“I wouldn’t go that far.” She pulled up a document on the tablet, energized. “So the Bro-duce Corporation didn’t purchase the farm until six months after Angela’s disappearance, but they were working the land before that. The previous owners were Jack and Linda Fodor.”

“Frodo’s parents?”

“Correct. Jack and Linda now live in a two-bedroom condo in Fort Lauderdale. I found a retirement newsletter that says they’ve been there for ten years, so they’d given their two sons, Nate, and his older brother, Adam, control of the farm before the purchase. Adam’s six years older than Nate and three years older than Dave and Kieran.”

“Which means he’s twenty-seven now?”

“Yes.”

Caitlin smiled. “And Adam not only went to IU, but he was also in the same fraternity?”

Lakshmi pulled up a picture of young men in matching blue blazers, the entire fraternity from Kieran Michelson’s freshman year. She tapped on a clean-cut blond.

“Adam Fodor was Kieran Michelson’s big brother, in the fraternity sense. Now he lives in the Bahamas and runs a tourist catamaran.”

She opened a browser, showed Caitlin bahamaspartycruise.com. The same man, five years older and tanner, his crew-cut hair now in foot-long, natty dreads, smiled next to two women in barely there bikinis.

Caitlin noticed the sign above him. “Doctor Greenthumb?”

“This means they were growing weed before Kieran and Dave started Bro-duce, right?”

Caitlin nodded. “Probably, but Kieran and Dave saw the chance to make it a legitimate business.”

“While Adam went to the Bahamas to grow those awful dreads.”

Caitlin remembered the box Gooch gave Lubbers. “Maybe more. The farm’s getting something from the Bahamas. Gooch said seeds.”

Lakshmi looked confused. “Can’t they find seeds in America?”

Caitlin reached for her phone. “Only one way to find out.”

Mike Roman answered before the second ring. “Don’t make me hang out with that scumbag again, Caitlin.”

“Settle down, tough guy. You’ve earned a vacation. Ever been to the Bahamas?”

He hadn’t, but his passport was current. He’d leave on the red eye, touch down in the land of rum the next afternoon, be mission functional by Sunday morning. Caitlin would have to dip into her pile of film-rights money for this one, but that cash had come with a list of producers who might be interested in her next big story. College kids running an international drug syndicate checked more than a few of Hollywood’s boxes. She hung up, noticed Lakshmi watching her.

“What?”

“Mike jumps at your command. You two never dated?”

“Me and Roman? You read the book. I put the man in jail.”

“Right, but eight years later you teamed up and saved all of those women. Now you work together.”

“We don’t work together. He works for me.”

“You never—”