Page 87 of Carry on Wayward Son

“I can’t believe you’re really here,” she said against my shoulder. “After all this time.”

I held on just as tight. “Me neither.” And then, because it was true, because it was the thing I’d come back to this island carrying and the thing I intended to see through: “And we’re going to make all those years count. We’re going to find the evidence, and we’re going to take these fuckers down. All of them.”

“Damned straight.” She pulled back and wiped at her face with the heel of her hand, and something in her had settled that hadn’t been settled before. The cousin and the prosecutor, both of them, lining up behind the same purpose.

Then she let out a breath and looked toward the kitchen. “But I really need more coffee first.”

Forty-Five

JACE

By the third day of the new year, I had developed a personal grievance against paper.

The whole group had been rotating through Sutter House in shifts, the dining room table buried under printouts and legal pads and laptops, the original financial architecture Dax had sent spread across every available surface and cross-referenced against Madden’s marina records and Daniel’s drug-running timeline and the property documents Layla and I had pulled before Christmas. The work was necessary. The work was also the kind of mind-numbing that made you understand why people confessed to things just to make the questioning stop.

I’d reached the point of staring at a column of LLC registration dates with none of them meaning anything when my phone rang, Dax’s name flashing across the screen. The interruption was so welcome I answered instantly. “Tell me you have something. Anything. I’ll take a grocery list at this point.”

At the prolonged silence that followed, I momentarily wondered if someone had hacked his shit.

“Your dad is connected, man.”

My relief at recognizing Dax’s voice died a swift death as my brain processed what he’d actually said.

This was not how he operated. He habitually led with dry remarks and made you work for the substance. The fact that he’d opened with this announcement, flat and direct, told me he’d called ahead of the email on purpose. A warning. The kind you gave a friend before you handed them something they weren’t going to want.

I set down the page I’d been holding. “Say that again.”

“I’ve been pulling the deeper Ashmore architecture. Took a while because it’s buried under a lot of legitimate activity, which is the point of structuring it that way.” A pause. “Your father’s name is in it, Jace. Not buried. Not incidental. He’s funded multiple ventures that trace back to Ashmore-connected capital. Including one tied to a Marcus Teller.”

Teller. The Bistro. Tidewater’s local face, the man Madden had surfaced through the county records. The man whose money I’d been chasing for weeks, without knowing my father’s fingerprints were on it.

“I sent you the file,” Dax said. “It’s in your secure inbox. I wanted to call first because I didn’t want you opening it cold.”

I was already moving to the laptop, pulling up the secure app, my chest doing something cold and tight that I kept off my face out of habit, even though there was no one looking at me. The file loaded. I skimmed it, hunting for the shape of what he’d said.

And there it was. John Hollingsworth, III, venture capitalist, had put money into a string of projects up and down the coast, and a meaningful number of them ran back to capital that originated in the Ashmore structure. Teller’s ventures among them. My father’s name on the funding documents, clean and unembarrassed, exactly where you’d expect to find the name of a man who financed things for a living.

“Talk me through what this is,” I said. “Best read.”

“Best read?” Dax exhaled. “Your father funds things. That’s his whole business. He finds capital that wants a return and ventures that need capital, and he puts them together. If a client has money to invest and the money spends, he doesn’t run a forensic audit on where it came from. That’s not a bug in how that business works. That’s the business.” A beat. “So the charitable version is he’s a man who took Ashmore money and Teller money and put it to work and never asked a question he didn’t want answered. The uncharitable version is he asked, got an answer, and put it to work anyway.”

Not innocent. Not guilty. Adjacent.

I’d built a whole understanding of my father over the years, a clear-eyed and unsentimental one, and none of it had included this. And yet all of it had still prepared me for exactly this. He was a man who had institutionalized his own daughter to make a problem go away. The idea that he’d take money without asking where it came from wasn’t a contradiction of the man I knew. It was the most consistent thing imaginable.

“You there?” Dax asked.

“I’m here.”

“I’ll keep digging. There’s more under this. It’s going to take time to pull it clean.” His voice shifted, the warning coming back into it. “But I wanted you to have the headline. Figured that was yours to handle how you wanted.”

“I appreciate it.”

“You okay?”

“No,” I said, because it was Dax and there was no point in lying. “But I will be. Thank you.”

He hung up the way he always did, without ceremony.