Page 55 of Mayhem

I copied the Primrose material into the private folder I kept outside the standard Quorum reporting system and removed the search history from the account Desmond’s people could audit. Malakai watched me do it without asking why.

Desmond received information when it affected the wider Quorum or when I decided it belonged in his hands. Echo was on my ground because I had made the arrangement with her. Until I understood why someone had worked this hard to bury the family she came from, I was not handing my father a half-built map and inviting him to start moving pieces.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside, followed by Echo’s voice complaining to someone about a professor assigning forty pages of reading as though graduate students had no other fucking obligations. Malakai stood before she reached the doorway and picked up her notebook and charger from my desk.

I watched him do it, then finally opened the file Ronan gave me.

The first page was ugly in the way useful information usually was: dates, payment records, fragments of requests that had survived because nobody had bothered cleaning every system they touched. Ronan had arranged them chronologically and left his notes in the margins, short enough that I could follow the trail without reading his conclusions first. The earliest entry was several months old and tied to a private investigator outside Seattle. The next came through a security subcontractor. Two more used different names but the same billing structure, and by the time I reached the fourth, the pattern was obvious enough that I stopped caring about the individual companies.

Someone had spent money finding Echo.

The requests were specific without being revealing. Old addresses. Vehicle sightings. Hospital admissions. Rental records. Traffic-camera pulls. Nothing that said why she mattered, only that somebody with resources had wanted her location badly enough to keep paying new people whenever the previous trail went cold.

I opened one of the supporting files and found a mileage claim for three separate trips through Washington. Another investigator had billed for records access at two hospitals and a private clinic. The dates stretched far enough apart that this was not somebody panicking after a single incident. Whoever had been looking for her had maintained the search.

Ronan came in while I was reading the third attachment and took the chair on the other side of my desk. He glanced once toward Echo before lowering his voice. “There’s more, but that’s the cleanest section. I left out anything I couldn’t verify twice.”

“That many contractors?”

“Enough to avoid building a single trail.” He reached over and scrolled past one of the payment records. “Different names, different companies, different reasons given for the searches. But the timing overlaps too neatly.”

I kept reading while he explained where the records had come from. Most were not Quorum files. That mattered. He had pulled them from old business accounts, investigator databases, insurance logs, and one county access request that should have disappeared years ago. Whoever organized the search had known how to keep the work distributed.

Malakai looked over from beside Echo. “How far did it spread?”

“Seattle first. Then north. A few pulls farther east once the local trail went dead.” Ronan turned the laptop slightly so Malakai could see the date range without leaving his seat. “Nothing recent enough to matter now, but it wasn’t casual.”

Echo’s pen slowed across the page.

She did not look up immediately. That was probably why Ronan noticed before I did. He stopped talking, and the quiet drew her attention more effectively than another question would have.

“What?” she asked, still looking at her notes.

I closed one of the attachments but left the timeline open. “Ronan found people searching for you after the warehouse.”

That got her eyes on me.

There was no visible alarm. Echo leaned back in the chair and rested one arm across the top of her notebook, waiting for the rest as though I had told her somebody had checked her credit.

“How many?”

“Enough that I’m not calling it random.”

She nodded once, more acknowledgement than surprise. “I knew somebody kept looking.”

Ronan’s attention sharpened. “You knew for certain?”

“I knew I stopped using places more than once because somebody showed up after I did.” Echo reached for Malakai’s water without asking and took a drink before continuing. “Could’ve been the same person every time. Could’ve been different people. I didn’t stick around to ask for business cards.”

Malakai took the bottle back when she set it down. “Did they ever make contact?”

“Not after Seattle.”

That answer carried enough weight that none of us needed to ask what she meant by Seattle.

I went back to the timeline. “Did you know who was paying them?”

“No.”