I drove back up the coastline, up the spray of the dry heat that was fanning at the surf-tormented shore. I'd been driving a long time by then and my joints were getting restless, so I stopped at a truck stop lunchroom mid-way back to the city and sat for a while in silence with a greasy meal under my chin and a heft of thoughts running around my head.

As much as Sam could have let me know, I knew there wasn't much more I could get out of him if he didn't want to. Part of me wanted to see if I could follow him further, down wherever it was he was going to end up. But I didn't know what else that could tell me. Maybe he really was trying to escape, make a new life, be by himself and away from the crooks at his trail. Maybe he really had told me all he knew. I doubted it—but it was possible.

With no other carrots tugging in front of me, I took out my smartphone and did a perfunctory search on the name Travis Kerr.

Sam was right about who he was, at least: chief officer of Cypress Constructions Ltd., specialising in tract developments and new housing estates. At least four new projects were proudly listed as under-construction on their website, including a grand new span of homes situated in Pillar Bay, which caught my attention.

Otherwise, there wasn't a whole lot about Kerr himself other than a biography that was brief and perfunctorily depthless. There was enough space in between the shade of the person painted by the website to imagine the accusations levelled by Sam against him. Maybe he really was a crook. Maybe he dealt in dirty money and corrupt deals. Maybe he swiped runaways and used them for his unscrupulous deeds. Maybe was the kind of rich man who had fat brown envelopes filled with bad information on important people—the kind that Sam said his operatives were expert at gathering for him.

But, then again, maybe Sam just snagged the name of a local business-heavyweight to throw me off the course for a little while and get a free ride south.

Maybe Sam really did know Sebastian Abbott, and maybe he didn't. Maybe he did have some bad business nipping at his heels that he was trying like hell keep away from. Maybe there were some people trying to find him and settle a score.

Maybe there weren't.

There were a lot of maybes that didn't have any positives attached, while in the meantime my food was getting cold. I ate what I could manage of it while thinking of what the next track I could possibly follow would be. There weren't a lot of options—just one, and it wasn't much.

I got back in my car and drove north, making a detour to splinter back into Pillar Bay.

The air and the white sunshine and the crystal waters were all the same as they had been only a few days ago. Maybe a few millimetres of sand banks had eroded since my last visit, or a dune had grown an inch, but there was nothing I could do about that.

All I had to do to find the Cypress Constructions development site was to follow the smiling billboards. Bright, shiny ads for bright, shiny futures by the sea.

But the beach-front development itself was not bright and shiny yet. It was a flat and dusty lot boxed by a long stretch of tarped fencing and dotted with the scattered kindling of half-finished wooden frames that looked as if they had been half-erected and suddenly abandoned. I parked at a corner of the lot and peeked in a slot through the fence. There were cobwebbed construction cranes, diggers and mixers sitting dormant like imposing stone gargoyles, and not a person in sight.

I wandered up the line of the fence and found a wide padlocked gate by the road, with a sign hung on front declaring in bold, coloured capitals that a brand new living experience was still coming soon. There was no date, though, and no other guarantee that the promise would come true.

I heard a stirring in the hut to the side of the gate, and before long a security guard was making an appearance at the door to cast a glare at me.

'This is a private lot,' he said. 'I'll have to ask you to leave if you don't have a permit from Cypress—'

'Do you work here? I'd like talk a moment, if that's alright.'

'I'm supposed to refer all reporters to the Cypress Constructions head office. They'll have a prepared statement as to the status of the development from their media representative.'

I walked up to the door to the guard hut and brought out my license. He looked at it a moment, tipped back his hat, and raised his eyebrows. 'Sorry, I didn't know,' he said. 'I don't know what I'm supposed to say...'

'That's alright,' I said, 'I'm not doing too much sleuthing right now, just taking a look out of interest. The site here is shut down, I can see.'

'Until further notice,' he said quickly.

'And you don't know when that is?'

He shook his head. 'No sir. You'll have to contact the Cypress Constructions head office. They'll have a prepared statement for you.'

