He buried the wrong man

Chapter 7: The first real thread

Barrett spread the contents of the folder across the kitchen table, arranging them with the careful precision of a man who'd spent hours organizing evidence he didn't fully understand yet.

"I pulled the vendor files like you asked," he said. "Three years, exactly like you specified. But going through them, I noticed something that didn't sit right, so I pulled two more years on top of that, just to see if the pattern held."

"What pattern?"

Barrett slid a printed spreadsheet across the table, several rows highlighted in yellow. "This vendor here — Ashgrove Creative Logistics. They've been billing Halcyon for post-production services on nearly a dozen projects over the last five years. Standard enough on its face."

"But?"

"But I cross-referenced their billing addresses against public filings, and Ashgrove Creative Logistics doesn't have a permanent office anywhere. It's registered to a mailbox rental service downtown. No employees listed on any professional networking site. No physical footprint of any kind that I could find in an afternoon of searching."

Thane felt his pulse quicken, recognizing the shape of something his four years of memory had never fully mapped. He'd heard variations of Ashgrove's name mentioned once during his trial, buried in testimony he'd barely understood at the time, dismissed as one vendor among dozens that federal investigators combed through without ever fully explaining its significance to him.

"How much has Halcyon paid them?"

"That's the part that made me want to bring whiskey." Barrett pointed to a total circled at the bottom of the page. "Just under eleven million dollars, spread across five years, in increments small enough that no single payment would ever trigger an automatic audit flag."

Eleven million dollars. Thane stared at the number, feeling the shape of Desmond's fraud reassemble itself into something both familiar and entirely new. In his old life, the total embezzlement Desmond had been accused of orchestrating — the crime Thane himself had been blamed for — totaled just over forty million dollars. If Ashgrove alone accounted for eleven million of that, structured with this much care, this much invisible infrastructure, it suggested a level of premeditation Thane hadn't fully appreciated even after living through the consequences once already.

"Who approved these payments?" Thane asked.

"That's the strange part. Officially, you did." Barrett watched his reaction carefully. "Your signature's on the original vendor onboarding paperwork from five years ago, and on several subsequent contract renewals."

Thane's stomach dropped. "I don't remember approving any vendor called Ashgrove."

"I believe you. But the signature matches your file." Barrett hesitated, choosing his next words carefully. "Thane, I need you to be honest with me. Is there a reason your name would be on paperwork you don't remember signing?"

Thane sat back, forcing himself to think clearly despite the cold unease spreading through his chest. He remembered, with sudden and unwelcome clarity, a stack of vendor onboarding documents Desmond had once handed him personally, five years ago, insisting they were routine administrative approvals that needed a signature before end of day. Thane had signed without reading closely, trusting Desmond's assurance the way he'd trusted everything Desmond told him back then.

"I think I signed something," Thane said slowly, "without fully understanding what I was signing. Desmond brought me a stack of vendor paperwork years ago and told me it was routine."

"You're telling me Desmond used your own signature to authorize a shell vendor."

"I'm telling you it's starting to look that way."

Barrett sat back, running a hand through his hair, the full weight of the implication settling over him visibly. "If this is what I think it is, Thane, we're not looking at simple financial mismanagement anymore. This is structured fraud, built over years, with your name attached to the paper trail whether you understood what you were signing or not."

"I know."

"Which means if anyone ever audits this properly, you're not just a witness. You're a suspect."

The word landed harder than Thane expected, even though he'd lived through the exact consequence Barrett was only now beginning to fear. "I know that too."

Barrett studied him for a long moment, something shifting behind his expression — not quite suspicion, but a dawning awareness that Thane's urgency over the past week hadn't come from nowhere. "You already suspected this, didn't you? Before I brought you any of this."

Thane hesitated, weighing exactly how much truth Barrett could handle without either doubting his sanity or, worse, pulling away entirely from an investigation that was about to become significantly more dangerous for both of them.

"I suspected something," Thane said carefully. "I didn't have proof. I still don't have enough to bring to the board, not without exposing myself to exactly the kind of suspicion you just described."

"So what do we do with this?"

"We keep digging, quietly, until we have enough that my signature on that paperwork becomes irrelevant next to everything else we can prove." Thane gathered the spreadsheet, studying Ashgrove's name until it burned into his memory alongside every other fragment he'd carried back with him. "I need you to find out who actually controls Ashgrove Creative Logistics. Not the mailbox address. The real person behind it."

"That could take weeks."

"Then we have weeks. What we don't have is the luxury of moving carelessly." Thane met Barrett's eyes directly. "Whoever set this up was patient enough to build it over five years without anyone noticing. We need to be at least that patient tearing it back down."

Barrett nodded slowly, though the uncertainty hadn't fully left his expression. "You're asking me to help you investigate a fraud that could implicate you personally, Thane. I need you to understand what that means for me if this goes wrong."

"I understand completely." Thane held his gaze, letting the full weight of his gratitude show plainly. "And I promise you, when this is over, you'll understand exactly why I asked."

"That's not exactly comforting."

"No," Thane admitted. "But it's the truth, and it's the only one I can give you right now."

Barrett exhaled slowly, gathering the scattered papers back into their folder with more care than before, as though handling something considerably more dangerous than he'd realized when he'd first walked through the door.

"I'll start digging into Ashgrove's ownership structure tomorrow," he said finally. "Quietly. But Thane — if this really does go all the way up to Desmond, we're going to need a lot more than a suspicious vendor and an old signature before anyone believes us over him."

"I know," Thane said, staring at the spreadsheet one more time before folding it away. "We're going to need everything."

---

Barrett left a little after nine, the folder tucked back under his arm, his easy demeanor from that morning entirely gone. Thane watched him go from the doorway, feeling the weight of what he'd just asked of a man who had no idea how much danger already surrounded this investigation, or how personally that danger had once cost Thane everything.

He locked the door and returned to the kitchen table, staring at the empty space where the folder had been, Ashgrove Creative Logistics burning steadily in his mind alongside every fragment of testimony he'd tried and failed to fully understand during his trial. Eleven million dollars. A mailbox address. His own signature, obtained through a trust he no longer possessed.

He pulled out his phone and opened the growing list of names and dates he'd started the night everything changed, adding Ashgrove's name beneath Wren Halloway's, beneath the frayed cable from the gala, beneath every thread that refused to connect cleanly into the fraud he thought he already understood.

*Ashgrove Creative Logistics — shell vendor, $11M over five years, my signature obtained under false pretenses. Who actually controls it?*

The question sat beside the others, unanswered, and Thane found himself staring at the growing list with something between dread and grim satisfaction. Four years of memory had given him a map of Desmond's downfall, but that map, he was beginning to realize, had only ever shown him the surface of something built far deeper and far older than he'd assumed walking out of that holding cell.

He thought of Rosalind Fairweather's measured curiosity at the gala, of Corwin's careful proposal over lunch, of Wren's guarded trust extended reluctantly across a coffee shop table. Pieces, all of them, of something larger than a single embezzlement scheme orchestrated by a man he'd once called a mentor.

Somewhere beneath Desmond Kane's careful ruin of his life, Thane was starting to suspect, sat an architecture built by someone far more patient than Desmond had ever needed to be.

He didn't sleep again that night. Instead he sat at his kitchen table until the sky outside turned gray, turning Ashgrove's name over and over, searching for the shape of whatever waited beneath it.