Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
I'd been with Marie long enough to know the quality of quiet that a house had when a woman was asleep in it.
Zoe's house had it when I left. She’d known I was going to go to pick up James before we’d gone to sleep, so she wasn’t expecting me to be there when she woke up.
She acted like it wouldn’t matter, but for just a quick moment, I could tell it did.
I was going to have to do something about that next time.
I sat in my truck in her driveway for a moment before I started it, not white-knuckling the wheel this time, not doing anything in particular. Just sitting. The April night was warm enough that I'd cracked the window. The air coming in smelled like her garden, green and faintly sweet.
Damn, I hadn’t wanted to leave.
I put the truck in gear and backed out of her drive.
It was only eleven o’clock by the time I got to Renzo and Millie’s place, and I knew Renzo would still be up. The man ran on less sleep than anyone I'd ever worked with. I saw his silhouette through the window before I even cut the engine.
He met me at the door before I could knock. He had a cup of coffee in his hand as he ushered me in. He did not look like a man who had been enjoying a quiet evening.
"James is asleep," he said, low. "Millie went down about an hour ago. Come in."
I followed him to the kitchen and he poured me a cup without asking. I took it. Something in the set of his shoulders told me I was going to want it.
"What happened?"
He set his own cup down on the counter and crossed his arms. "Diego was doing a walk of Lot Eight at eleven-thirty. Standard rotation."
Diego was one of the two men we'd put on informal night watch after the septic flag incident. Not security contractors, not yet—just him and Cory, two reliable guys from the crew who knew the site and knew what they were looking for. We'd agreed it was a precaution.
"Someone hit him from behind," Renzo said. "He went down hard. Cory found him. Took him to urgent care to make sure there wasn’t a concussion. There was.”
“Shit.”
“Unfortunately, he was out just long enough.”
"Long enough for what?"
"Long enough for someone to get to the excavator on Lot Seven.
" Renzo's jaw was set. "They didn't steal anything.
They didn't vandalize it in any obvious way.
But the hydraulic lines on the boom arm were tampered with.
Slow leak. If Cory hadn't come around when he did and noticed the ground was wet under the machine, we might not have caught it until someone was operating it. "
I put my coffee cup down.
A slow hydraulic leak on a boom arm wasn't a prank.
It wasn't kids, it wasn't a competitor making noise.
A slow leak meant the machine looked fine until it was under load, until an operator had it extended over a foundation or a trench, until the pressure dropped at exactly the wrong moment and eight tons of equipment moved in a direction nobody intended.
It was the kind of sabotage that killed people and looked like an accident.
"Who else knows?" I asked.
"Harvey. Code Drakos. I called them both before you got here." He paused. "I didn't call the sheriff yet. Harvey wants to talk to you first."
I understood that. Harvey Sadowski had built his reputation over forty years of development without a single serious incident.
This project was his legacy and his retirement and his attempt to do something that mattered for the county, all wrapped into fifty-seven acres.
He was going to want to control how this went public, and how fast.
"The excavator's locked down," Renzo continued.
"I put Diego's brother on it. He's sitting with the machine until morning. Nobody touches it. I called Onyx Security. Jase is on a job in Wyoming, so we’ve got Roan Thatcher and Nolan O’Rourke. Simon didn’t want to send any of the new guys; he sees how important this is. "
"Good." I looked out of the window. The dark outside no longer felt welcoming, it felt oppressive. "This is the second physical incident in two weeks."
"Second physical incident, but third incident," Renzo said quietly. "If you count the permit application that almost went in with the wrong drainage specs attached."
I looked at him.
"I didn't mention it before because I thought it was an internal error. I'd been going back through the project files. Someone accessed the shared drive two Saturdays ago and made a change to the drainage document. Small change. The kind of thing you'd only catch if you were looking for it."
"Who has access to the drive?"
"Our team. Harvey's office. The civil engineer." He paused. "And anyone who got into the civil engineer's system."
Code Drakos was going to have a busy week.
I picked my coffee back up, more for something to do with my hands than because I wanted it.
The sabotage at the site, I could get my head around.
Pacific Rim was a California investment group that wanted fifty-seven acres of eastern Tennessee for a development that would price out half the county and line their portfolios.
They'd tried bureaucratic harassment and financing pressure. Now they were hitting the physical operation. It was a logical escalation. But this was something that could have been deadly.
"We need cameras," I said. "Not just a watch rotation. Actual cameras on every piece of equipment and both access points by Monday."
Renzo nodded. "Onyx is already on it. They can have equipment on-site by Sunday afternoon."
Of course they were.
"One other thing," I said.
He waited.
"Nobody on the crew talks about this. Not to their wives, not to their buddies at Maverick's, not to anyone. The fewer people who know what we know about how the sabotage was done, the better."
"Agreed." He uncrossed his arms and picked up his coffee. "How was your evening?"
The shift was so abrupt I almost missed it. Then I saw the look on his face—tired, yes, and tightly wound from the night he'd had, but underneath it, genuine.
"Good," I said.
He waited.
"Really good," I said.
His face relaxed. "Good," he said simply. "Let’s go get your kid."
James was in the small guest room, tucked into a double, one arm flung out sideways and his mouth slightly open. His sneakers were lined up neatly at the foot of the bed, which meant Millie had made him do it, which I appreciated.
I stood in the doorway for a moment.
He had a smear of something on his chin that I was reasonably certain was strawberry. He looked content.
I went in and gathered him up. He stirred but didn't wake, just turned his face and snuggled into my shoulder like he’d been doing since he was an infant.
Something settled inside me. We might have sabotage going on, but everything was now right in my world.
An image of Zoe sleeping in her bed flashed before my eyes.
Yes, everything was definitely right in my world.
The drive home was quiet, James asleep in his car seat, the hills dark on either side of the road and I let my mind wander.
Hydraulic lines. Shared drive access. A man on the ground with a concussion.
Zoe asleep in her house with her garden outside the window.
The two things sat in my head side by side. The project was under real threat, the kind that was going to require more than cameras and watch rotations before it was done.
And Zoe. Zoe, who owned a shop on Main Street in this town and had no idea that the project her town was counting on was under coordinated attack from people who played a long, methodical game. Of course, I wasn’t going to tell her. Which kind of felt like a betrayal, but it was what I had to do.
I pulled into my garage and cut the engine.
James slept on in the back seat, one hand curled loosely open, dreaming whatever four-year-olds dreamed about. Something told me I would be hearing about his day out at the orchard for weeks.
I sat there a minute in the dark before I got him out.
I thought about hydraulic lines and shared drives and a man named Code Drakos who was very good at his job.
Then I got my son out of the car, carried him inside, and put him to bed.