Jax believed in loyalty. He was loyal to his adoptive father, the man who’d raised him, put him through school, and given him a place in the firm. He was loyal to his sister and his clients.
Unfortunately, loyalty wasn’t his team’s strong point. They’d served together in Afghanistan—Jax in the legal division, Roark and Reuben in tech. They’d uncovered graft and blackmail at headquarters. It wasn’t exactly as if all of Afghanistan wasn’t rife with corruption. Their officers had not been pleased. After the inevitable confrontation, Jax had been ready to go home and had accepted his honorable discharge with a shrug.
Roark and Reuben had been a little less thrilled at being given the brush-off. The result had been ugly. They’d never find a job in their chosen professions with that dishonorable on their records.
So he’d put them to the kind of work that let them direct their energies profitably rather than going to jail. They’d been doing fine uncovering evidence in the criminal fraud cases Jax specialized in.
He rubbed the back of his neck and contemplated his next move on the chessboard of his life.
Ariel pinged him again. He’d given her access to all of the financial accounts Loretta had inherited. Unlike Jax, Ariel enjoyed watching money move around, and the Posts had had enormous investments with multiple brokers.
Her message highlighted and bolded an account he didn’t recognize—one in a bank in the Cayman Islands. What the...
Shit. There was the reason the Posts were yachting in hurricane season.
Fourteen
Once Mavis returnedfrom the bank, Evie took her mother’s retriever for a walk. She needed to clear her leapfrogging brain. She’d never given much thought to the land her family owned. It was just convenient to have a house of her own. Mavis could have lived there, too, but she preferred her own space, and she owned the shop—or maybe only some portion of it? Her mother probably didn’t even know.
The woods and pond were used for so many activities that Evie had always looked on them as a kind of public park.
But now that it had been brought to her attention—someone had to own the property and someone had to pay taxes and that tax notice on Mavis’s desk was worrisome.
And being fairly certain that Loretta’s parents were buried on that land... Could she use Loretta’s funds to hire dogs to search for them? Loretta would have a conniption.
A yellow road truck parked on the town side of the pond claimed her attention much as a squirrel might claim the dog’s. A white van was stopped in front of it. Honey tugged on her leash, drawing Evie onward. After her run-in with Jax’s father, she had real bad feelings about those trucks. She didn’t want to go forward. She wanted to run home and raise a tar-and-feather party.
But that was childish and irresponsible and the reason she got labeled a flake—she acted on things others couldn’t see or hear. So, fine, she’d gather evidence. Trucks weren’t ghosts, after all. They had to have drivers who talked.
She wished she had a cell phone so she could take pictures of their license plates, but she didn’t even carry a purse or notepad to write the numbers on. The yellow truck had state insignia, but the white van had no markings at all. A state truck signified someone was serious—abouther family’sland?
She jogged along behind Honey, following her down the pond path instead of the woodland one. The town had scraped up a foot-high levee along the lower end of the pond to prevent it from running into the road during storms. Right now, the water level was so low that she didn’t even get her shoes muddy after she passed the levee. Her capris didn’t protect her too well from the long grasses alongside the path, however.
The men in boots setting up tripods didn’t even notice the bluestem they were crushing. The pond was a habitat for birds and deer and other wildlife that fed off the grass.
“Hey, whatchadoin’?” she asked casually as she jogged closer.
She guessed the men in hardhats were the road department employees. The ones in khakis and hiking boots were setting up surveying equipment and probably belonged to the van. All four of them ignored her.
“County expanding the road?” she asked, not giving up. The road was a two lane to nowhere, but one never knew.
None of them seemed inclined to answer that either. This was the South. Peopletalkedto each other. Just her luck not to find a communicative crew. Maybe they didn’t like redheads. Or dogs, since not one stopped to pet Honey, who eagerly pointed her nose in their direction.
“It’s my family’s land you’re standing on,” she continued genially. “We’ve not received any notice of road improvements. Do you have anything official allowing a survey?”
“We’re just here to keep the surveyors safe,” one of the hardhats answered curtly.
“Umm, wise use of county time, I’m guessing? I’m pretty sure the quail won’t attack. Someone here must have written orders allowing the survey. This isn’t public property.”
The surveyors continued ignoring her. The hard hat produced a clipboard from his truck and shoved it at her. The whereas’s and wherefore’s were Greek to her. She sought signatures and didn’t recognize them. She noted Titan as the surveyor’s name among them and handed it back. “Thank you, sir. But this doesn’t say who gave permission to trespass on my family’s property.”
“Owners had to give permission for us to receive these orders,” Hard Hat said laconically.
Now was the time to bring out her half-baked lie detector, even if they thought she was stoned. Opening her inner eye, she saw nothing disturbing in the hardhat’s aura. He was just a low-level non-thinker doing his job.
The surveyors... Evie swayed trying to interpret the muddy gray overlaying their normal shades—guardedness. They feared they were doing something shady.
Honey barked, dragging her back to the moment. She shook off a shiver. “I think I’ll have to ask you to leave unless you produce a letter of permission from my family.”