under conditions that required learning to read the people around you accurately, or suffering the consequences. He was operating now somewhere in whatever gray space existed between legitimate private intelligence work and the things that never got written anywhere, and he was exceptional at navigating both sides of that line.

“How deep do you want me to go?” he finally asked.

“As deep as it goes. If there’s nothing there, I want to confirm it’s nothing. If there’s something, I want to know exactly what I’m looking at before I decide what to do with it.”

“That’s going to take some time. Men like Edmund Ashmore spend a great deal of money structuring their holdings specifically to be difficult to follow.”

“Take the time you need. I’d rather have it right than fast.”

“A week, maybe two.” He paused, and when he continued, the easy, transactional quality had gone out of his voice. “And Hollingsworth. If it is their operation, and it’s been running for that long without attracting serious attention, there’s a reason for that. People like that don’t get where they are by being careless about loose ends.”

“I know.” I’d spent enough of my career getting close to groups like that from the inside to understand how they thought about exposure.

“Eyes open.”

“Always.”

Something creaked over the line. Dax leaning back in his chair. The keys went quiet. “Anything else?”

“That’s it for now.”

“How’s Willa?”

“Good. Better than she’s been in a long time.” I said it simply because it was true and because with Dax there was no need to embellish.

“Good.” Warmth surfaced in his voice—genuine without lingering long enough to become a moment he’d have to manage. He’d met Willa once, under circumstances that had been complicated for everyone involved in different ways, and somewhere in the course of that single meeting he’d decided she was someone who mattered. That was how he operated. Quiet, efficient, and without making a production of it. “Tell her I said so.”

“I will.”

“Best to Sawyer and the rest of the guys, too. And get off the deck. It’s December.” He was already gone before I could answer.

I sat with the phone in my hand and looked out at the Atlantic. The cloud cover was solid. No stars, no moon, just the surf breaking below in the dark and the cold salt air coming off three thousand miles of open ocean. No satellite imagery, then. The man really did know me.

Rather than moving, I continued turning Halston Ashmore over in my brain.

I hadn’t had cause to think of him in years. Not since my freshman year of college, when he’d been frat president. He’d been a prick. Charming, connected, well-resourced, but underneath all of it, a prick. One with the kind of magnetism that organized a room around himself without appearing to try. I’d had a year of being at the same events, the same parties, before he graduated and was gone. I’d watched him work people with the ease of someone who’d understood from childhood that his family name was a tool and had decided to use it accordingly. I’d kept my distance because I’d had decent instincts even at eighteen, and my instincts about Halston had been clear enough. That kind of entitlement often led to questionable things.

I didn’t have anything concrete at this point. Nothing I could put my finger on, nothing I could write down and call evidence. I didn’t even have a specific reason I could spell out for having Dax do the deep dive on the Ashmore family before anyone else on the list. It was nothing more than a persistent niggling in my gut, the quiet kind that didn’t announce itself so much as settle in and refuse to leave. That niggle had kept me alive doing intelligence work for years, so I wouldn’t start ignoring it now.

Either way, until Dax came back with something worth looking at, the Ashmore name was just a name on a property record. One of dozens. I had no business sitting out here in the December cold, treating it like anything more than that.

Thirty-Four

LAYLA

Willa’s approach to Christmas decoration could best be described as enthusiastic maximalism.

She opened a third box. “There is no such thing as too many ornaments. I have been told my whole life that things need to match and coordinate and be tasteful, and I am done with all that.”

“Wren, the tree is already listing slightly to the left,” Sawyer said from the kitchen doorway.

“The tree has character.” Willa held up a sequined lobster and a small wooden lighthouse and hung them on adjacent branches with the satisfaction of someone exercising a long-denied freedom. “Layla, there’s another box in the hall closet.”

I found the box. It contained, among other things, a ceramic cactus wearing a Santa hat, three ornaments shaped like different breeds of dogs, a blown glass pickle, and what appeared to be a very small disco ball.