Chapter 15 #2
‘No. Not at all.’ She shook her head. ‘Meghan was excited to be part of Izzy’s work and digging for new leads. She even left me a message, asking for advice, for my help—’
Holy hell.
Hope suddenly flared in his chest.
Help. Actual help from someone who may just shift some of the weight he’d been carrying solo for too damn long.
Only her expression killed all that hope just as fast.
‘By the time I got her message… she was dead.’
Finn flinched.
To control himself, his fingers curled tighter around the steering wheel as his throat locked up like his body had heard something it couldn’t forget.
Because he knew.
God help him, he knew.
He’d missed his message, too.
Liam had called. His little boy. Late at night. Voice thin and tired, barely more than a whisper on the machine that said, ‘I love you, Daddy. It’s okay. I get it.’
Finn never got the chance to call his boy back.
Then, finding all his messages had been blocked: the ones from Bree, from the doctors, Drew, even his old sergeant from Queensland—all of them had been held up by a chain of command more interested in headlines than humanity.
By the time they’d reached him, he’d already lost everything that mattered in gut-wrenching order of...
His son. His wife. His career. His freedom.
That was the crack that broke the rest of him. The moment the wires snapped, and the mask fell off. What was left wasn’t a cop, it wasn’t even a man. It was just pain, walking.
What made it worse was he never got to say goodbye. Or to even say he was sorry.
It’s why he came back to Elsie Creek, to watch over this town. And why he always slowed down when he drove past the town’s dusty church, which stood on the hill, where they said the graveyard had the best views of the outback.
He drove past it more than he needed to…
Because his son was buried here.
And that was reason enough for him to stay.
The silence in the troopy thickened like heat off the bonnet. The gravel crunched beneath the tyres as they headed towards the Spinifex Highway.
Finn exhaled heavily, as if he had to drag it up from somewhere deep just to breathe, while fighting against all that pain of his past.
Thing is, she was sitting right beside him, sharing the same breathing space, and didn’t even realise they shared the same pain from the exact same thing.
But he could see it now.
He understood.
That moment no one ever talked about—hell, he couldn’t explain it—but there was something about losing someone like that. Missing that call. The message. And that moment it tilted your world on its axis.
It did something to you. Twisted grief into guilt, then guilt into fuel. Where you then tucked away the pain and turned it into purpose.
And here they were, enemies who had somehow formed a kind of de-facto trauma bond on steroids.
He’d turned it into rage—while she was chasing justice.
‘That’s why you told Izzy your father would back you up,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a bluff. He’s Meghan’s uncle.’
Taryn gave a tight nod. ‘He’ll do whatever he can to help… unofficially. My mother, too.’
Damn. A federal intelligence analyst and a JAG officer with reach. Talk about wildcards. No wonder Taryn walked like she had classified clearance in her back pocket.
That was a helluva combination to have in the family, that was more than just a family motivated by shared grief. It was deep government wiring. The kind that could reroute careers and bury bodies if needed. It was also a golden ticket into places very few people had access.
He looked at her again. Like really looked.
Taryn Hayes wasn’t here to chase numbers or headlines.
She was chasing ghosts.
Just like him.
‘Your laptop… Izzy says it’s off-grid and encrypted? Specialised hardware?’ He tried not to get his hopes up. But, come on, in Taryn’s hands… That’d be like someone handing him a custom Harley after years of pushing a busted bike uphill. If it were true.
But then she nodded.
It was enough to have him raking his hand through his hair, trying to put a lid on that too-good-to-trust-it feeling.
‘I’m here to dig up the truth. And if there’s something in your files that can help—’
She never got a chance to finish, as Finn pulled the troopy off to the side of the dirt road, stopping on a low ridge where the late afternoon sun was dragging its belly across the scrub like golden fire.
He reached beneath his seat and dragged out a battered folder wrapped in a rubber band, thick with handwritten notes, dog-eared pages, and dropped it onto her lap before he could change his mind. ‘Then let’s find out what they buried. Together.’
Before he could get the car back on the road, she’d cracked it open. Flicking through his notes, maps, drawings and clippings from articles with enough red ink to bleed the truth out of each piece of paper.
Her eyebrows rose at the circles, arrows, and what looked like a drawing of a livestock truck with angry eyebrows. ‘Amara mentioned she had to decode your chicken scratch scribbles for the Commissioner? What was that—two years ago?’
‘Yeah. That was the first one.’
She grinned, and surprisingly so did he, enough for the heaviness to lift, just a fraction, but in the right direction.
‘What you have there is every hole I found in the livestock industry from transport through to quarantine and exports, mapped out in a nice and neat little dossier, we call the Gaps File.’
Taryn muttered, ‘Simple. Easy to remember.’
‘Yeah, up all night thinking up that title,’ Finn deadpanned.
Another short grin, but this time there was some excitement flaring in her eyes.
The engine droned on as she read the file that had lived in this troopy longer than some of his shirts had lasted.
It held notes from truck-stop conversations.
Cattle yard whispers. Rumours from roadhouse staff.
Things Amara had once called circumstantial garbage—until some of it turned out to be real.
He kept his eyes on the road, but he could feel her flipping through it as if reading him. In a way, she was. Because every page, every scrawled note or underline was a confession in ink.
He hadn’t built a case. He’d built a map. A trail that uncovered all the holes in a system so flawed that someone could drive a convoy of stolen livestock trucks straight through them—and had.
But would she see it?
So, he drove and waited. Hating how Taryn’s opinion mattered. Because if she didn’t see something in it, if she thought it was useless, then maybe he’d just spent the last two years chasing ghosts.
Taryn flicked through the last few pages of the bulky file.
‘You’ve mapped out a field manual of every flaw in the livestock industry’s supply chain—from farm gate to freight terminal.
’ She then held up a crumpled napkin, covered in Finn’s rough scrawl.
‘Even if some of it’s written on pub napkins. ’
Finn grunted. ‘Was the only thing I had on hand.’
She shook her head with the faintest curve on her lips. Just enough to show she wasn’t laughing at him, but more as an acceptance of his methods.
Then her expression shifted as she slowly flipped the paperwork back to the beginning again, then smoothed a hand over the coffee-stained, dog-eared cover.
‘You didn’t just find the cracks,’ she said.
‘You saw where the system fails. Where oversight becomes an opportunity for the wrong people.’ She paused, with only the engine humming to fill the silence.
‘What matters, Finn, is that you saw what no one else was willing to face. That it was broken. And more importantly, why that matters.’
It was the first time anyone had said it like that. How she had seen it, not as a list of failures, but as something that mattered. And coming from the woman sent to shut him down—that meant more than he cared to admit.