Page 118 of Hunt Me, Daddy

“I can see that too.”

“I’m looking.”

“Then look very carefully.”

The words were quiet. There was no command or even a hint of Daddy in his voice, no attempt to soften what had happened between us with the dynamic I had not yet decided whether to keep or burn to the ground.

So we kept working. At some point, he set coffee beside me. I did not thank him, but I drank it anyway.

At midnight, we found the first clear overlap. Daniel’s warehouse visit coincided with a transfer through Seaport Meridian’s successor entity. In the records, it was listed as a consulting payment with the label archival services. Shortly thereafter, we found the second overlap. The same warehouse had been subleased, briefly, to a company tied to one of Mikhail Orlov’s older Boston conduits. Sometime later, we found the third. A man listed on the port services permit had given a witness statement in Daniel’s case. The bartender who had first mentioned a Russian accent and then forgotten all about it.

My vision narrowed. I pulled the statement up, then the permit, then the signatures.

They were all signed by the same man.

Mikhail Orlov.

I sat with his name on the screen for a moment.

Seven years of red string and cold files and the specific, private grief of someone who had kept looking past the point where looking made practical sense. Seven years of Mikhail Orlov as a shape I could prove by what moved around it but never directly touch.

His signature was right there.

He had not hidden it. He had buried it under enough corporate language to assume it would never resurface. He had been so certain of that assumption he had not even bothered to scrub the name from the permit.

My hands were very still on the keyboard.

For the first time in seven years, Daniel’s disappearance did not feel like a cold file. It felt like a door I was about to open.

Ivan’s voice came from beside me.

“Kit.”

I did not look away from the screen.

“If you tell me to stop, I will throw this laptop at you.”

“I was not going to tell you to stop.”

“What were you going to say?”

“That you did it.”

CHAPTER 20

Ivan

Kit did not answer.

For a long moment, she only stared at the screen, her face pale in the monitor glow, her hands resting perfectly still on either side of the keyboard. She was a bit too still. I had learned the rhythm of her by then, the little movements she could not fully suppress when her mind was working: the tap of one finger near the trackpad, the tilt of her head, the faint pull between her brows when a detail resisted her. Now there was none of that.

Only stillness.

Daniel Calloway’s paper file lay open beside her elbow. The old pages looked fragile under the hard light of my desk, police reports and witness statements and timelines arranged around the digital records we had spent hours dragging out of Orlov records. The Seaport subsidiary. The warehouse. The payment disguised as archival services. The witness who had become a permit signatory. The final authorization line, buried undercorporate language and enough coded phrasing to mean nothing to a court until placed beside everything else.

Mikhail Orlov had signed off on it, not in words clean enough to suggest murder, but it was still there.

Kit’s brother Daniel had found something he was not supposed to find, and Mikhail had ordered the problem ended.