Chapter 3
Simone
Simone investigated the Iron Thorn the way she investigated everything — thoroughly, patiently, waiting for the clean surface to crack under enough pressure.
It didn't crack. It kept getting cleaner, which was, frankly, starting to offend her professionally.
The clinic wing checked out down to the last invoice, the contractor's records matching the club's donation ledger to the dollar.
The community garden had an actual waiting list, forty families deep, tended by a rotating schedule of club members who showed up before dawn to water rows of vegetables that weren't theirs.
There were scholarship records for kids whose families had never even met a single club member, funded quietly, no strings attached, no press release, no plaque with anyone's name on it.
She interviewed half the town over the course of that week and got the same story everywhere she went, delivered with the specific warmth of people who genuinely believed what they were telling her.
"They fixed my roof after the storm last spring," said an elderly woman at the diner, buttering toast with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd done it eight thousand times.
"Showed up unannounced, six of them, tools and all.
Then they fixed my neighbor's roof too, because he's too proud to ask for help and they knew it. "
"Did they ask for anything in return?" Simone asked, pen ready.
"Asked if I had extra pie," the woman said. "I did. That was the whole transaction."
Simone wrote it down and felt something she didn't immediately have a name for.
It wasn't relief, exactly. It was closer to a kind of low-grade grief — for the version of the world where the clean thing always turned out secretly dirty underneath, because that version, at least, had made sense to her.
She'd built her entire career on that version.
She'd been burned badly enough by it that certainty had become her armor, plate by careful plate, since the day her old department decided the truth-teller was the actual problem instead of the theft she'd exposed.
And here was a case actively, stubbornly, almost rudely refusing to give her anything to be certain about.
Elliot Rourke didn't help matters. He sat in on half her interviews at Knox's request, patient and honest in a way that should have made her job easier and instead made everything considerably more complicated, because every time she caught herself watching him instead of her subject, she had to mentally file that away as a professional failing and move on.
"Why'd you transfer here?" he asked one afternoon, apropos of absolutely nothing, while she cross-referenced receipts at a folding table in the back office.
"That's not relevant to the investigation."
"Wasn't asking as part of the investigation."
She didn't answer. He let it go without pushing, which somehow made the silence worse than if he'd pressed harder.
"You don't have to answer," he added a moment later. "I just noticed you flinch a little every time someone mentions your old department. Figured there was a story there."
"There's always a story, Mr. Rourke."
"Elliot's fine, if you want. 'Mr. Rourke' makes me feel like I'm being audited by the IRS."
"You are, essentially, being audited. Just by me instead."
"Fair point." He tilted his head, studying her the way she'd caught him doing more than once now — not invasive, just curious, like he found her genuinely interesting rather than merely useful.
"For what it's worth — the town that punishes the person who tells the truth is the one with the problem. Not the truth-teller."
It hit her exactly where she hadn't braced for it, landing somewhere under her ribs with a precision that felt almost unfair, given that he had no idea what her old department had actually done to her.
She excused herself before her face could do anything traitorous, and stood in the sheriff's parking lot for a solid ten minutes afterward, breathing, furious at a man she'd known for two weeks for seeing her so clearly without even trying.
She composed herself. She always did. That was the whole point of the armor.
Before she went back inside, her phone buzzed with a text from her supervisor's office confirming a check-in call for later that week, and she stood there a moment longer, staring at the screen, feeling the familiar cold settle back into her chest. Whatever was happening at this grove in the evenings, whatever was happening in that back office with a man who kept answering her questions honestly when lying would have been so much easier, none of it changed the fact that she still had a job to do and a superior who expected results.
She went back inside and interviewed two more club members that afternoon — a quiet man named Sable who ran the club's charity accounts with the fastidiousness of a forensic accountant, and a woman named Josie, married to one of the members, who ran the scholarship committee and had opinions about everything.
"You want to know the dirt on the Iron Thorn," Josie said, settling into her chair like she'd been waiting weeks for someone to ask.
"Fine. Here's the dirt. Diesel eats the last slice of pie at every single potluck and nobody's called him out on it because he's built like a refrigerator. That's the worst thing I've got."
"That's not exactly a crime, Mrs.—"
"Josie's fine. And no, it's not a crime. Neither is anything else you're going to find here, Detective, though I understand you've got to look."
"You seem very confident about that."
"I've been married into this club for six years.
I've seen the books. I've seen the late nights.
I've seen Bishop personally lose sleep over whether a scholarship fund looked too generous and might draw the wrong kind of attention.
" Josie shrugged. "You can only fake that for so long before it stops being a performance and starts just being who you are. "
Simone wrote it all down, methodically, the same way she wrote down everything, and told herself the accumulating weight of testimony didn't mean anything yet. Evidence took time to add up to a verdict. She wasn't going to rush the math just because everyone in town kept doing it for her.
She went back inside like nothing had happened, and neither of them mentioned it again, though she caught him watching her a little more carefully for the rest of the afternoon, like he was recalibrating something.
That night, unable to settle in the too-quiet rental house, she found herself driving out to the grove again. Not on purpose, she told herself. Just a place to think, same as anyone might use.
He was already there, like always, sitting on the same stone wall, watching the same sunset like it was a different one every time.
"You're becoming a creature of habit, Detective."
"So are you."
"I was here first."
"Debatable. I've started keeping a log."
That got a real laugh out of him, low and surprised, and she felt an unreasonable flush of satisfaction at having earned it.
They stopped pretending it was a coincidence around the fourth night in a row, though neither of them said so out loud, because saying it out loud would have made it a decision instead of an accident, and Simone was not yet ready to have made that particular decision on purpose.
The conversations got longer each time. Less procedural.
More real, in a way that unsettled her almost as much as it drew her in.
He told her about the meeting years back where half the club had laughed at him for wanting to go legitimate, and how he'd gone home that night and written a five-year plan nobody had asked for.
She told him, in careful, rationed pieces, about the department that had exiled her — not the whole story, not yet, just enough to be honest without handing over every vulnerable piece of herself to a man who was, technically, still a subject of her investigation.
"You're better at this than you think," he said one night, meaning the case, meaning something else too, probably, the way he always seemed to mean two things at once without making either one obvious.
"Better at what? Finding nothing?"
"Better at looking honestly at something even when you expected — maybe even wanted — to hate it."
Simone didn't have a good answer for that. She looked out at the darkening valley instead, feeling unmoored in a way she hadn't felt since the night she'd packed her old apartment into boxes and told herself it didn't matter where she landed as long as she still had the work.
"I came here certain," she said finally, quiet. "Certainty's easier. It doesn't leave room for—" She gestured vaguely at the grove, at him, at the whole complicated mess of the last two weeks.
"For being wrong?"
"For being surprised. I don't like surprises. Surprises usually mean something's about to go badly."
"Not always," Elliot said. "Sometimes a surprise is just a thing you didn't expect to be good."
"You have an answer for everything, you know that?"
"I have a lot of time to think out here. Comes with the territory."
"Must be nice. Having a designated thinking spot. I've got a rental house with three unpacked boxes and a ceiling fan that ticks."
"You're welcome to think here too. I don't charge rent."
"Generous of you."
"I have my moments." He glanced sideways at her, something warm and a little rueful in it. "Can I ask you something, and you don't have to answer if it's out of bounds?"
"Depends on the question."
"Do you like this job? The actual work, I mean. Not the department, not the politics. The work itself."
Simone considered it longer than she expected to. Nobody had asked her that in longer than she could remember — not her sister, not her old partner, certainly not anyone in her old department, where the question would have sounded like a trap.