The man who answered was the passenger from the bus.

His name was Gus Hansen.

He was Rufus’s son.

Within the hour his battered pickup rattled up beside me, and he drove me deep into the coastal marsh, to a weather-beaten shack half-hidden by willows.

Inside I met Rufus Hansen himself — the fourth partner, who had survived the crash all those years ago and lived off the grid ever since, because Denton had made it clear that if he ever surfaced, his wife and children would pay for it.

He was a small, weathered man with careful eyes, and he made us tea on a camp stove with hands that had learned, long ago, not to shake in front of strangers.