CHAPTER NINETEEN
The video lasted nine seconds.
Connor watched it for the fourth time with the engine running and both hands locked around his phone.
The image had been recorded from somewhere high beneath the roof of Walton Morimer’s rear porch.
Connor recognized the wicker chairs, the folded newspaper, and the glass of lemonade on the side table.
The angle caught him in profile as he leaned forward and placed a thick envelope on the table between them.
His own voice came through clearly.
“There’s six thousand dollars here.”
Morimer’s hand moved toward the envelope.
The video ended.
No threat followed. No written demand. Only the clip and the unknown number that had sent it.
Connor opened the message details again.
The number was masked through an internet service.
Calling it produced a recorded notice that the line could not accept incoming calls.
A trace request might lead somewhere once the phone company and provider responded, but Morimer knew how slowly those wheels turned.
Morimer had made no attempt to hide the message’s origin. The recording existed to prove that he could destroy Connor’s reputation whenever he chose.
Connor set the phone on the passenger seat and gripped the steering wheel. Anger pressed against his ribs with each breath. Morimer had recorded him inside the estate, kept the video, and waited until the right moment to reveal it.
Six thousand dollars handed to the most powerful criminal in Harlan County.
The clip stopped before Morimer explained what the money bought. It did not show Morimer’s men locating Marlene Schmidt or Connor’s desperation to find Victor’s killer. Anyone seeing those nine seconds could draw the conclusion Morimer wanted.
A sheriff paying a crime boss.
This had not been an authorized informant payment. Morimer was the target of an active federal investigation, and Connor had handed him personal cash without reporting the contact.
The county attorney would ask why Connor had entered Morimer’s property without reporting it.
The FBI would ask why cash changed hands.
Selena’s name might be dragged into the inquiry because she knew what he had done and concealed it.
Morimer would not need to prove corruption.
He only needed to make the explanation sound less believable than the image.
Connor shifted into drive.
The SUV pulled from the dark shoulder and accelerated along the county road. Trees crowded both sides, their upper branches moving in the wind. Wet leaves flashed beneath the headlights and disappeared beneath the tires.
The message had arrived as he left the station.
Morimer knew where he had been. Maybe someone had watched the parking lot. Maybe the timing was coincidence. Neither possibility improved Connor’s mood.
He took the turn toward the Morimer estate without slowing.
The road climbed through wooded land until stone pillars appeared ahead. Black iron gates blocked the private drive. Lamps mounted on the pillars cast pale circles over two men in dark jackets.
Connor stopped close enough that the headlights washed across them.
One guard stepped forward, palm raised. The second remained beside the gatehouse with a radio clipped near his shoulder.
Connor got out.
Cold wind moved across the road. He left the SUV door open behind him.
“I want to see him. Now.”
The guard nearest him kept both hands visible. “Hey, calm down, Sheriff.”
“I want to see Morimer.”
“It’s late.”
“I can read a clock.”
The second guard lifted the radio. “Give me a minute.”
Connor moved closer to the gate. Beyond it, the private drive curved uphill through trees. No part of the house could be seen from the road. Morimer had built distance into everything he owned.
The first guard shifted to block Connor’s path.
“Don’t make this difficult.”
“I’m not the one making it difficult.”
The radio crackled. The second guard turned away and spoke too quietly for Connor to hear. After several seconds, the man faced him again.
“He says it’s too late. If you come back tomorrow, he’ll make time.”
Connor almost laughed.
Morimer wanted him standing in the road, angry and powerless, while two hired men relayed instructions through a locked gate. Another reminder of who controlled access.
Connor took the phone from his pocket and held up the frozen image of the envelope on Morimer’s table.
“Tell him I got his message.”
Neither guard reacted.
“It won’t work on me,” Connor continued. “He doesn’t own me.”
The man beside the gatehouse gave a small smile.
“He owns everyone, Sheriff.”
Connor stared at him.
The guard did not move. Neither did the man in front of the gate.
Punching one of them would give Morimer another weapon. Driving through the gate would end Connor’s career before sunrise. Morimer had chosen the location because every response available to Connor was worse than leaving.
He returned to the SUV.
The first guard called after him. “I’ll tell him you stopped by.”
Connor slammed the door and reversed hard enough to scatter wet leaves across the road.
The gate remained closed in the mirror.
He drove downhill with the phone resting beside him. The anger had not eased, but it had changed shape. Morimer would not send the recording without a purpose. A request would follow. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not for weeks.
That uncertainty was part of the pressure.
Connor’s phone rang through the vehicle speakers.
The sheriff’s department appeared on the dashboard.
He answered. “What is it?”
The night dispatcher came through the speakers. “Sheriff, the circuit judge signed the HearthSpace warrant. The company confirmed receipt about twenty minutes ago.”
“Did they send the records?”
“Not yet. Their compliance team says they’re processing the request.”
Connor checked the road ahead.
Sleep would not come while Morimer’s video remained on his phone. Sitting alone in the house would only give the message more space.
“Call me if anything comes through.”
“You got it.”
Connor reached the next junction.
Home lay to the left.
He turned right toward Elmsview.
*
The briefing room was colder at night.
Connor spent the next several hours working through reports while the HearthSpace request remained in processing. He reviewed the barn search, checked outstanding interviews, and read the same sections twice without absorbing them.
At 4:47, the secure system sounded an alert.
HearthSpace had completed the production.
Connor opened the download across two screens. It contained account tables, group directories, exported posts, direct-message indexes, and a stack of legal notices explaining what the company had not retained.
