He set it on the kitchen table and looked at it for a moment.
Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office. The seal was small and embossed on the lower right corner of the cover, more functional than decorative. Meant to identify, not impress. He'd noticed the small pad in the leaves, too clean and dry to have been there for any length of time. He'd stood in the clearing longer than he should have, turning it over in his hands, until his phone had buzzed with a reminder about the afternoon job and he'd had to leave.
He opened the cover. Handwritten inside in a tight, precise hand: M. Sullivan.
M for Michael, maybe. Matthew. It was the last name that held more importance.Sullivan.As in Eamon and Thomas Sullivan, the previous owners of Sulley’s Campground.
His gut told him it wasn’t a coincidence.
He stood there for another moment, sensing that this discovery needed more focus and clarity than he could give in his current state.
Carrying it with him to his room, he laid it on his nightstand and went to bed.
In the morning,with coffee hot and in hand, and several hours of subconsciously turning things over in his head, Patrick sat down at the kitchen table with the notebook and his laptop.
He tackled the seal first. Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office. Pulling up the staff directory, he cross-referenced the name. M. Sullivan wasn't a complicated search and got two hits. One was a senior forensic pathologist named Martin Sullivan, twenty-six years with the office. The other was Morgan Sullivan, a Medicolegal Death Investigator.
Theoretically, either could be the M. Sullivan he was looking for, but a forensic pathologist and a medicolegal death investigator were different roles with different functions. The notebook contained scene observations and questions—field work, not lab work. A forensic pathologist worked primarily with the body after it's been moved. An MDI read the scene.
The notes he’d found were definitely MDI notes.
Morgan Sullivan was his guy.
No photo in the directory listing, unfortunately.
He moved to the property records. He already had Eamon Sullivan and Thomas Sullivan from the deed research two nights ago. Eamon, the father who'd founded the campground. Thomas, the son who'd run it until he couldn't anymore. Now he was looking at the other side of the family. Eamon had transferred the Old Miller Road parcel separately, around the same time as the campground transfer. Current registrant: Francis J. Sullivan. Frank.
So he got to work on Frank.
And found almost nothing.
A property tax record going back to 1989. A voter registration, current. The deed itself. And before 1989—nothing. No professional listings. No marriage record. No employment history in any public database he could find.
Frank J. Sullivan was a man who had apparently materialized on a rural Pennsylvania property in 1989 and generated as little paperwork as possible ever since.
Normal people left more trace than this. Patrick knew enough about what left traces and what didn't to know that this kind of clean absence didn't happen by accident.
He filed that and moved on.
Eamon Sullivan had two sons, then. Thomas, who'd taken the campground and run it for decades and died eight months ago without anyone claiming what he'd left behind. And Frank, who'd taken the land on the Old Miller Road and apparently stayed there, quiet and minimally documented, ever since.
Frank Sullivan. The brother who hadn't been listed in the obit or come forward on the estate. The one who, for all intents and purposes, lived off the grid as much as possible.
And M.Sullivan. An MDI from the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, appearing at a death scene well outside his jurisdiction.
Same county, same family land, same case.
He looked at the notes in the notebook again. The precise shorthand. The three numbered questions at the bottom of the page, each one tighter than the one before it.
A Philly MDI had been there, reading that scene on land belonging to Frank Sullivan, who was Thomas Sullivan's brother, whose campground was where the body had been found.
He closed the laptop, put the notebook back in his jacket pocket, and went to get his keys.
Old Miller Roadran out past the edge of town where the properties were large and generous. He found the gravel turnoff without difficulty, the trees opening up around a long drive that ended at an older farmhouse.
He sat in the car for a moment after he cut the engine, thinking about the best way to approach this.
He decided that the straightforward approach was best. He'd found a lost notebook, he'd identified the likely owner through public records, and he was returning it, presumably to someone related to the man who lived here. Nothing about that required explanation.