I sighed and stumbled back to the little room in the back where Birn and Muñoz were still looking through the last batch of files.
“Hey, I thought you were…” Birn started to say when he saw me come back in, and then he caught sight of what I was carrying. “Aww, man, you can’t be serious. There’s more? We’re not even done with this batch yet, not that it’s done us any good.”
“There actually might be a lead this time,” I said, dropping the files down on the table with such force that they fell over, spreading across the whole of the long table, and collapsing back into the chair that I had made my home for most of the day.
I quickly caught Birn and Muñoz up to speed on what had happened out by the whiteboard, including my unpleasant little run-in with the guys from the FBI.
“Those God-” Muñoz started to say, shaking her head and gritting her teeth and looking like she was about to unleash a sea of expletives on our friends from the bigger agency. But Birn placed a hand on the inside of her elbow and stopped her short.
“Now, now,” he said in a gentle, almost teasing tone. “Diane’s right. We have to figure out how to get along with our new friends for the time being. And that starts with what we say about them behind closed doors.”
“You think they’re not making fun of us when we’re not there?” Muñoz asked angrily. “Just look at what they’ve been saying to Holm’s face!”
“We can be better than them, no?” Birn asked, raising his eyebrows at each of us in turn.
“Fine,” Muñoz snarled, though she didn’t look at all happy about it, and I just nodded and grabbed the nearest file for myself.
It was about a couple by the names of Nolan and Patricia Jones, who had a lot of investment properties in smaller cities and towns along the east coast.
I perused through the thick file and several others like it on the same alias for what felt like hours. My eyes drooped, and more than once, I may have drifted off into a light sleep, dreaming that I was still reading because that’s how monotonous my day had become.
Until finally, something caught my eye.
A purchase in Newport News, Virginia. An old house the couple had wanted to refurbish for rental purposes. I blinked at it and then ran back out into the main room without so much as a word to Birn or Muñoz.
“Marston’s case, Marston’s case!” I screamed as I ran into the room, making Diane nearly jump out of her skin as I jutted the file beneath her nose.
Her eyes widened as the same realization that had dawned on me dawned on her, and she took the file from my shaking hands.
I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, dialing for Marston immediately.
The call didn’t go through. He didn’t have a signal.
24
Ethan
Tessa and I couldn’t get much out of the Carltons after that. They were too shaken up, and I didn’t even bother to ask if I could talk to the kids myself. I knew that they wouldn’t allow that. They were too overprotective, and to be honest, I didn’t blame them.
So we thanked them for their time, and I gave them each a copy of my card before we headed back out to stroll back to the restaurant parking lot where we’d left our rental car.
We were heading down the stairs and back to the beach when the noise started.
It was faint at first, so much so that I barely noticed it, and the sounds blended in with the roar of the ocean waves as Tessa and I walked arm in arm along the beach just as we had on our way there.
Then the loud clangs coming one after another became impossible to deny.
I stopped dead in my tracks and felt Tessa’s grip around my arm tighten, her fingernails digging into my skin.
“You don’t think…?” she started to ask, glancing over at me with that familiar gleam in her eyes. But she didn’t finish her thought. She knew by the look on my face that we were each thinking the same thing.
“Where else would those sounds be coming from?” I whispered, moving my free hand down to where my gun rested at my side once again.
We took a few more cautious steps forward, and then a few more, and then a few more, until the clanging sounds overwhelmed the sounds of the thick waves crashing against the shore, sprinkling saltwater on my exposed skin and sending water droplets up my nostrils.
“I can see how that would get annoying, especially at night,” Tessa murmured sympathetically. “Especially with kids trying to sleep through it.”
“Yes, I can imagine,” I agreed. “Though I don’t really want to.”
“What are you thinking?” Tessa asked, glancing over at me again. “What they said about an old pirate ship and buried treasure…?”
Her voice trailed off again, and I knew that it was because she didn’t dare voice her hope out loud. I didn’t dare to do it, either, though I was thinking the same thing.
Could the Dragon’s Rogue be here, in Virginia after all? It would explain why Grendel’s journal had ended up at the nautical museum in the first place. Tessa had been right about that. But somehow, that didn’t seem right to me. It seemed almost too easy, somehow. I’d expected a long march to the finish line, combing through clues and other documents once I found the journal. Could it be possible that I’d stumbled upon what I’d been looking for for so long without even getting to the real journal first?
“I don’t know,” was all that I could manage in the end in response to Tessa’s question. There was nothing else that I dared to say. It was too much, too fast. I wasn’t a
