White Space Season 2

always be good enough for me,” Mrs. Rasmussen said. “Goodbye.”
    “Goodbye,” Jon ended the call.
    His stomach knotted with all the things he planned to say to his father.
    “Ready?” he asked, turning to his passengers.
    “Ready!” Emma cried from the back seat.
    Houser and Cassidy said nothing, though Jon could feel them both wondering what the phone call was about, and knowing they couldn’t yet ask.
    As they left the cemetery, John gazed at all the vultures with cameras waiting outside, trying to steal a peek through his blacked-out windows. He smiled as he considered hitting the gas pedal and running one or five of them down.
    In the back seat, Emma, who didn’t know better, was waving at the paparazzi, though they couldn’t see her.
    He smiled at her innocence, longing for a day he might feel less jaded.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 3 — Brock Houser

    Houser wasn’t sure why he had a hunch about Milo Anderson — but something seemed off about the kid. Sure, he’d been through a lot, having lost a friend, his mother ripping into the front of a grocery store with a lead foot, and seeing as how the island wasn’t all that large, he had probably lost another friend or two in the shootings a month back. Maybe the kid was just traumatized — but Houser couldn’t help but think there was more to the kid and his camera. He’d been an investigator long enough to know when a hunch needed follow-up.
    After parting with Jon and Cassidy, Houser decided to park his truck down the street from Milo’s house, then sit and watch, doing research on his tablet.
    Milo lived in Ulysses Cove, not exactly The Gardens, but a damned site nicer than anywhere Houser had ever lived. It was a gorgeous community — not that many acres of clearing with thick, swaying forest surrounding three sides. The average home in Ulysses was worth well north of $4 million. More than a few nudged the bottom of five. What Houser liked about the neighborhood, at least sitting at the end of the block and looking down Milo’s street, was that the houses were far from the copy-and-paste blueprints you saw in most luxury developments, where it seemed like one architect, and maybe her brother, had designed from a single deck with barely shuffled cards.
    Each house on Cavern Avenue was unique. Milo’s was bought eight years earlier for just under $3 million, right before the last giant spike in housing prices. Not bad. Houser wasn’t sure what Stephen Anderson did for Conway Industries; his report showed his occupation as “Senior Analyst,” but it was clearly something important. His second wife didn’t work, even before the accident, and loved to spend. Houser dug up a statement on the Open Report Directory detailing a dispute opened by Bea after someone stole her cell from a Starbucks. The charges prior to her vanilla latte were an embarrassment of excess. The sort that made Houser’s skin crawl. If anything, the person who stole her cell and used it to charge shit, was more responsible in their spending than Bea.
    Jon would spend a hundred grand to scratch an itch, but he wouldn’t drop a dollar to try and make someone think he was better than he was, or waste money trying to fill whatever emptiness he had inside him — that’s what booze was for.
    As Houser grew restless in the Blacklander Jon bought him to match his own while staying on the island — midnight blue to Jon’s silver — and finding nothing on his tablet no matter how deeply he dug into the digital dirt, he started adding weight to the thought that something seemed somehow off about the whole damned island.
    Houser couldn’t remember much before the accident, and that bothered him, more by the minute. According to Jon, who had spoken with Liz Heller, she had given him a flash drive — a flash drive with something that scared her. Now that flash drive was conveniently missing, of course, after his accident. He wondered if it had been on him during the accident, or if maybe it had been in his hotel room, after he apparently “crashed through the glass after drinking too much.”
    That doesn’t sound like me. I crash into shit when I mean it.
    He had to find out what happened to the flash drive. Had the police found it? Were Paladin’s island “army” after it, and did they find it? Were they the ones who trashed his hotel room and broke the glass door?
    Houser couldn’t help but wonder if the flash drive, or its contents, had anything to do with Liz Heller’s