Page 40 of Carry on Wayward Son

“Twenty minutes,” Rios said.

The agent left the door open. Rios came around the desk and reached past us to close it again. The set of his shoulders said everything his face didn’t. When the tap-tap-tap sounded before he even made it to his desk, a muscle jumped in his jaw.

“Yeah?”

The door opened, and a woman stuck her head in. “Sorry to bother you, Chief, but you said you wanted an update on that single-vehicle crash call we had earlier.”

He blew out a breath. “Yes.”

“The fire department is out there now helping with stabilization, but she’s critical. Medevac’s been called.”

Rios scraped one big palm down his face. “Who is it?”

“Diane Crowell.”

The name struck me like a fist, and I hissed out a breath.

We’d been with her just this morning. Asking questions just this morning. Questions about things she’d left her old job to escape, whether she’d been fully aware of it or not. What were the chances that she just happened to get into a critical car accident right after?

Koa pressed tight to my legs, shoving his head beneath my hands. My fingers automatically twined in his ruff, anchoring myself.

The door shut.

“Layla.” Jace’s voice was calm and even. His hand gently curled around my shoulder even as Rios shifted files to empty a chair.

“I’m okay.” My voice sounded distant to my own ears, and when Jace nudged me into the chair, I didn’t fight. “We just saw her,” I whispered.

“You what now?” Rios asked.

“She’s the bookkeeper at the ferry company,” Jace said. “We met with her this morning to talk to her about her work for the marina, back when she was employed there.”

“Y’all talked to her about work at the marina, where you suspect money laundering has been occurring for years, and now she’s in critical condition.” He didn’t pose it as a question.

The three of us sat with that. Outside, the SBI audit ground on. Someone’s keyboard clattered. A phone rang twice and stopped. The ordinary sounds of a department at work, indifferent to whatever had just landed in this office.

“We don’t know that it’s connected,” Jace said.

“We don’t know that it’s not,” I argued.

I had done this work long enough to understand that questions have weight. That asking the right ones in the wrong place at the wrong time could set things in motion that you didn’t intend and couldn’t control. I had sat in rooms like this before, after outcomes like this one, and I had learned not to call it guilt because guilt implied you’d done something wrong, and I hadn’t done anything wrong. Neither had Jace. We had asked an old woman about fuel numbers and empty slips, and she had seemed relieved to finally tell someone.

That didn’t make the timing sit any better.

Then I thought about the conference room door swinging open. The apology. The spreadsheet question.

“There was a man,” I said. “While we were with her. He knocked on the door, said he was sorry to interrupt, and asked about a spreadsheet error. Something about column F on the quarterly variance report. Not Kevin, someone else.” I looked at Rios. “Young guy. Dark jacket. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but is it crazy to look into him?”

“Not crazy at all.” Rios picked up a pen and wrote it down. “I’ll ask around.”

We said our goodbyes and walked back out through the hallway, past the banker’s boxes and the legal pad and the officers who didn’t stop to talk, through the front room where the SBI men sat with their documents, and out into the cold.

I made it to the truck and stopped there with my hand on the door. I couldn’t make myself open it.

Questions had consequences. It was a key detail of this kind of work. Sometimes those consequences were something you hadn’t intended. After years of doing this job, I’d learned to hold that. To keep the professional distance that made it possible to keep doing the job.

I wasn’t holding it particularly well right now.

“Hey.” Jace came around the truck and stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to look up at him. Not touching. Just there, blocking the wind a little, his face open in a way I’d learned meant he was paying full attention. “Talk to me.”