Chapter 31
Thirty-One
JACE
The prison facility sat forty minutes inland from the coast, a low complex of concrete and chain-link that would have been unremarkable set against any landscape in the world.
I’d been in prisons on four continents, including ones where the word facility was generous.
This one registered as orderly and maintained, and nothing more.
The parking lot was freshly striped. The entry officer greeted us with the professional neutrality of someone who had learned to be neither hostile nor friendly, because neither served any particular purpose in his job.
We passed through security in the order the officer directed.
Phones in the lockers. Wallets stripped of anything with metal in them.
Belts removed and folded. I moved through it without thinking, the process familiar enough to be automatic.
Rios had his credentials already out, the paperwork from the racketeering inquiry that had gotten us access, and he handled the administrative piece while I waited and watched Layla.
She’d come prepared. No jewelry, flat shoes, nothing on her that would slow her at the checkpoint.
The knife sheaths she didn’t know I knew she normally wore weren’t on her.
She’d thought through what she could and couldn’t bring in, made her decisions, and hadn’t mentioned any of it. Merely showed up ready.
The duty officer handed back Rios’s credentials, made a note in the log, and buzzed the first gate open.
The sound of it was the same everywhere.
That electronic clunk of a lock releasing, followed by the weight of a door built to contain rather than welcome.
We walked through, and it shut behind us before the second gate opened.
Then the third. The institution made sure nothing moved faster than it had decided things should move, and there was no arguing with that logic from inside it.
The room they put us in was small and plain.
A table bolted to the floor, four aluminum chairs, a fluorescent light overhead that hummed at a frequency slightly below the threshold of conscious irritation.
No window. The kind of room that existed entirely for function and had made its peace with that a long time ago.
Private, though, which I’d hoped for and hadn’t been certain of.
Attorney-client rooms weren’t always available, and Rios had called in a favor to get us one.
No other visitors nearby, no shared space, no one who could pick up fragments of conversation.
When I found the camera in the upper corner, the small red eye blinking at a steady interval, I adjusted my appreciation of the privacy accordingly. We had the form of it. We didn’t have the substance.
Layla took the chair at the far end of the table, set her hands flat on the surface, and looked at the door. Rios took the chair to my left. I sat facing the door, settling in and letting the waiting be what it was.
Rios drummed two fingers on the table once and stopped. The habit of a man containing impatience he wasn’t going to show. “He didn’t know we were coming,” he said. “They told him the chief of police from Sutter’s Ferry wanted to meet. That’s all.”
“That’s enough to have him ready for something,” I said.
“He’s been ready for something for nine months.” Rios looked at the door. “Let’s see what he does with us specifically.”
Layla said nothing. Her eyes were fixed on the door with the complete, unhurried attention of someone who understood that observation was work, and she was doing it.
The door opened, and the guard brought Miles through.
He’d been a few years ahead of us growing up, and I hadn’t seen much of him once I joined the Navy.
Hadn’t been home to. But I’d seen the campaign photographs.
The man who’d worked a room with the practiced ease of someone who’d honed his ability to make people feel like they were the most important person in it.
Trim, yacht-club fit, the kind of polish that required maintenance.
Nine months had taken most of that maintenance away.
He was broader across the shoulders than the photographs suggested, the muscle that came from having time and facilities and not much else to do.
His forearms were thick below the rolled sleeves of the prison-issue shirt.
But the middle had gone soft on institutional food and the kind of stress that sat in the body rather than moving through it.
The lines around his mouth had set hard, and his eyes had a wary quality that definitely didn’t expect good news.
When his eyes landed on Rios, Miles stopped in the middle of the room, his face cycling through some recalculation before he managed to pull it back to neutral. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Have a seat, Miles,” Rios invited.
Miles stood there for another beat, working it through. Curiosity won, and he pulled out the chair across from me and sat. His eyes moved to me, to Layla at the far end of the table, and back to Rios. “What do you want? Where’s Carson?”
“Dead,” I said.
The flatness in his eyes cracked open, just for a moment, to reveal something involuntary and unguarded somewhere below the level of the defenses he’d spent nine months building.
He hadn’t known. I watched the information hit him, the implications of it unpacking in real time, before he shut the door back down.
Apparently the prison was just far enough from Hatterwick that it either hadn’t made whatever news was broadcast here, or it had been a footnote that Miles hadn’t seen.
“Executed,” I added. “By a sniper at the end of the summer.”
Miles sat very still for a moment.
“I’m the new chief,” Rios said.
“You?” The word carried the weight of our island’s opinion of Rios Carrera and, underneath it, something that might have been the beginning of a reassessment.
“Yeah. Surprised me too when the council asked.” Rios kept his voice easy. “Turns out helping expose that Carson was dirty goes a long way toward convincing people you can be trusted with something.”
Something settled in Miles’s jaw and then released. “Good,” he said. “That fucker needed to be taken down a long time ago.”
