Meanwhile, back at Martins Detective Agency, Karl Martin sat alone in his office staring down at a reheated burger from the night before. The office microwave, old and barely functioning, had left parts of it scalding hot while other sections were still cold, but Karl barely noticed. He chewed without tasting it, his eyes somewhere else entirely, his thoughts drifting far from the food in front of him. The once-busy agency had been getting quieter every year, and the silence had started to feel permanent. Fewer calls came in. Fewer clients pushed through the front door. More desks sat empty, chairs untouched, filing cabinets full of cases nobody was working anymore. Martins Detective Agency was slowly losing relevance in a city that had once known its name well, and everyone inside the building could feel it even if nobody said it out loud.
There was no single moment that destroyed their reputation. No scandal, no public failure, no case that collapsed spectacularly and took the agency's credibility with it. People had simply stopped trusting the Martins name over time, the way trust tends to leave — quietly, gradually, and then all at once. Jason Martin had founded the agency in 2014, building it on aggressive casework and real ambition. In the early years there was genuine energy behind it. Real cases, real results, real people walking through the door who needed help and got it. But over time, both Jason and Karl had changed. Kingsport had noticed. The general public had started seeing them for what they had become — opportunists who only cared about a case if it came with media attention or a high payout. The transformation hadn't been dramatic. It had just been steady, and by the time most people had made up their minds about the Martins, there wasn't much left to argue against.
Quiet cases got turned away. Personal struggles were dismissed at the front desk without much thought. Smaller investigations — worried parents, grieving spouses, neighborhood disputes — were ignored if they didn't come attached to a cheque worth cashing or a headline worth chasing. If a case couldn't benefit them publicly, it wasn't worth their time. Kingsport knew it. Word spreads in a city that size, and it had spread completely, and so the phone had mostly stopped ringing.
Karl refreshed the Kingsport News website out of habit while finishing the last of his burger, barely tasting it. He did this several times a day now, just to fill the time. He was mid-scroll when a headline stopped him cold. He leaned forward. Read it once fast, then slowed down and read it again. "Cold Case Reopened: Former Martins Detective Morganta Maddison and Former Police Investigator Lexus Grant Reinvestigate The Kingsport Five." Karl nearly spat out his coffee. He stared at the screen, rereading the words, making sure he had it right. Morganta. Someone he had dismissed without a second thought. Someone who had walked out of this agency and apparently kept going. She had officially reopened one of Kingsport's most infamous unsolved cases — the Dawson family disappearance, the Kingsport Five — a case that had hung over this city for years. A case with enormous public interest, enormous emotional weight, enormous media potential. A case Karl himself had once looked at and decided wasn't worth the effort.
He sat very still for a moment. Then his face turned red.
He picked up his phone and called his father.
Jason Martin arrived faster than Karl expected. Even in retirement, even years removed from the daily running of things, he still moved like the building belonged to him — like the furniture and the walls and every person inside were extensions of his will. He came through Karl's office door without knocking, coat still on, polished shoes hitting the old wooden floor hard with every step.
"What the hell do you mean Morganta reopened it?" he said before he was fully through the door.
Karl turned the monitor around without a word. Jason stepped closer and read the article. Then he read it again, slower this time. His jaw tightened. A former Martins detective — someone who had worked under their roof for years, who had carried their name — was now publicly connected to the biggest reopened case in recent memory. And Martins Detective Agency was nowhere in it. Not mentioned. Not consulted. Nothing.
He stood up straight. Stayed very still for just a second. Then he brought his fist down on Karl's desk hard enough that the coffee cups jumped, paperwork slid sideways, and two pens rolled off the edge onto the floor. The sound rang through the quiet office like something snapping.
"We should be on this case," Jason said, quieter now, which was worse.
Karl nodded. "She's already getting attention. If she solves it before us—"
"She won't," Jason said flatly.
It wasn't a prediction. It was a refusal to accept a version of events where that happened.
For Jason, none of this was about the Dawson family. It wasn't about whatever had happened to five people who had vanished and left an entire city with questions it couldn't answer. It wasn't about closure or truth or any of that. It was about the agency clawing back into the spotlight before it faded completely. The Kingsport Five was exactly the kind of case — high profile, emotionally loaded, publicly compelling — that could drag the Martins name back into relevance. That was all it was to him. An opportunity that someone else had spotted first, and that was the part that made him furious.
They moved quickly. Jason pulled aside one of the few remaining employees and told them he and Karl were personally stepping in. Then he told staff to start contacting every news outlet they had a connection with, to get the agency's name attached to this investigation publicly and fast, before Morganta could build any more momentum. He wanted headlines. He wanted his name in print and on screen in connection with this case before the week was out.