I nodded for him. I took another look out at the snatches of broad flat dustiness that I could catch through the slits in the steel fencing. 'How long's it been closed?' I asked.

'A couple of weeks,' the guard said. 'That's how long I've been on hire to sit here and keep anyone out.'

'Nice job,' I said.

He shrugged. 'Pretty boring,' he said dryly. He moved his eyes a little, and took a moment of breath, as well as some of his broad lower lip in his teeth. 'You know...I was gonna test for an investigator's license,' he said.

'Really?' I crooked my head at looked friendly at him.

He nodded. 'Long time ago. Either that or the police force. Plenty of reasons I didn't wind up in either of them...so I got wrapped up doing this instead. It's not too bad, really. Just boring, like I said.'

'Oh, come on,' I said, buttering him. 'What do you guard, usually?'

He shrugged bashfully at my interest. 'Whatever I'm contracted for,' he said. 'All kinds of places. Warehouses, seaports, offices—business offices are the best, at least they're comfy. But I don't get a lot of those assignments. Usually just places like this. Keep the idiots out, the kids jumping the fence to smoke pot and screw, the drunks sleeping in the cement mixers.'

'Being an investigator isn't a whole step up, believe me. Most of my clients are the same.'

'Naw, I know.' He kicked around a snatch of dirt with the steel-toe of his boot. 'But you never know... You remember that story from the other month, about the crooked petrol guy that killed himself? It was an investigator that broke all that, I read.'

'Well, we're not all heroes,' I demurred. 'Some of us are just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the right time, and learn all the wrong kinds of things.'

'Yeah, I guess.'

The security guard looked down a moment, then perked his thumb back toward the office. 'Hey, listen,' he said, 'I dunno what it is I could say to help with whatever you're doing, but I know there's some documents inside from about when this place was shut down, if you'd want to take a look.'

'That'd be a great help, sure.'

He led me inside and unlocked a file cabinet under a desk with a key on his lanyard-ring. 'This is all from head office to the workers,' he told me. He stepped back and took a seat across the room to give me space.

I nodded a smile at him as I knelt down and fingered through the folders. His eyes were rolling away like a nervous child, but at the same time had a thrill in being in the same room as a real-life private investigation.

Most of the files were nothing but faxes and e-mails that had been printed for posterity. None of them were from Travis Kerr directly, but a few of the more important-looking of the bunch had been verified and signed by his signature. I pulled them out, and found that the majority were budget notices and receipts of mass materials.

I made a hum of interest as I read through them. The security guard heard it and couldn't help but crane his neck with interest over toward me. 'Anything interesting?'

'I'm not sure,' I said back. From what I could read, the project had had a whole budget approved and construction underway before a notice was sent suddenly stalling the contract until further notice. The only reason I could find why was a vague mention of 'unforeseen financial irregularities.'

I filed the papers back into the cabinet and let the security guard lock it all back away. 'I guess there's about as much as I can find,' I told him. 'I don't think I got your name, though.'

'Oh, it's Alan,' he said. 'Alan Darwell.'

'There was one other thing you could help me with, Alan. Did you see anyone hanging around here recently that stuck out? Someone young, in his late teens or early twenties?'

Alan rubbed the back of his neck and moved his head. 'Shit, I dunno...Maybe one young guy I saw a couple of weeks ago. Strange, cause he wasn't breaking in or anything—just skulking around the edge of the fence for a little bit, like he was trying to see in or look for something inside. I yelled to him and he ran off.'

'That was the only time you saw him?'

'That's right. Hasn't been back, as far as I know.'

'Do you remember what he looked like?'

'It was a while ago, I really dunno anymore. Young and skinny. I only saw him from down the fence before he ran off.'

'His hair colour, maybe? You remember that?'

He shook his head. 'I don't, no. I'm real sorry.'

'Don't worry about, Alan. You've been a real big help. You should go back for that investigator's license someday. I think you'd do well at this kind of work after all.'

He turned to me with hope hiding in his wide eyes. 'Well...you think? For real?'