Chapter 3 #2
"I love it," she said finally, surprised by how true it felt saying it out loud.
"Evidence doesn't lie. It doesn't have an agenda.
You follow it far enough and it tells you exactly what happened, no matter how many people want it to say something different.
I've built my whole life around that being reliable. "
"And when it doesn't say what you expected?"
"Then I've usually been wrong about something. Which happens less often than people think, and more often than I'd like."
"Is this one of those times?"
She looked at him, at the calm, patient way he waited for her answer without pushing, and felt something in her resolve crack just slightly at the edges.
"I don't know yet," she said honestly. "Ask me again in a week."
She looked at him then, really looked, chestnut hair catching the last of the light, that steady, patient calm that she was starting to suspect wasn't a performance at all, and felt something in her chest tilt dangerously off its axis.
"I should go," she said, standing before she could think better of it.
"You always say that right before you don't leave for another twenty minutes."
He wasn't wrong. She sat back down anyway, telling herself it was purely strategic — rapport-building, useful for the investigation, nothing more complicated than good detective work.
She was a good enough detective to know that was a lie.
She just wasn't ready yet, that particular night, to admit out loud what the actual truth was, so she let the silence between them stretch out comfortable and dangerous under the old trees, and stayed until well past when either of them had any professional reason to.
The check-in call with her supervisor came two days later, and it did not go the way she'd expected.
"You've been out there two weeks," Captain Voss said, his voice carrying the particular impatience of a man who'd already decided what he wanted to hear. "Tell me you've got something."
"I've got a thorough financial picture, sir. Everything checks out so far."
There was a pause on the line, long enough that Simone almost thought the call had dropped.
"Checks out," Voss repeated.
"Yes, sir. Clean books, verified donations, no discrepancies I can find."
"Dig deeper, Detective. Organizations like that don't stay clean. Find the seam."
"I've been looking for two weeks. There isn't one so far."
"Then look harder. I didn't send my most thorough detective out there to come back with nothing."
The call ended shortly after, and Simone sat at her desk for a long moment afterward, turning the conversation over the way she turned over everything, looking for the angle that made sense of it.
Voss wanted something. That much was obvious.
What she couldn't yet tell was whether he wanted the truth, or just a story that looked enough like the truth to satisfy whoever was pressuring him.
She didn't like either answer. She liked even less that she was starting to suspect the second one.
She thought about mentioning it to Elliot that evening at the grove, and then didn't, because some cautious, professional part of her still wasn't ready to admit that she'd started thinking of him as someone worth confiding in rather than someone she was supposed to be investigating.
That distinction, she was beginning to realize, was getting harder to hold onto by the day.
She called her sister instead, later that night, sitting on the back step of the rental with a mug of tea gone cold beside her.
"You sound weird," Dana said, without preamble. "Weirder than usual exile-weird."
"My supervisor wants me to manufacture a case against a club that's done nothing wrong."
"That's bad-weird. Is there also good-weird happening? Because you've got a very specific tone."
Simone didn't answer right away, which was, apparently, answer enough.
"Oh my God," Dana said. "It's the biker. It's the grove biker."
"He has a name."
"I know he has a name, you've mentioned it four times in the last two weeks, which for you is basically a wedding announcement." Dana's voice softened. "Simone. Be careful. You've been burned bad enough already."
"I know."
"I mean it. You build walls for a reason."
"I know, Dana." Simone looked up at the sky, the same stars that hung over the grove three miles away, over a man who was probably, at that exact moment, sitting under the same trees thinking his own patient, unhurried thoughts.
"I just don't know if the walls are keeping the right things out anymore. "
Dana didn't have anything clever to say to that, for once, and the silence between them, three states apart, felt almost as comfortable as the one Simone had left behind at the grove an hour earlier.
"Just don't lose yourself in it," Dana said finally. "Whatever it turns out to be."
"I won't," Simone said, and hoped, for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, that it was actually true.
She hung up and sat a while longer on the back step, tea long since cold, mapping out the shape of the next few weeks in her head the way she mapped out any case — what she knew, what she suspected, what she still needed evidence for.
Voss wanted a dirty club. The town, the ledgers, and her own two weeks of digging kept insisting there wasn't one to find.
Somewhere in that gap between what her supervisor wanted and what the evidence actually showed, she suspected, was where the real case was hiding.
She just hadn't figured out yet whose case it actually was.
She went to bed turning it over, and dreamed, again, of gold light through old trees, and told herself in the morning, again, that it didn't mean anything at all.