Chapter 5 #2
"They've made two offers on our storage lot in the past year.
Both lowball, both rejected. Knox handled it, didn't think much of it at the time — companies make bad offers on property all the time.
" He exhaled slowly. "This changes things.
If Voss needs us to look dirty to force a sale or a raid that spooks us into selling—"
"Then this was never really about the club at all," Simone finished. "It's about the land underneath it."
"That's almost worse."
"It's definitely more useful. Motive's the thing juries and oversight boards actually care about. 'Corrupt captain manufactures evidence to benefit family member's real estate deal' is a much better story than 'corrupt captain doesn't like bikers.'"
Elliot almost smiled despite everything. "You say that like a woman who's already building the case in her head."
"I am. I've been building it since I found the filing twenty minutes ago.
" She stood, energy replacing the exhaustion of an hour earlier, the particular electric focus she got when a case finally had a shape she could work with.
"I need everything the club has — every offer Ridgeline's made, every conversation, every piece of paper Knox has filed away.
If we're doing this, we're doing it thoroughly. "
"You'll have all of it by morning."
"Tonight would be better."
"Tonight it is." He was already reaching for his phone, texting Knox, the unhurried patience she'd come to associate with him replaced by something quicker, sharper, a man who'd apparently been waiting a long time for a fight he could actually finish.
"Welcome to the other side of the investigation, Detective. "
"Feels different from this side."
"Better or worse?"
Simone considered it, watching him work, watching a club mobilize itself around her in real time because a woman with a badge had finally been believed instead of doubted.
"Better," she said. "Considerably."
She stayed at the clubhouse longer than she'd planned that night, sitting at the same folding table she'd used for weeks to audit the club's records, except now Knox and Ivy and half a dozen others were gathered around it with her instead of watching from a wary distance, all of them building the same case together for the first time.
"I've got every offer letter Ridgeline sent," Knox said, sliding a folder across to her. "Every rejection we sent back. Dates, signatures, all of it."
"I've got a contact at the state bar who owes me a favor," Ivy added, "in case we need to move this above Voss's head fast, before he has time to bury anything."
Simone looked around the table — bikers and a detective, working the same problem from the same side for the first time since she'd arrived in Clover Ridge — and felt something unclench in her chest that had been wound tight since the day she'd read her own exile disguised as a transfer memo.
"Thank you," she said, to the room in general, meaning it more than the words could really carry. "All of you."
"Don't thank us yet," Knox said. "We haven't won anything."
"No," Simone agreed, looking at Elliot across the table, steady and patient and already three moves ahead the way he always seemed to be. "But for the first time since I got here, I actually think we might."
It was nearly midnight by the time the folders were organized into something resembling an actual case file, and the clubhouse had mostly emptied out, Knox and Ivy heading home with assignments for the morning, the others drifting off in twos and threes with the easy familiarity of people who'd been doing this — showing up for each other, at odd hours, for causes bigger than any one of them — for a very long time.
Elliot walked her out to her car, the parking lot quiet except for the cicadas starting up their spring chorus in the dark.
"You did good work today," he said. "Finding that connection. Most people would've just been angry and gone home."
"I was angry and I didn't go home. Those aren't mutually exclusive."
"No," he agreed, something warm in his voice despite the exhaustion of the day. "They really aren't."
She leaned against her car, not quite ready to get in yet, the adrenaline of the evening slowly draining out and leaving something rawer underneath.
"I've never had backup like this," she admitted. "Not really. Not people who just — showed up. Without me having to convince them first."
"Get used to it," Elliot said. "It's kind of our whole thing."
"I noticed." She looked up at him, close enough now that the careful distance they'd maintained for weeks felt almost theoretical. "Elliot—"
"I know," he said, gentle, before she could finish. "Not yet. Not while this is still open."
"Not yet," she agreed, and hated, just a little, how much she meant it, and how much she was already looking forward to the day that qualifier finally stopped applying.
She drove home that night with the case laid out clean in her head, motive and opportunity and a paper trail that was going to end Captain Voss's career the honest way, and underneath all of it, quiet and patient and steadily growing, the certainty that whatever came after this case closed, she wasn't going to be facing it alone.
She fell asleep faster than she had in weeks, for once not thinking about ledgers or grove sunsets, but about the exact, specific relief of finally having people in her corner who meant it.