Chapter 20 #2
Brandt came in and set a small digital recorder on the dresser, a notepad open beside it. He pulled a chair to the center of the room and sat down. No theatrics. No warmup.
“Ready when you are,” he said.
She was.
The Dead Marshall first. She walked him through it clean — the bar, Rux, the knife at her throat, Evander stepping in. How fast it happened. How she’d gotten into Evander’s truck because the alternative was standing in that parking lot alone with Sons coming out the door.
Brandt listened without interrupting. He wrote in the notepad with a shorthand she couldn’t read.
“Back further,” he said. “How did you first come into contact with Malachai Granger?”
Music. Of course it always came back to music.
She told him about meeting Mal at a bar in Billings where she’d been playing a Tuesday night open mic.
How he’d introduced himself casually, said he knew people in the industry, that she had something real.
How those conversations had stretched into months.
How he’d folded her gradually into the club’s orbit, a party here, a gathering there, introduced her around, made her feel like she was being welcomed into something instead of being managed into it.
“When did you understand what the Sons of Sin were?”
“I’d heard of them before I met Mal. I wasn’t completely naive.” She paused. “But Mal made it easy to believe it wasn’t what I knew it was. He was good at that.”
“At what?”
“Making things seem smaller than they were. Safer than they were.” She set her coffee down. “He was good at knowing what you wanted to hear and giving you enough of it that you stopped asking the other questions.”
Brandt nodded. Wrote something. “When did the dynamic change?”
Roy Bishoff. She told him about Bishoff — the accountant, the shell companies, how Bishoff had gotten scared and threatened to cooperate with federal investigators.
She told him how Mal had shot him in the back of the head in the club’s back office while she was in the hallway and the door wasn’t fully closed.
How she’d stood there with her hand over her mouth while Hobbs walked out past her and didn’t even look at her face.
She told him about Sylvie. How she’d found her shaking in the bathroom ten minutes later, how they’d gotten out through the kitchen while the club was still figuring out what to do with the body.
Brandt’s pen moved steadily.
“I need you to go further back,” he said. “Before Bishoff. Before you witnessed the murder. I need to understand the full scope of your involvement with Granger — personally, not as a witness.”
She looked at the recorder.
She’d known this part was coming. She’d been bracing for it since she’d said Mal’s name to Brandt in the yard last night, the first time she’d said it out loud to a federal officer. But knowing and doing were different things.
“He hit me once,” she said. “Three weeks before Bishoff. We’d argued about something — I was talking about leaving, told him I wanted to go back to playing shows on my own, that I didn’t need the contacts anymore.
He backhanded me. Once. Said if I tried to leave it would be the last time I tried anything.
” Her voice was steady. She’d decided somewhere on that mountain that if she got a chance to say this, she’d say all of it.
“But the hitting — that wasn’t the start of it.
That was just the part that finally had a shape I could name. ”
Brandt waited.
“The control started inside the first month. Small things. Who I talked to. What I wore when I came to club events. He’d tell me what he wanted me to say to certain people, what to say I did for work.
He monitored my phone for a while without telling me, and when I found out he just — explained why it was necessary.
And I accepted it.” Her chest felt strange.
Tight and hollow at the same time. “I’d stopped playing shows six months in.
Stopped seeing most of my friends. My contact list had basically narrowed down to people he’d approved of, and I’d done it so gradually I almost didn’t notice until I looked up one day and there was almost nobody left. ”
Naomi sat very still in the corner.
“Fear kept me longer than any of it kept me,” Rainey said. “I knew, by the end, that I wanted out. I’d known for a while. But leaving meant— I didn’t know what leaving meant. I knew what he’d said leaving meant. And I believed him.”
Brandt wrote for a long, quiet moment after she stopped talking.
“Okay,” he said. He reached over and paused the recorder. “Thank you. I know that last part wasn’t easy.”
She exhaled. The mountain had held all of this at arm’s length — the week in the cabin had been about survival, about gunfire and fever and cracked ribs and Evander’s hands on hers in the dark, and none of it had required her to sit in a room and say this is what was done to me in plain sentences with a recorder running.
She’d forgotten how much effort it took to hold a thing until you finally set it down.
Her eyes went to the doorway.
He was there.
Evander stood in the frame with one hand braced against the wood, dressed in borrowed clothes that weren’t quite his size, pale as chalk under the bruise climbing his jaw.
He’d clearly been there long enough to hear at least some of it.
He wasn’t moving. Wasn’t speaking. His dark eyes were on her face with an intensity that stripped everything else out of the room.
He’d come to find her.
She hadn’t gone to him, so he’d come to find her.
Rainey stared at him across the room, the recorder on the dresser, Brandt still in his chair, Naomi very carefully not looking at either of them, and the thing she’d been holding at arm’s length since she fell asleep with one boot on cracked right through the middle.