4. Penny
PENNY
The call comes in at four-eleven in the morning, which is a special kind of hell reserved for people who haven’t slept well in seventeen years anyway.
I’m dressed and in the cruiser before the sky starts lightening. Even though I drive past the turnoff for my parents’ place, I don’t honk this time. No one’s awake to wave back.
Fog sits low over the ridge by the time I pull up, so thick that it dims the flashing lights on the other units. I passed the old feed mill on the way in. Up here, trees crowd the road on both sides.
Two county transport guards sit on the tailgate of an ambulance, blankets around their shoulders even though it’s not that cold.
EMTs check their vitals while Johnson hovers nearby with his notepad, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.
I catch his eye and he shakes his head—nobody’s hurt bad. Just rattled.
The van itself sits crooked on the gravel shoulder, back doors hanging open on their hinges, empty where crates should be. Whatever they were hauling, it’s gone now.
I crouch near the driver’s side door and study the ground.
Boot prints, at least three sets, maybe four, pressed deep into the soft shoulder where the gravel gives way to mud.
Tire tread crossing tread—overlapping tracks I can’t separate by eye.
A cut zip tie lies in the dirt a few feet off, discarded once its job was done.
“Professional,” I say, mostly to myself.
“That’s the word I’d use.” Morris’s voice comes from behind me, gravel crunching under his boots as he ambles over with his hands in his coat pockets, looking like a man who’s had exactly as much sleep as I have.
“Talked to both guards already. Say they were flagged down by a broken-down truck up the road, hazards flashing, hood up, the whole show. Two men came out of the tree line the second they stopped. Wearing masks.”
My skin prickles. “What kind of masks?”
“Devils. Red ones. Cheap latex, from what they could tell in the dark.” He rubs a hand over his face. “They were in and out with very little mess.”
I think about the reports of similar robberies in neighboring jurisdictions.
“Sound familiar?” Morris asks, like he’s reading my mind, which after a year working under the man, he probably is.
“Sounds like somebody who’s done this before.” I straighten up, brush gravel off my knee. “You get a description on the vehicles?”
“Truck and something bigger. No plates anybody caught, obviously.” He shakes his head. “CSI’s rolling in from Knoxville. Should be here any minute.”
I narrow my eyes, eyeing the empty van. “Any idea what they were hauling? Got an inventory?” If they knew what was inside, the inventory might tell us why they wanted it.
“Guns,” Morris whispers, making my eyes snap to his. “Doesn’t look like somebody just trying to destroy evidence. Might as well have been bars of gold in the back of that truck for the combined street value of what they took.”
I take a deep breath. There are a few people who deal in guns in this county and neighboring ones. But a certain MC will always be my first thought.
CSI arrives twenty minutes later in a white van with a seal on the side, two techs in windbreakers unloading kits and setting up floodlights that turn the gravel shoulder stark white.
I stand off to the side while they work the scene methodically—every square foot photographed, flagged, catalogued before anybody’s allowed to touch it.
One of the techs, a woman with her hair scraped back tighter than mine, kneels near the spot where a struggle happened, the mud all churned up from boots and knees.
She’s got a flashlight in one hand and a pair of tweezers in the other, moving in that slow grid pattern they teach in training, sweeping the beam an inch at a time.
She stops. Goes still.
“Chief,” she calls out. “Got something.”
Morris ambles over, and I follow. The tech holds up the tweezers, something small and metallic caught in the pincers, catching the floodlight and throwing it back.
A ring. An engagement ring, by the look of it.
Small stone, simple band, the kind a kid buys when he’s scraped together everything he has.
The hair on the back of my neck stands straight up.
“Must’ve lost it in the scuffle,” the tech says, dropping it into a small plastic bag, sealing it, writing something on the label in neat block letters. “Wasn’t buried deep.”
Morris takes the bag, turns it over once, holds it up to the light like he’s appraising it. “Somebody’s gonna be missing this.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t, not right away, because my mouth’s gone dry and I’m remembering something I haven’t let myself think about in years—seventeen years back, to a gravel parking lot outside a clubhouse, sodium lights buzzing overhead, my car already packed with everything I owned.
Evan standing there with his hand out.
Some details are blurred. It was a small box, snapped open too fast, like he’d practiced pulling it out of his pocket a hundred times and still fumbled the reveal.
I remember the way the parking lot light hit the stone and made it flash once before I looked away because I already knew I couldn’t say yes.
I remember him saying my name like a question.
I remember driving away with the radio too loud so I wouldn’t have to hear myself crying.
I never saw it again.
I take a step closer to Morris, close enough to see the ring properly through the plastic.
No engraving anywhere on the band, not that I can tell.
The metal’s not shiny the way new jewelry is—it’s dull like it’s been handled.
Turned over between fingers. Carried somewhere close for longer than a week or a month.
But that’s insane. That’s a leap built on nothing but a bad night’s sleep and a coincidence of shape—small stone, simple band, the exact kind of ring half the jewelry stores between here and Knoxville have been selling to broke eighteen-year-olds since before I was born.
There’s no name on it. No date. Nothing that ties it to anyone specific, and I know better than most people how many rings in this world look exactly alike.
“You alright?” Morris asks, studying me and waiting for a better answer.
“Fine.” I make myself look away from the bag. “Just cold.”
He hands it off to the tech, who logs it into evidence with the rest—photographs, tags, chain of custody paperwork that’ll follow this ring wherever it goes next, filed under a case number instead of a name.
Just another piece of scattered evidence from a robbery nobody’s going to solve fast, if they solve it at all.
I should let it go. A common design and a seventeen-year-old memory aren’t enough to connect Evan to a robbery.
But I keep standing there long after the tech moves on to the next grid square, staring at the spot in the mud where the ring came from, and I can’t shake the feeling crawling up my spine.
It’s the same instinct that told me twelve pages on Erik Halvorsen’s murder didn’t add up to a robbery gone wrong.
Whoever hit that van knew what they wanted. That much I can put in a report.
I don’t say any of that to Morris. I don’t say it to Johnson, either, when he wanders over to ask if I want coffee from the gas station up the road.
I just nod and tell him black, no sugar, and watch the fog start to burn off the ridge while somewhere behind me, that little bagged ring gets boxed up with the rest of tonight’s evidence and driven away to a shelf where I know I could ask to see it again.
But I’m not sure I can forget seeing it.