Riley was going to have a field day with this.
Patrick pulledup the file he’d started on Morgan Sullivan.
He wasn't particularly proud of that, in the sense that he'd never told her, but he wasn't ashamed of it either. It was what he did. Part ofhisprocess.
Frank Sullivan's granddaughter, on administrative leave from the Philadelphia ME's office under circumstances that had looked wrong from the outside and looked worse the closer you got. He'd pulled her professional record, of course. It was squeaky clean and decorated with commendation that came from four years of exemplary performance prior to the leave.
He’d looked up her Philadelphia address, confirming a small studio rental in the Fairmount section of the city. Followedthe thread further to her mother and stepfather, their house in DelCo.
It was all there in black and white. Factual. Accurate.
But it wasn’tMorgan.
The file told him what she'd done and where she'd been and who she'd worked for, but it said nothing about the way her mind worked behind those bright, intelligent eyes or the sound she made when something almost made her laugh.
Those were the things he was most interested in.
And the file, thorough as it was, shed no light on the question taking up most of the space in his brain now: who had protected Morgan by eliminating Varro before he could do what he’d been presumably sent to do? Who knew about Varro? About the situation that had sent him to Pine Ridge? Who had both the means and the motivation to intervene?
He opened the forum. NorthStar had posted another question.
Cold War provenance. The method is the message. Ask who benefits from the silence.
A chill ran the length of Patrick’s spine. Saxitoxin had been used in CIA experiments as a covert assassination and suicide weapon during the Cold War.
The tox result had never been posted to the forum. Not by him, not by Riley, not by anyone. The Thread knew Anthony Varro had a constructed cover and a professional signature. It didnotknow he'd been killed with a CIA-developed assassination compound that hadn't seen active use since the Cold War and required specialized knowledge to synthesize and deploy.
But NorthStar knew.
How? The only reason Patrick knew was because Michael and Nicki had identified it based on samples Morgan had obtained, andit hadn’t been documented anywhere. Which meant either NorthStar had looked at the evidence and made one hell of an educated guess… or NorthStar was personally involved in the case somehow.
Means. Motive. Opportunity.
He thought about his uncles and his grandfather. Former Navy SEALs who had been working private covert operations for longer than he’d been alive. Michael and Nicki had the chemical knowledge to identify the compound.
Was NorthStar a member of his own family?
The specificity of the post—Cold War provenance, the method is the message—was the language of someone who understood what a CIA developed neurotoxin meant operationally. What it signaled. A frozen dart that left no trace, designed to mimic cardiac arrest, developed specifically so that a death could happen and no one would look twice. That was not general knowledge. That was experience. Cold War, CIA operative level experience.
His phone buzzed.
Riley:Are you seeing this?
Patrick:Yep
Riley:One of us?
That was one of the reasons he and Riley got along so well. Their brains operated on the same frequency.
NorthStar was a guiding figure in the forum, encouraging thought through questions like their fathers often did. He never provided the answers outright, instead treating each case like an opportunity for teachable moments.
And yet, it didn’tfeellike one of them. Close, but not quite.
Patrick:Or someone adjacent
He looked at the post again.
Ask who benefits from the silence.
