Chapter 37 #2
“Right now it’s my job to find out whether you’re a witness or a weapon,” Eleanor added, still calm.
“So let’s keep going.”
Katie’s mouth pressed into a line.
Eleanor glanced back at the report.
“You suggested they start at the Riverbend development,” she said. “Why?”
“Because he wouldn’t shut up about it,” Katie said. “How proud he was. How much money it made. It was going to put him on the map. He said it was the project that changed everything.”
“Did he ever mention Caroline’s name in connection with Riverbend?”
“No.”
“Did he ever say, ‘That’s where I buried her’?”
Katie opened her mouth.
Closed it.
“No,” she admitted. “But he said he buried her at ‘a site.’ And then he couldn’t stop talking about that one.”
“And in a fight, a man wanted to scare you,” Eleanor said. “So he reached for the most painful thing he could. The missing woman everyone in this county knows about.”
“Then why did he say buried?” Katie shot back. “Why not ‘left her’ or ‘hurt her’? Why buried?”
Eleanor paused.
“That’s a fair question,” she said. “So I’ll give you one back: in eight months, how many times did he say things he didn’t mean?”
Katie’s throat worked.
“Plenty,” she said.
“How many times did he scare you and then tell you you were overreacting?”
Katie looked down.
“Enough.”
Eleanor leaned in slightly.
“And how many of those times did you call the sheriff’s office?”
Silence.
Katie’s hand tightened around the edge of her chair.
“I get it,” Eleanor said more gently. “You’re angry. You have every right to be. But anger and truth are not the same thing. The state is about to send heavy equipment into projects that feed half this county based on a year-old argument in a bad relationship.”
Katie looked up sharply.
“So you think I’m lying.”
“I think,” Eleanor said, “you’re hurt. And that hurt is real. I also think you waited until the cameras showed up to decide this mattered.”
“I was scared,” Katie snapped.
“Of him?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re less scared now that the entire internet is watching?” Eleanor asked quietly.
Katie hesitated.
Eleanor saw it. So did Scout.
“Ms. Martin,” Eleanor said, tone shifting to something cooler, more formal, “I need you to understand something. If you take that stand with nothing more than ‘he said he buried her,’ and the jury believes you were motivated by anything other than truth—anger, revenge, a desire to be part of the story—you don’t hurt David Mercer. You help him.”
Katie flinched.
Eleanor held her gaze.
“So I’m going to ask you again: is there anything else? Any detail you haven’t told Burke’s people? A date. A time. A name. A text. A witness who heard the same thing. Anything that turns this from an ugly threat into something the law can actually use.”
Katie’s eyes shone, but she blinked the brightness away before it could spill.
“No,” she said. “That’s all there is.”
Eleanor sat back.
“All right.”
Katie pushed away from the table.
“So that’s it?” she demanded. “You’re going to rip me apart and then go back to defending him?”
Eleanor’s voice stayed level.
“I’m going to defend my client with everything I have,” she said. “And I’m going to assume the state will do the same. That includes you. If you’re going to stand up in front of twelve people and tell that story, you need to be very sure you can live with the questions that come after.”
Katie stared at her, breathing hard.
Scout rose slowly.
“Ms. Martin,” he said, “we can take you back to your car.”
Katie dragged her gaze away from Eleanor.
“You’re really going to stand next to him after that?” she asked. “After everything that’s come out?”
Eleanor answered before Scout could.
“I’m going to stand next to him until the evidence tells me not to,” she said. “Right now, what I have is a threat made in a bad argument and a lot of understandable anger. I don’t have proof.”
Katie’s mouth trembled.
“Maybe proof is under your precious Riverbend,” she said.
“Then we’ll find it,” Eleanor said. “And if we do, we’ll have a very different conversation.”
For a heartbeat, they looked at each other—two women with entirely different versions of the same man in their heads.
Then Katie turned and walked out.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Scout exhaled, long and low.
“You were hard on her,” he said.
Eleanor didn’t look away from the closed door.
“I was exactly as hard as the state will be soft,” she said. “If they decide she’s their star witness, they’ll sand down every rough edge and sell that story like gospel.”
Scout watched her a moment.
“You believe her?” he asked.
Eleanor’s fingers tightened slightly on her pen.
“I believe,” she said slowly, “that David Mercer is capable of saying that to hurt someone. I don’t know if I believe it means what she thinks it means.”
Scout nodded once.
“And if Burke starts digging Riverbend?”
Eleanor finally looked at him.
“Then,” she said, “we stop arguing about hypotheticals and start dealing with whatever the ground gives us.”
Something flickered at the edge of her memory—
a detail from Mercer’s file she hadn’t paid much attention to at the time.
A brief gap in the Riverbend construction timeline.
Two weeks where work had stopped completely. There was a line item for additional fill dirt. Far more than the site plans called for.
No weather reports to justify it. No permit delays. No recorded incident.
She’d assumed it was a clerical oversight.
Now she wasn’t so sure.
She closed the file gently, as if that might keep everything inside from spilling onto the town.
“It always comes back to the evidence, Deputy,” she added. “Not the stories people tell when they’re mad.”
Scout’s mouth tipped in a grim half-smile.
For a second, Eleanor almost smiled back.
“Story of my life,” she said.
“Now go tell your boss I’m not letting him railroad my client on the strength of one angry ex and a bunch of strangers with microphones.”