Within minutes they were in Jason's car, pulling out of the agency's small lot and onto the street. The drive was tense and mostly quiet. Jason's hands were tight on the wheel, eyes fixed forward, furious in that cold, contained way that was harder to be around than shouting. Karl stared out the passenger window, turning things over in his head — which angles to use, how to insert themselves into this thing in a way that looked credible rather than reactive. Neither of them said what both of them were thinking, which was that they were running behind, and they hated it, and they couldn't let it show.
When they reached Fraser, they drove straight to Moretti's General Store without stopping. The place looked exactly as it had for decades — old without being neglected, worn in the way things get when they've been genuinely used over a long time. It sat quietly near the roadside, the kind of building that seemed entirely unbothered by the world moving around it. Jason parked. They climbed out, straightened their suits — the automatic, practised gesture of men who had long used appearance as a form of authority — and walked inside.
Enzo Moretti was behind the counter. An elderly man, unhurried, with steady eyes that had spent a lifetime watching people come and go and learning something from each of them. He looked up when they entered. His expression didn't change dramatically, but something shifted in it — a slight cooling, a subtle settling into wariness. He had been easy with Morganta and Lexus. With these two, he wasn't.
Jason put on his best smile. "Good afternoon, sir. We're from Martins Detective Agency. We're here regarding the Dawson family case."
Enzo's eyes moved between them slowly.
Karl softened his voice, going for approachable. "Just a few questions. Shouldn't take long at all."
Enzo's face had already hardened. He knew about Morganta and Lexus. They had come to him with patience, had listened properly, had treated what he had to say as worth hearing. These men felt different in a way he couldn't quite name but didn't need to. He recognised it the way you recognise certain weather before it arrives.
He crossed his arms. "Case already being investigated," he said evenly. "You do not need to be here."
Jason kept the smile going. "Sir, with all due respect, our agency has been working in Kingsport for over a decade. We have the experience and the resources to—"
"No." Enzo said it simply, without heat. "Morganta and Lexus here first. They care." He looked at Jason. "You care for cameras."
It landed clean and quiet, which made it worse than if he'd shouted it. Karl and Jason exchanged a quick look. Enzo hadn't raised his voice or been hostile. He had just said plainly what he saw, the way old men do when they've stopped having patience for performance. And what he saw was accurate enough that neither of them had a good answer for it.
Jason tried once more — framed it as having more people on the case being better for everyone, used the kind of reasonable-sounding language that didn't really mean anything. But Enzo had stood behind that counter for too many years and watched too many different kinds of people walk through his door to be moved by smooth talk. He shook his head and went back to what he'd been doing. He had nothing more to say to them. He wouldn't share what he'd shared with Morganta and Lexus. He wouldn't be used as a foothold for whatever these two were trying to build. As far as he was concerned the conversation was finished, and he made that clear without making it into a scene.
They walked back out into the afternoon. Jason said nothing. Karl said nothing. They got in the car. Jason sat with his hands on the wheel for a moment without starting the engine, staring through the windscreen at nothing in particular.
Then he started it and they pulled away.
The drive back was heavier. Jason's jaw stayed set the whole way, eyes on the road, the fury from before not gone but compressed into something harder and more purposeful. He wasn't finished. Being quietly turned away by an old shopkeeper wasn't the end of anything — it was just one door that hadn't opened, and Jason had spent his whole career finding other doors. If Morganta was going to work this case carefully and earnestly with her small team, he was going to make sure Martins Detective Agency was louder, more visible, and harder to ignore than anything she was doing. He had media contacts she didn't. He had connections in rooms she hadn't been let into. He intended to use all of it.
Karl, quiet in the passenger seat, was already thinking through the specifics. Which journalists would be useful. Which old contacts could be brought back into play. How quickly they could build something that looked authoritative even if nobody who actually mattered had invited them in. He was genuinely good at that kind of thinking, and in a different version of his life, aimed at something honest, it might have taken him somewhere worth going.
But this was the life they had built — him and his father — shaped by ambition that had slowly replaced everything it was supposed to be in service of.
For the first time, the Dawson case was no longer just a cold case or an old mystery gathering dust somewhere in an archive. It wasn't only about five missing people and the questions a city had never been able to stop asking. It had become a battleground, a quiet professional war being fought on two completely separate fronts for two completely different reasons. Morganta, Lexus, and Enzo were looking for something real — truth, answers, whatever justice was still possible after all those years. Jason and Karl Martin were looking for something else. They were looking for the thing that had slowly replaced meaning in everything they did.
And that difference, simple and absolute, was going to change everything about what came next.