He Came Back Running (Maya and Mason) novel Chapter 55

Chapter 55

Mason’s POV

I didn’t go back to the office…

The lunch had produced what I needed… For now the more pressing question was Alex Voss, and Alex Voss required a different kind of resource than anything inside my existing network.

I needed someone with no connection to me.

No connection to the company.

Someone who operated in the spaces between official records and found the things that official records were designed not to show.

I had a name.

A contact passed through two intermediaries, which was the appropriate distance for this kind of arrangement.

I drove across the city and didn’t tell anyone where I was going

The office was on the fourth floor of a building that looked like it housed accountants and small insurance firms.

Which was, I suspected, entirely deliberate

The man behind the desk when I walked in was perhaps fifty, with the specific, unremarkable appearance of someone who had cultivated unremarkability as a professional asset…..

Medium height, medium build, the kind of face that didn’t stay in memory

He stood when I entered. Didn’t extend his hand….

“Mr. Hargrove”

“You know who I am,” I said.

“I research people for a living,” he said. “Knowing who walks through my door is the minimum standard” He gestured to the chair across from his desk.

“Sit down”

I sat

He sat

“You have a subject,” he said.

“Alexander Voss.” I kept my voice level. “CEO of Voss Maritime. Based in this city, operates internationally. Forty- one years old” I paused. 2

“I want everything”

He looked at me.

“Define everything.”

“His history. His finances, not the public filings, the real picture. His relationships, past and present. His enemies. Anyone he has wronged, anyone who has reason to want him diminished” I held his gaze.

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“Business dealings that didn’t close cleanly. Legal matters that were settled quietly. Anything he has kept out of the public record and would prefer remained there.”

The investigator, he had given me a name, Patterson, which I suspected was not his name… wrote nothing down. He was the kind of professional who kept things in his head until he was alone, which was the correct approach.

“That’s a comprehensive brief,” he said

“I’m a comprehensive client.”

“Voss Maritime has significant legal resources,” he said. “If he becomes aware of an investigation….”

“Then the investigation wasn’t conducted well enough.” I held his gaze. “I’m told you’re good at this.”

“I’m good at this,” he confirmed, without self-deprecation or performance.

Simply accurate…

“Then the timeline and the methodology are yours to determine.” I reached into my jacket and placed an envelope on the desk. “That covers the preliminary work. There’s more when results are produced”

He looked at the envelope without touching it.

“What are you looking for specifically?” he asked. “In my experience, clients who say they want everything are usually looking for one particular category of thing. Knowing the category makes the search faster and more accurate”

I thought about it.

Alex Voss had built a four-hundred-million-dollar company.

He had done it over ten years, across multiple jurisdictions, in an industry where relationships and reputation were the primary currencies.

He had done it largely without scandal, without the kind of visible damage that accumulated around men who operated without principle

Which meant if there was something… and there was always something, in my experience, because men who accumulated that much power in that short a time made choices along the way that they needed to make and preferred not to examine…. it was buried.

“Relationships,” I said. “Specifically, situations where a professional or personal relationship ended badly. Complaints filed and settled. Women.” I paused. “Anyone who has reason to feel they were treated as disposable”

Patterson looked at me.

“You’re looking for a pattern,” he said.

“I’m looking for information,” I said. “What patterns emerge from it are for the interested parties to assess”

The interested party being Maya.

Who had a specific, deep, and entirely justified fear of being treated as disposable by a man with power.

Who had spent eight years with me and still carried every detail of what that had felt like.

Who was, at this moment, cautiously allowing herself to depend on a man she had known for six weeks under extraordinary circumstances, a man whose history she had not had the time or the context to examine, a man

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whose past I intended to make very present…

“Singapore,” Patterson said.

I looked at him.

“There’s already a thread,” he said, with the neutral delivery of someone reading from a list in their head. “Two years ago. Voss Maritime’s Singapore operation.

A woman… director level, not an employee, a partner firm. A complaint was filed with his legal team. It went no further than that.” He paused. “It’s in the professional record if you know where to look. It’s not public.”

I sat forward slightly.

“What kind of complaint?”

“That’s where the thread gets interesting,” Patterson said. He folded his hands on the desk with the unhurried quality of someone who understood that the value of information was in the delivery as much as the content.

“The complaint was filed. It was addressed internally…. settled, confidentially, terms undisclosed. Standard practice for this kind of thing.” A pause. “But the woman who filed it, she’s not findable through normal channels anymore.”

I looked at him.

“Not findable how?”

“Changed her name. Left the industry. Lives quietly somewhere that doesn’t involve maritime logistics or anything connected to Voss Maritime’s network.” He held my gaze. “That’s not unusual for a confidential settlement. People move on. But the specific way she’s moved on… the comprehensiveness of it suggests the terms of the settlement included more than financial compensation.”

“She was told to disappear,” I said.

“She was given the resources to disappear,” Patterson said carefully. “Which may or may not be the same thing, depending on context I don’t yet have”

The office was very quiet

I looked at the envelope on the desk.

“Find the context,” I said.

“That will take longer than the preliminary work,” he said. “And it will require going into territory that carries its own risks”

“I understand the risks.”

“Do you.” Not a question.

The tone of a man assessing whether his client understood what he was actually asking for.

“Alex Voss is a man who solved a professional problem by making the problem invisible,” I said. “I want to know what the problem was. I want to know it in enough detail that it can be placed in front of someone who would find it significant.” I held Patterson’s gaze.

“I’m not asking you to fabricate anything. I’m asking you to find what’s already there”

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Patterson looked at me for a long moment.

Then he picked up the envelope.

“Two weeks,” he said. “Preliminary findings. I’ll contact you through the channel you used to reach me”

“One week,” I said.

He considered this.

“Ten days,” he said. “The Singapore thread requires physical verification. You can’t rush physical verification without creating errors.”

I stood.

“Ten days,” I agreed.

I walked to the door.

“Mr. Hargrove”

I stopped.

“The woman who filed the complaint,” Patterson said, without looking up from whatever he had just opened on his desk. “I’ve seen her name before. In a different context.” He paused. “It may be nothing.”

“Or?”

He looked up.

“Or there’s something about Alex Voss that doesn’t fully add up in his records,” he said. “Something I noticed when I researched you this morning, the overlap between certain Voss Maritime filings and a structure that appeared briefly in a jurisdiction I track for other clients.” He held my gaze, “Give me ten days. I’ll have a clearer picture.”

I stood at the door…

The specific sensation of a thread beginning to pull.

“Ten days,” I said.

I walked out..

In the car, driving back toward the penthouse, I thought about Alex Voss.

He had hit me in a building corridor in front of witnesses and walked out with Maya on his arm

He had built an empire I had underestimated.

He had placed himself between Maya and every threat I had sent her way.

He was not an easy target

But easy was not what I was looking for.

I was looking for real…

And real, in my experience, existed for every man who had ever built something at the speed Alex Voss had built it.

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You just had to know where to look.

I looked out the window at the city.

Ten days, I thought…

I could be patient for ten days.

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