Page 38 of Carry on Wayward Son

“Were the fuel discrepancies consistent?” she asked. “Always in the same direction?”

“Over, mostly. Revenues coming in higher than the actual logged traffic would account for.” Diane looked at Layla steadily, and I watched her arriving at something, slowly, the way you arrived at conclusions you’d been circling for years. “I thought it was sloppy record keeping.”

“It may have been something else,” Layla said quietly. She didn’t push further. Just let it sit there between them.

Diane looked at the table for a moment. Then she looked up at me. “I always liked that family,” she said. “The whole Busby family. Even at their worst, they were real people. They loved each other. It just went so wrong.”

A knock at the door. A younger man leaned in, apologetic, papers in hand. “Diane, sorry to interrupt. The quarterly variance report is throwing an error, and Kevin can’t figure out what’s wrong with it.”

“Column F,” she said without looking up. “Tell him to check the formula in column F.”

He nodded and pulled the door shut behind him.

Layla closed her notepad. “You’ve been extremely generous with your time, and more helpful than you know.”

Diane looked at us both. “I’ve thought about all of this more times than I can count, since everything came out about Miles and Carson and all the rest of it. If I’d noticed something sooner, if I’d asked more questions about those numbers, maybe something would have been different.” She stopped. “I know that’s probably not realistic.”

“You couldn’t have known what you were looking at,” Layla said. “And you looked out for the people you could look out for. That matters.”

Something in Diane’s face eased. Not completely, but some.

“If we have more questions, we’ll be in touch,” I said. “Thank you, Diane.”

We walked back out through the corridor, past the breakroom, through the lobby with its brochure rack and ticket desk, out into the cold air of the parking lot. The ferry horn bellowed somewhere out on Pamlico Sound—that low, sustained note that had underscored every day of my childhood.

Layla walked beside me without speaking for a moment, looking at the water, and I let her think.

“Fuel revenues running high,” I said finally. “Slips occupied with no record of what was in them.”

“Money coming in off the books and being run through as legitimate marina revenue.” She kept her eyes on the sound. “And vessels coming and going without a paper trail. They were using that marina as an operational hub—not just laundering money through it, running actual traffic through it. Boats that had no business being there, logged as nothing.” She paused. “Which means it was already happening before Miles refused them. He may have had no idea what his family’s business had been turned into. And when they finally came to him and asked him to participate directly, and he said no—that’s when it became personal.”

“And when the Busbys sold⁠—”

“Whoever bought it got a fully operational setup. Established routes, established cover, staff who saw the discrepancies as just grief-related sloppiness.” She turned away from the water toward the truck. “Which means quite likely all of it is still ongoing.”

“So the sale is the thread. Who bought it, how the purchase was financed, whether the money trail connects to anything we already have.”

“Public records?” she asked.

“Public records,” I agreed, and slid into the truck.

Twenty

LAYLA

For once, technology was on our side. The Dare County Register of Deeds had digitized its records back to the early nineties, which meant the marina sale was right there in black and white. We followed the trail from there to the North Carolina Secretary of State’s registration of the LLC that had made the purchase. In an hour, we’d collected a list of names and entities to take to Rios.

The police station was only five minutes away, and the chief was in.

I noted the tension before we even made it through the door.

The officer at the front desk sat too carefully, her eyes moving between us and the two men at the corner table in a way that said she was tracking more than one thing at a time and had been doing it for months. The men at the table wore the kind of business casual that wasn’t quite civilian. One of them looked up when we came in, ran his eyes over Jace, over me, over Koa, and went back to his documents. The other didn’t look up at all, which was its own kind of looking.

The front desk officer obviously recognized Jace, but it didn’t melt into the easy flirtation I’d seen him get other places. Her gaze shot once more to the agents in the corner.

“Chief’s in his office,” she said. “Go on back.”

The hallway felt like a held breath. Another man came out of a side room carrying a banker’s box, angled past us without acknowledgment, and disappeared. Koa’s eyes tracked him and came back to me. I kept my pace even and my face neutral as I noted the storage room door propped open with a box of files, the yellow legal pad on the breakroom table with handwriting I couldn’t read from this angle, the way the two officers we passed in the hall both registered Jace first and me second, and neither of them stopped to chat the way people usually did with him.