His gaze moved to me and then to Layla at the end of the table, where it lingered longer than I was comfortable with.
I didn’t have a clean read on why. Because she was a stranger?
Because she was beautiful? Or because she focused on him with the full weight of her attention, and he’d always been a man susceptible to that kind of focus?
Maybe some of all three.
I had to resist the urge to snap at him to take his eyes off her.
“Hollingsworth.” His focus came back to me. “Last I heard, you were in the Navy.”
“Still am.”
“And you’re here… why?”
“Consider me a concerned citizen.” Wasn’t like I’d be telling him the details of my assignment in the region.
Miles’s gaze returned to Layla. “And who are you?”
She let the question sit for a moment, the way she let most things sit before she answered them. “Someone who hopes to get your sister, and others like her, some justice.”
Miles studied her for another beat, some deep emotion burning in his eyes that he didn’t allow to reach his face. The flatness came back down like a shade being drawn. “Good luck with that.”
Rios leaned forward slightly. “Here’s where we are: We know there’s a broader trafficking operation that’s been running on and around Hatterwick for at least as long as Gwen’s been missing, probably considerably longer.
We know you were blackmailed into laundering money for parties we haven’t yet identified.
We’re trying to establish whether those two things are connected, because given what happened to your sister, we believe they are. ”
Miles’s eyes hardened. “Given what happened to my sister, you’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to say one word to anyone about any of that.
She already paid with her life because I wouldn’t cooperate with these people.
I’m not putting my wife and children at risk because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. ”
“We’re not asking about that,” Rios said.
“What the hell are you asking?”
“We’re here to talk to you as the former mayor of Sutter’s Ferry.”
Miles frowned. I could see him working through the angle, trying to figure out where this was going.
“Carson was dirty,” Rios continued. “The State Bureau of Investigation has been auditing the department since his death, working to determine the extent of the rot. I want to know whether you noticed anything… untoward, in your position as the mayor. Anything we ought to take a closer look at. Because given how many years Carson was on the take, I expect we’re gonna have a landslide of cases to re-investigate, and you’re aware of the city’s budget.
That’s going to take time and manpower we don’t have.
We’ll have to prioritize cases. I want to know if there’s anything you’d move to the head of the line. ”
“Why not just ask Chelsea? She’s been in there for months now.”
“I have. She’s as overwhelmed with what she inherited as I am.” Rios spread his hands. “I’m asking everyone who might have insight.”
“I don’t know what you think I might know,” Miles said.
And then they went around.
Rios worked it with the patience of a man who’d understood that patience was the only lever available.
I came in from different angles when I saw an opening, searching for the flicker that meant we’d gotten close to something real.
Miles was genuinely good, not merely stubborn.
He’d had nine months to think about what he would and wouldn’t say if someone ever came asking, and he’d used that time.
He deflected without appearing to deflect.
He answered questions without giving information.
He gave us the surface of a cooperative interview and held everything below it with both hands.
Layla didn’t say a word.
She sat at the end of the table, those dark eyes on Miles.
Not in an obvious way, not in a way that Miles could have pointed at and objected to.
Only the steady, unhurried attention of someone doing work that required observation.
Miles’s gaze traveled to her several times during the conversation.
Each time she met it without expression, and each time he was the one who looked away first.
I couldn’t tell what she was taking in. I trusted that she was taking in something because I could sense the tension in her, vibrating at a frequency I doubted anyone else could see.
If Koa had been here, he’d have been pressed up against her.
I resisted the urge to do the same myself.
Now was not the time, and this was not the place.
When the guard knocked to signal five minutes remaining, I leaned forward and let the professional patience go for a moment.
“Miles.” I kept my voice quiet. “Don’t you want to do something to make up for what happened to Gwen?”
The flatness broke.
Just for a moment. A crack in the wall he’d spent years building, and in that crack I saw what was underneath—the grief, the guilt, the college kid who’d stood in front of his family’s marina and told someone to go to hell, then spent the rest of his life living with the cost of being right about his refusal and still being wrong about what would happen.
His gaze moved across all three of us, settling on Layla at the end of the table one more time, something in it that I still couldn’t fully read.
“I’d do anything to undo all of it.” His voice had dropped to something that wasn’t the careful neutral of the past forty minutes. “Anything in the world. But I’m not willing to risk anyone else in my family to do it. So I’ll live with my guilt.”
He shoved back from the table and stood. “Guard. Take me back to my cell.”
He shuffled out. The door closed. The camera in the corner kept its steady blink.
I sat in the silence for a moment and let the full weight of leaving with nothing settle on me.
Forty minutes of careful, patient work, and Miles Busby had given us exactly what he’d decided to give us when he walked through the door, which was nothing actionable, and he’d done it with the competence of a man who’d had a long time to prepare.
Rios stood first. Layla stood. We processed back through the gates in silence, gate by gate, the doors opening and closing around us. We retrieved our things from the lockers and walked out into the flat gray of a December afternoon that had nothing to offer.