Nobody Asks

A woman is dead on the shoulder of Route 14, a tire iron beside her, and the car that hit her belongs to no one.

Tessa Marchetti was an auditor at the Port of Wilmington. The vehicle that killed her is registered to Harborfield Holdings, a Delaware statutory trust: a trustee that is another company, a law firm that answers letters with letters, and a certificate on file in Dover that names nobody at all.

Calvin Reed is an accountant in the state's fraud unit, a former military policeman who counts the cars in a parking lot before he counts the stairs. He is told to find out who owns the car, quietly. Lydia Brandt is a reporter at a two-room newspaper who covers the port and has a reason of her own not to look too closely at it. Neither of them is a detective. Both of them read paper.

The paper leads from a gravel yard on Route 13 to a law office on Orange Street to forty-one acres on the river, and to trusts written long before anyone now living, built to survive and grow. Somebody has been putting them to use.

Nobody Asks is the first book of The Grasshopper Seals.