Page 53 of Mayhem

I closed the folder in front of me. “Camille thinks history guarantees access. It doesn’t.”

“That answer sounded practiced.”

“It has had opportunities to become practiced.”

She gave me a brief look that said she had more questions and had decided against asking them. Then she reopened the article and dragged the pen beneath one line, apparently satisfied enough to return to work.

Malakai lasted less than a minute before leaning toward her screen again.

Echo put one hand against his forehead and pushed him back without looking away from the page. He caught her wrist before she could withdraw it, held it for a second, then released her when she turned her head toward him. There was no argument attached to the exchange. He simply settled back into his chair and opened the work he had abandoned earlier.

That bothered me more than when he was deliberately climbing into her space.

Malakai was learning her.

I gathered the Friday materials and left them working at the table while I went downstairs. The rest of the afternoon filled itself quickly enough that I did not get back to Echo’s background until after dark. By then the main library had thinned, the lounge was quiet, and Ronan had sent me three messages about the identifier I had pulled from the old Primrose record.

The first said the archive error was not random.

The second contained an old municipal index number and a warning that several linked records had been intentionally severed from the searchable database years ago.

The third was only a name.

Runo.

I opened the attached record at my desk.

It was older than Echo by decades, scanned badly enough that half the page leaned sideways. Primrose appeared in the header. The identifier I had found earlier sat near the bottom beside a property reference that had been transferred out, archived, and effectively buried beneath two later entities. The name Runo appeared once in the surviving index, without a surname attached to the line I could see.

I searched it anyway.

Too many results came back at first. Most were useless. I narrowed by Primrose, then by the date range attached to the property record.

The list collapsed. One surviving result remained locked behind an archive level I did not normally need permission to access.

Echo had mentioned Father Four more than once. She had never given me his name. Her current family records didn’t place anyone called Runo anywhere near Primrose. Nothing in the clean version of her background should have led me here.

I opened Echo’s file beside the screen and went back through the family section one more time. Four fathers. Different histories. Years that thinned too neatly. Current records that looked ordinary only if nobody cared enough to ask what came before them.

Then I looked at the old Primrose index again.

Runo.

I copied the name into the private note beneath Echo’s file and sat back.

The first useful thing I had found about her family was a record someone had gone to significant trouble to make difficult to reach.

That meant I was finally looking in the right place.

hunter

The Primrose result should have been useless. Most old references were. A property transfer here, an archived court index there, names repeated often enough to survive whatever somebody had done to the underlying records without leaving enough behind to explain why they mattered.

I had been staring at the same cluster for nearly an hour when Runo’s name appeared again, this time attached to an address that had stopped existing on paper years before the building itself was demolished.

I opened the property record in one window and the archived municipal index beside it. The dates matched closely enough to irritate me. Runo Matthews had occupied the address according to one system, while another listed the property under a holding company that dissolved less than six months later.

The company’s registered agent had died several years before it was supposedly formed, which meant either Primrose had employed some exceptionally incompetent clerks or somebody had built the paper trail knowing nobody would look closely enough to compare the pieces.