Tag. You're it.
Maybe not his smoothest line, but accurate. He was putting the ball back in her court. Letting her set the pace.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Morgan:Are you up?
He chuckled, glancing down at the visible tent in his sheet.
Patrick:Yes
Dots appeared and disappeared as Morgan typed and erased, typed and erased. Then finally…
Morgan:I can’t stop thinking about yesterday
He grinned.
Patrick:Which part?
Three dots. Gone. Back again. Gone.
Yeah. He knew exactly what she was thinking about.
Patrick:Me too.
The VIN came back mid-morning,registered to an LLC in Delaware with a mail forwarding address in Wilmington. No employees, no operating history, no web presence. Yet another shell built for a single operational window, functional and deliberately thin.
He cross-referenced the filing patterns against the network Riley had mapped from Varro's constructed identity.
Same patterns. Same process.
He sat back and thought about what that meant. Anthony Varro had a cover that worked—neat, tidy, legitimate on the surface. That cover had been built by someone who knew how to remain under the radar. An organization that maintained assets, constructed identities, deployed people for specific jobs and then managed the cleanup afterward.
This wasn't freelance work. Varro had been sent. By whom, was the question. Everything pointed to Morgan’s supervisor and the case that had gotten Morgan an LOA. That was where he needed to focus his attention.
Declan entered the makeshift office and sank down into a chair.
“What did you find out?” Patrick asked.
“Crickets,” Declan said. “A cursory search on missing persons matching the vic came up empty. No one’s come forward to claim him, and without a next of kin to notify, it’s a dead end.”
“So no further investigation.”
“None. The coroner’s satisfied calling it a cardiac arrest. They’re transferring him out to the county for indigent burial after thirty days in storage.”
“Is that normal?”
“It’s not unusual,” Declan said. “Unlike Philly, we don’t have an ME, we have a county coroner.”
“What’s the difference?”
“ME’s are appointed, licensed physicians, usually a forensic pathologist. County coroners are elected officials, no medical training required. They have legal authority to investigate deathsand sign death certificates, but they rely on contracted docs to perform autopsies when deemed necessary. Spoiler alert—autopsies cost money and aren’t deemed necessary often. In a case like this, without obvious evidence of foul play…”
Patrick applied what he knew about small town politics. Elected translated to political. Contracted implied favors and quiet phone calls.
Organization. Infrastructure.
The silence around Anthony Varro's death had been maintained—not just by whoever wiped the car, but inside the Pine Ridge PD itself. Whoever was behind Varro's cover had a long enough arm to quiet a small-town police department, or knew someone who did.