Page 3 of Beneath the Surface

The first page was a handwritten note in her father’s familiar scrawl:If you’re reading this, something has happened to me. The people involved in this are dangerous. Please be careful.

Her throat tightened. She turned the page.

What followed was a journalist’s dream—or nightmare. Dozens of documents, carefully organized and annotated in her father’s precise hand. Real estate transactions that didn’t add up. Shell companies. Money moving through accounts in complex patterns clearly designed to hide its origin and destination. Names of people involved. Dates. Amounts.

And at the center of it all: a man named James Wheeler.

Quinn’s journalist brain kicked into high gear, analyzing and cataloging even as her emotions churned. Her father had been building a case. He’d discovered a major real estate fraud scheme—properties being bought and sold at inflated prices, money being laundered through a local car dealership, investors being bilked out of millions.

The detail was incredible. Bank statements. Property records. Photographs of meetings between Wheeler and various associates. Her father had been thorough. Methodical.

And then he’d died.

Quinn flipped through more pages. Found a list of victims—people who’d invested in Wheeler’s schemes and lost everything. One name jumped out at her: Thomas Crane.

She grabbed her laptop and did a quick search. Thomas Crane, local real estate developer, had died just two days ago. The news article called it a suspected suicide.

Her pulse quickened. She dug deeper, searching for more information. Crane had been about to testify in a fraud case when he died. The case had fallen apart without his testimony.

Another “accident.” Another convenient death.

Quinn sat back in her chair, her mind spinning. This wasn’t just about her father anymore. People were still dying. Wheeler was still out there, still stealing, still destroying lives.

And someone needed to stop him.

She thought about her grandmother’s words.You’re a journalist. You find the truth.

This was what she did. This was who she was. She exposed corruption. She told the stories that needed to be told. She gave voices to victims who couldn’t speak for themselves.

But this was different. This was personal. Her father had been murdered for digging into this. Thomas Crane had likely died for knowing too much. Nothing she’d investigated had ever been this close to home.

If she pursued this story, she could be next.

Quinn looked down at her father’s neat handwriting. At the evidence he’d died collecting. At the truth he’d never gotten to tell.

She thought about Thomas Crane’s family. About all the people who’d lost their money to Wheeler’s schemes. About justice and truth and the job she’d sworn to do when she became a journalist.

Then she thought about her grandmother sleeping down the hall, using her last days to make sure Quinn knew the truth. To make sure someone would finally do something.

“Okay, Dad,” she whispered to the empty kitchen. “Okay.”

She pulled out her phone and started taking pictures of every document in the folder. She’d upload them to her secure cloud storage tonight. Make copies. Send them to trusted sources. Whatever happened, this information wouldn’t disappear again.

Then she opened a new document on her laptop and started typing. Names. Dates. Connections. Questions that needed answers.

She worked until midnight, until her eyes burned and her back ached. Her grandmother slept peacefully in her room. The house creaked and settled around her as the wind kicked up outside. Outside, a storm was brewing. And Blackridge was quiet—the kind of small-town quiet she’d forgotten existed.

But Quinn’s mind was anything but quiet. It raced with possibilities and plans and the burning need to know the truth.

Her father had been murdered. Now Thomas Crane had been murdered. And James Wheeler had gotten away with it.

Not anymore.

Quinn saved her document and closed her laptop. She’d start fresh tomorrow. Talk to people who knew her father. Track down anyone who’d worked with Crane. Build the case her father had started.

She just had to be careful. Smarter than her father had been. More cautious than Thomas Crane.

Because if they’d been killed for what they knew, she was walking into the same danger.