Chapter 38 #3
“Sure, my interest has to do with my father,” she said.
“And my mother. That’s true, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
And I wouldn’t be doing the work I’ve done if I hadn’t grown up knowing that something was wrong.
” She paused. “But it started as a genuine need to bring justice to the family of a missing woman. To get closure for her. The evidence we found in the annex is not my father’s case.
It’s years of documented targets, authorized by Grant’s family going back to the eighties, with my father and mother entries among hundreds.
The annex records are not about me. They’re about Maple Ridge and what has been done to it. ”
Solis looked at her.
“Can you say that on the stand?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Then we’re fine,” he said.
He closed the laptop.
“I’m issuing a preservation order on the county recorder’s filing as of now,” he said, standing.
“Grant can’t withdraw it. Which means the fabricated transfers are now part of the public record, and we can demonstrate they’re fabricated, which makes them evidence of obstruction rather than exculpatory material.
” He looked at me. “He handed us something by filing that this morning.”
I nodded.
“My team will be in Maple Ridge by four,” Solis said. “We’ll move on Grant tonight.” He looked between us. “Get some rest if you can.”
He nodded once, picked up his jacket, and left with Evan the way he’d arrived, efficiently and without ceremony, taking the entire weight of the federal case-building with him.
The house was quiet after his car pulled away.
Outside, the pines were still in the morning light. The sky over the ridge was clear and pale and very large.
River picked up her jacket.
“I’ll be an hour,” she said. “Maybe two.”
I didn’t ask where she was going. I knew. She’d made a promise to a dying man in a cabin in the dark, and River Bennett was not the kind of person who let those types of things lapse.
“Take Atlas,” I said.
She looked at me.
“Cole’s in custody,” I said, “but until Solis’s team is fully in place, I don’t know if Grant has anyone else mobile. It’s not a risk worth taking.”
She held my gaze for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”
I stood at the window and watched them go.
River’s shoulders were set the way they got when she was carrying something difficult and had made her peace with carrying it.
I thought about what she was walking into.
Jordyn Vale in protective custody, who had been embedded in my department and who had not, by any accounting I could do, known the full shape of what her brother was into.
Who had cooperated fully once she was cornered.
Who was about to be told by a woman she’d barely met that her brother was dead and that his last words had been about her.
No version of that conversation was easy. River knew that, but she was going anyway.
I turned back to the kitchen. The legal pad was still on the table with its four pages of what we could prove, and underneath all of it, written in the margin at some point between five and six in the morning without my fully registering it was, Sean kept his word.
I looked at it for a moment. Then I went to make more coffee, because there was still a long day ahead, and I intended to be standing at the end of it.
River came back an hour and forty minutes later, walking through the door and setting her jacket down. She stood in the kitchen for a moment with the particular stillness of someone who had just done something hard and was letting the act settle.
“How was she?” I asked.
“Broken,” River said. “The way people are when the thing they were most afraid of turns out to be true.” She paused. “She’d already guessed, of course. Some part of her had known when he didn’t check in after last night. She just needed someone to say it out loud.”
“Did his message help at all?” I knew it was stupid the minute I said it, but it was already out.
River was quiet for a moment. “I think it will,” she said. “Just not today. Knowing he said it, that he knew it was his fault and said so before the end, that’s something she can hold on to when the anger comes.” She looked at me. “And the anger will come.”
“I know,” I said.
She came and stood beside me at the window. The afternoon was building toward the hour when Solis’s team would arrive, and the town would start to understand that something had shifted.
“My father’s name is in a public record again,” she said. “As a corrupt official. By tonight, it’ll be in the Gazette’s digital edition.”
“For maybe forty-eight hours,” I said. “Until Solis’s team demonstrates that it’s fabricated and that fabricating it was obstruction. The retraction will run the same week as the indictments.”
“I know,” she said. “I know that’s true.” She paused. “It still costs something, having his name in that story again.”
“Yes,” I said. “It does.”
I didn’t try to take anything away from her. She didn’t want that, and it wouldn’t have been honest.
She turned from the window.
“Forty-eight hours,” she said.
“Give or take,” I said.
She nodded once.
Somewhere across town, Evan Narnachek was in an AG safe house at the beginning of what would be a long road.
I didn’t know how that went for people. River would be part of it, every Thursday at two once he was settled, doing the work she’d been trained to do and had been doing at a distance for a long time.
We hadn’t reached our after yet.
But it was close enough that I could see the shape of it from here.