Chapter 4
Ezra
Hex finds him on day three.
It happens at half past four in the morning, which is exactly when Hex does his best work, because Hex believes the human brain runs better when it's been sleep-deprived for between fourteen and twenty hours and I've stopped arguing with him about it.
He walks into the workshop with a printout in one hand and a thermos of black coffee in the other and his eyes have that particular flat sheen of a man who has just gotten what he came for.
He doesn't say good morning. He sets the printout down on the table in front of me. He says, "Harlan Creed."
I look at the page.
It's a profile, half assembled from public records and half from the gray-market databases Hex maintains.
The photograph at the top is of a man in his late forties, gray at the temples, with the kind of jaw you see on men who have been told all their life that they look intelligent.
The kind of intelligent face that's used to being right.
The kind that doesn't deal well with being wrong.
I read the file.
Creed was a chemist before he was a demolitions specialist. He took two degrees from a state school in Ohio — undergrad in chemistry, graduate work in materials science.
He didn't finish the graduate work because he washed out of a research program for what the file calls insubordination toward thesis advisor.
I've read between those lines before. It means he thought he was smarter than the man supervising him and the man supervising him thought he wasn't. Creed left the program and took a job with a commercial demolition outfit in West Virginia where he built a reputation for innovative work on building takedowns.
Innovative, in Creed's case, meant willing to push tolerances.
He left that job after a building collapse killed two of his coworkers.
Insurance investigation found nothing actionable.
The men's families found him civilly liable.
He was bankrupted out of the legal industry and disappeared into private contracting.
That's where the Iron Ridge Wolves picked him up.
The Iron Ridge Wolves were a smaller rival club whose territory butted up against ours on the eastern flank.
They were a low-level nuisance for years — bad neighbors, opportunists, the kind of pack that picks fights it can't finish.
Two years ago, they got involved with a man named Ashburn who was trying to expand his methamphetamine operation through the region.
The Sinners pushed back. The Iron Ridge Wolves chose the wrong side of that conflict.
The Ashburn Kings push lasted ninety-three days and ended with most of the Iron Ridge senior leadership dead and the rest scattered.
The club hasn't existed in any meaningful form since.
Creed was their demolitions man.
He survived the Ashburn Kings push because he wasn't a wolf and wasn't on the front line.
He was the bomb maker. He stayed in his lab.
When the lab burned — set on fire by us, as part of the operation — he barely got out.
The file says he lost his right hand to the third-degree burns.
Prosthetic now. The file has a photograph of the prosthetic.
It's a precision-engineered black carbon-fiber unit with custom grip attachments.
The kind of thing a man only has if he intends to keep working with his hands.
I look at the photograph for a long time.
"He has motive," Hex says. "Lost his pack.
Lost his hand. Lost his livelihood. Lives off the grid in eastern Kentucky.
We have him on a property under a shell company we cross-referenced through his sister's tax filings.
Thirty-two acres. Industrial outbuildings.
Way more land than a man needs unless he has something on it he doesn't want neighbors near. "
"He has the chemistry background to reverse-engineer me," I say.
"Yes. Better than anyone we know personally."
"He had access. Two of my three vulnerable sites are in or adjacent to former Iron Ridge territory. He could have pulled samples in the days after the burns, before we cleaned up, especially if he had a contact who knew when I was coming and going."
"He almost certainly had that contact. Iron Ridge had two prospects who survived the push and went to ground. I'm tracing them now."
"And the fourteen fires."
"Distribute around our territory in a pattern that matches what Isolde found. The first fire — the one that killed her crew — was eight months after the Ashburn push. About long enough for a chemist to reverse-engineer a compound from samples and field-test the result."
I sit back. I look at the printout. I look at the man's face in the photograph, and I try to see if I recognize him, and I don't. I never met Creed.
The Ashburn push was a wolf operation. The chemists weren't on the field part of the war.
He saw me, maybe. From a distance. Through a scope or across a parking lot or in the chaos of a building going up. But I never met him.
I just took the things that mattered to him. And he's been trying to do the same to me ever since.
I get up and walk to the back of the workshop.
I pour myself coffee from the carafe I keep going.
I drink it standing up. The wolf is awake under my skin.
The wolf is interested in the way a wolf gets interested when a predator-prey dynamic clarifies.
I push it down. The chase will come. First, the work.
I go back to the table. I tell Hex, "Get me everything. Movements. Communications. Cellular pings. I want to know where he sleeps and what he eats and who he talks to."
"Already underway. Give me through tomorrow."
"And I want you to talk to Conrad about a surveillance team on the Kentucky property. Casket and Spite, probably. They can leave by tonight."
"On it."
Hex leaves. I sit with the printout for another minute.
Then I get up and I walk down the hill to Isolde's cabin.
It's just after six. The sun is up. The compound is starting to move — kids running for the schoolhouse, women heading for the dining hall, a couple of the brothers stretching on the porch of the bunkhouse like they slept badly.
I keep my head down and walk. I don't want to talk to anyone before I talk to her.
I knock on her cabin door. I don't expect her to be asleep. She isn't.
She opens the door in a flannel shirt and jeans, with her hair tied back and a mug of coffee in her hand, and the look on her face is the look of a woman who has also not been sleeping well.
"We have him," I say.
She steps back to let me in. I cross the threshold.
I haven't been in her cabin before. It's the bunkhouse cabin Della keeps for visitors — small, clean, two windows, a wood stove and a single bed and a desk by the window.
The desk has her files on it. The files are open. She was working when I knocked.
I lay the printout on the desk. She reads it.
I watch her face as she reads.
It does what I expect it to do, which is several things in sequence — recognition, then anger, then a kind of vacant exhaustion that I've seen on the faces of men who have just been told what they came to find out and are now facing the question of what to do next.
The anger settles to the back of her eyes and stays there, banked, the way a fire bank holds heat without flaming.
She finishes reading. She doesn't say anything for a long time.
Finally she says, "He killed them because they walked into the wrong forest."
"Yes."
"They were collateral."
"Yes."
She sits down on the edge of the bed. The mug in her hand has tilted. Coffee is sliding down the inside. She doesn't notice.
I stay standing.
I don't know what to say. I'm a man who deals in fires and compounds and the precise placement of charges.
I'm not a man who deals in this. I never have been.
I look at her sitting on the edge of the bed in the morning light, the side of her face that catches the window lit gold, the side that doesn't, in shadow, and I want — for the first time in I don't know how long — to do something I can't do. I want to put my hand on her shoulder.
I don't.
I say, "I'm going to bring him back. I'm telling you that now. We're going to find him and bring him in. And whatever you want done with him, when we have him, we'll do."
She nods. She doesn't look up.
I stand there for another minute. Then I say, "I'll be in the workshop when you're ready."
I turn to leave.
"Ezra."
I stop. She's said my name once before, in the bar, and it sounded different in her mouth than the way the brothers say it. The brothers shorten it to Ash. She uses the whole name. I don't know why it matters that she does, but it does.
I turn back.
She's looking at me. The mug is still tilted in her hand. Coffee is dripping onto her jeans.
"Stay," she says. "For a minute."
I stay.
I don't sit. I stand at the foot of the bed, with my hands in my pockets, and I watch her not look at me while she gets her face back in order.
It takes about thirty seconds. She's good at it.
She's had practice. When she looks up, her eyes are clear and her mouth is steady, and she says, "Tell me about the fire.
The one that scarred you. I want to know. "
I haven't told that story in a long time.
I tell it now.