Karen Sloane, Ruth Keller, and Linda Mercer watched from their photographs above the table.
Connor opened another spreadsheet. Part of him knew he should call Selena.
Wake her up and let her know what was there.
But he wanted to go over it himself. He wanted to do something for the victims. It was his county, and always relying on Selena and the FBI was beginning to call his own sense of being a sheriff into question.
Deep down, he knew it was to assuage his guilt over Morimer.
If he made the breakthrough, perhaps he would be worthy of wearing the badge again. Worthy of not making rash mistakes.
Thousands of usernames filled the rows.
Most were meaningless combinations of words and numbers.
RiverGlass. MountainMoth27. QuietRoom. JuniperBlue.
Some accounts had public biographies. Most did not.
Because HearthSpace no longer retained historical source IP addresses, it could not match the victims’ connections directly to usernames.
Under HearthSpace’s retention policy, source IP data was discarded after twenty-four hours.
By the time Kelly’s preservation request arrived, the relevant records had already been overwritten.
The order instead required the company to identify accounts active during the exact connection timestamps supplied by the regional provider and to produce records from closed communities shared by multiple candidate accounts.
The correlation still returned thousands of usernames, many registered through masked email services.
The internet provider’s logs showed when the victims’ homes connected to HearthSpace.
HearthSpace could not tell him which usernames had made those connections.
Connor searched the three women’s names. No results.
He searched their email addresses. Nothing.
The briefing-room door opened.
Cheryl entered carrying a small plate covered with plastic wrap and a fork tucked beneath it.
“I thought I’d bring you some fuel.”
Connor leaned back from the screens. “What is it?”
“Apple pie.”
She placed it beside the keyboard.
"It was baked yesterday, and it's been in the refrigerator since, but it should still be nice."
“Thanks.” Connor lifted the plastic. Cinnamon and cooked apple rose from the slice. “Your pies always are, Cheryl.”
She remained in the doorway, one shoulder resting against the frame.
“You know, they always told me the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but no matter how hard I try...”
The sentence faded with a small smile.
Connor watched her for a moment.
Curled hair fell around her shoulders. Deep red lipstick suited the dark blouse beneath her cardigan. The fitted skirt and soft fabric outlined a figure she made no attempt to hide.
It would be easy.
Cheryl had a hard edge when the station needed one, but loyalty sat beneath it.
She remembered birthdays, covered shifts without complaint, and carried casseroles to families who had lost someone.
She was attractive, interested, and standing close enough that Connor could end the loneliness with one careless decision.
The house would no longer be silent when he returned.
An empty bed would become a shared one. There would be someone to hear what the day had done to him, someone to tell about the small victories and the fears he kept behind his badge.
Cheryl wanted to be with him.
Would that solve it?
Connor already knew the answer.
Cheryl deserved someone who loved her for herself, not a man trying to fill a wound that had remained open since Selena left. Wanting comfort was not the same as wanting the person offering it.
He lowered the plastic wrap over the pie.
“Cheryl...”
She crossed the room before he found the rest.
One hand settled on his shoulder.
Her perfume reached him, light and sweet, like a breeze on an autumn day. Cheryl rubbed his shoulder once, the touch brief and gentle.
“I know, Connor,” she said. “I know.”
Then she stepped away.
A smile remained as she left the room, but it held less hope than before.
Connor listened to her footsteps move down the corridor.
Did she know?
Maybe she understood more than he had said.
Maybe everyone in the station had seen the pain he carried since the marriage ended.
It had left him sitting on the night shift after working all day, trying to hold the county together one thread at a time because going home offered nothing he wanted to find.
The computer waited.
Connor picked up the fork and ate a piece of pie while opening the next directory.
The apples were soft, the crust still crisp at the edges. Cheryl had warmed it slightly before bringing it in. That small kindness made him feel worse.
A folder labeled COMMUNITIES contained more than two hundred closed groups covered by the order. Some dealt with addiction, grief, marriage, workplace complaints, and medical conditions. Others used vague titles that revealed nothing.
He opened the largest export.
Posts appeared in chronological order, each attached to a username and timestamp. There were thousands. Some were a sentence long. Others filled pages. The conversations covered affairs, abuse, resentment, money, fear, and private fantasies people would never attach to their legal names.
Connor searched for Elmsview.
Four results appeared; none tied to the victims.
Harlan produced thirty-seven, most referring to the county or places outside Kentucky.
He tried Eagleton, Loyall, school names, employer names, street names, and phrases from the victim interviews. Each search returned either nothing or too many irrelevant results.
The warrant production had given him access to the words.
It had not given him a reliable way to identify who had written them.
Connor opened the legal notice again.
HearthSpace retained account-activity timestamps longer than source IP addresses. The latter had already been overwritten, leaving Connor with correlation rather than identification.
He pushed back from the desk.
“How the hell am I going to figure out which ones belong to the victims?”
The murder board offered no answer.
Karen’s phone had not been recovered, and the smashed word processor contained no useful account data.
Ruth’s phone was missing as well; the laptop from her study was still being examined.
Linda’s phone had not been found with the body, and Phil did not know her passwords.
Perhaps Selena or Kelly would see a route Connor had missed.
The thought irritated him.
Selena understood databases, warrants, and digital records better than he did.
Kelly probably did, too. Connor had spent his career reading people in rooms, tracing local grudges, and noticing when a familiar story changed by one detail.
Thousands of anonymous posts turned those instincts into guesswork.
He checked his watch.
6:53.
Selena and Kelly would be back soon. Dana could help organize the files. Perhaps he had been foolish thinking he could do this himself.