CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Reyes had kept his word about doing things properly, and for the better part of a week that meant long, quiet evenings in his truck parked a discreet distance from the marina construction office, watching Vance's comings and goings with the patient, unglamorous tedium Marin suspected made up most of actual police work, whatever television had led her to expect.
"This is not how I pictured detective work," she admitted, on the third night, nursing a thermos of coffee gone lukewarm an hour ago.
"Most of it's this. Sitting, watching, writing down times nobody will ever read unless it matters." Reyes didn't take his eyes off the lit office window across the lot. "The exciting parts are rare enough that you remember every single one of them for the rest of your career."
"Is that why you became a detective? For the exciting parts?"
He was quiet for a moment, considering the question with more seriousness than she'd expected.
"I became a cop because my father was one, here, for thirty years, and I liked the way people trusted him.
Not the badge — him. He knew everybody's name, everybody's kid's name, exactly which families needed a warning instead of a ticket and which ones needed the opposite.
I wanted to be that, for this town. Somebody people could actually trust to get it right.
" He glanced at her sideways. "I've been thinking, this last month, that I let this town's habit of trusting its own tidy stories make me a little too comfortable not asking harder questions. I don't love what that says about me."
"You caught it eventually. That matters."
"I caught it because a woman who runs a bookshop wouldn't let it go, even after I told her to." He said it without any bitterness at all, more like an observation he was still getting used to. "I've been meaning to properly thank you for that. Not just professionally."
"You don't have to thank me for being stubborn."
"I think I do, actually." He looked at her fully then, in the dim glow of the dashboard lights, and something passed between them that had nothing to do with Prescott Vance or thirty-year-old fraud at all.
"I think it's one of my favorite things about you, if I'm honest, and I wasn't planning on saying that out loud in a stakeout, but here we are. "
Marin felt her face warm despite the cold night air coming through the cracked window. "Here we are," she agreed, and neither of them said anything else for a while, though the silence, this time, felt entirely different than it had three nights before.
It was two days later, in the ordinary light of a Wednesday afternoon, that Tim Kessler called the shop, his voice rough over the phone in a way that suggested he hadn't slept much since his uncle's funeral, and asked if he could come by — not about the investigation, he said, but to apologize.
He arrived that evening after closing, standing in the same spot near the door where he'd stood the first time, though something in his posture had loosened, the defensive tightness gone out of his shoulders.
"I lied to you," he said, without preamble.
"Sort of. Not about the ledger — I really didn't know he'd left it here.
But I wasn't honest about why I came in that first time looking so wound up.
" He rubbed the back of his neck. "My uncle had been quietly paying down some debt I'd gotten myself into.
Medical stuff, my daughter's — it's not important, it worked out, she's fine now.
But I owed him a lot of money, and I was ashamed of it, and when he died I panicked, thinking people would find out and think I had a reason to want him gone.
Which is insane, obviously, he was helping me.
But grief makes you stupid about how things look. "
"You don't owe me an explanation."
"I think I do. Because I heard, from about six different people at Ruth's diner, that you're the one who found something real.
Something about Danny Whitfield, about the Vances.
" His jaw tightened. "My uncle spent his whole retirement chasing down the true story of this town because he genuinely believed people deserved to know it, even when it was inconvenient, even when it made powerful people uncomfortable.
If somebody killed him for that, I want them to answer for it, and I want you to know I'll do whatever I can to help.
Testify, dig through his files, whatever it takes. "
Marin thought of the ledger, of Ruth's fists on the diner counter, of Marjorie Fenn's crack in composure, of the machine Oswald had described — a sequence built to hold together only so long as nobody examined any single piece too closely.
"There's a box of his research papers at his house, isn't there," she said. "The stuff you were sorting through when he died."
"Most of it's still there. I couldn't face finishing the job." Tim looked at her steadily. "You want to go through it with me?"
"Yes," Marin said. "I think it's time."