Chapter 35
Reed
For the record, I wanted to kick the door in.
You know, just for style.
I said so in the truck, and Bram looked at me the same way he did when I was six and proposed we test whether the hay elevator could throw a kid into the pond. (It can, by the way.)
“We knock,” he said.
So here we are a little after ten at night, parked across from the Creekside Inn with the engine ticking. Nobody talks. Bram’s in full police uniform, hat on the dash, a manila folder squared on his knee. He’s been on-duty quiet the whole drive.
“All right, boys. Let’s do this,” he finally says, and we climb out.
Pearl Hutchins, who has run the Creekside since before I was born, is behind the desk when we come in, not looking remotely surprised to see us.
“Evening, boys.” Her eyes go over Bram’s uniform, then the folder, then my hands.
“Evening, Pearl,” Bram says. “I’m going to need the spare key to room nine, just in case our ‘friend’ doesn’t open up.”
She sets a key on the counter before anybody has to ask twice. “Went up after supper and hasn’t come down. Quietest guest I’ve had all year.” A sniff. “Doesn’t tip.”
In Pearl’s courtroom, that’s a hanging offense.
The stairs complain the whole way up. Room nine sits at the end of a hall behind a dark window, and Bram knocks three times slowly.
A floorboard shifts inside. The spyhole goes dark. Then the chain, the deadbolt, and the door opens on a guy in an undershirt with the record’s face on.
Brown hair. Thirties. Medium everything. A face you’d lose in a two-man lineup, which I guess is a professional asset.
I’ve been carrying that description around for days, and the real thing looks like a guy who sells extended warranties. Then he clocks the uniform, and his scent does the rest of the introductions: I can smell the fear and the sweat in it.
“Wade Fenton,” Bram says.
“... Who’s asking?”
“Deputy Miller.” A beat. “From Apple Blossom Orchard.”
Wadelooks at the folder. At Ash. At me. At a hallway that has exactly one staircase and three Millers in it. You can watch him run the numbers and get a bad answer. He steps back and lets the door swing wide.
The room’s small and neat. Duffel half packed on the bed. Laptop on the desk. And on the nightstand, a camera with a lens as long as my forearm.
My blood goes from idle to redline so fast my ears ring. That lens has been somewhere, pointed at something, at somebody...
Bram’s hand lands on my shoulder. Light. Don’t.
I breathe through it the way I do at a structure fire. In through the nose, count the exits, save the burn for later.
Bram opens the folder on the desk and starts laying pages down, one at a time, unhurried.
“About a week ago, a man walked a bag up to a parcel counter in Lakeview and shipped it to our house.” The counter slip goes down. “Prepaid, cash. Sender, Wade Fenton.”
“Shipping a bag isn’t a crime.” He aims for bored and lands somewhere short of it. His tongue darts across his lips, and the fear-sweat comes up another notch.
“The bag arrived with a note in it,” Bram adds.
“Addressed to an omega with a documented history with your client. That’s harassment by proxy, and the stalking statute reaches agents.
” The booking photo goes down next. “Wade Fenton. Impersonation, pled to a fine. Trespass in two counties. I read the whole narrative, by the way. Creative.”
Wade’s jaw moves and produces nothing.
“And a few days ago,” Bram continues, “somebody paid a sixteen-year-old forty dollars cash to wreck our staging bay. Alpha, thirties, brown hair, a stranger to a town with no strangers in it. That boy will pick your face out of a photo array in about four seconds, and his mother will drive him to the county building herself to do it, if we ask.”
You can just about hear the carry-the-one happening behind Wade’s eyes.
“Conspiracy,” Bram says. “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Criminal mischief.” He pulls the desk chair out and turns it toward Wade. “Sit down, Wade.”
“I want a lawyer,” Wade says.
“You’re not under arrest.” Bram’s voice doesn’t move. “You can call anybody you like. And Monday morning this file lands on the county prosecutor’s desk either way. The only question being decided in this room is what your name’s doing inside it when it lands.” He lets that sit.
Here’s the part I keep behind my own teeth.
The file is thin. A counter slip, a kid’s description, an old rap sheet.
Every line in that folder is true, and none of it is enough, and the whole game is getting Wade to believe otherwise.
Hell, we don’t even have formal proof Derek’s behind all this.
I’ve got to say, though, I’ve spent my whole life watching Ash bluff people, and it turns out he has nothing on Bram (when he’s motivated).
I just pray to God this guy’s as sold as I am
Wade stares at the camera for a long beat.
“I find people.” He finally says. “That’s the job. Somebody skips out, somebody’s owed money, I find them. It’s legal.”
“Finding her was legal,” Bram agrees. “Everything after it has a charge code.”
“Especially paying a teen to sabotage us,” I say. My hands want to be fists, and I make them stay open at my sides. Wade must feel the vibe and just looks at the floor.
The radiator ticks. Out the window, somebody’s dog is hollering at the creek.
“He didn’t tell me what she was to him,” Wade says. “Said the girl took off, the family’s worried, that’s the story I got. I had her in a day, and it should’ve been the end of the job.”
“But,” Ash says.
First word he’s spoken since the truck. Wade’s head comes around.
“But the client had follow-ups.” Wade wipes his mouth. “First the retreat reservation. He’d already written the letter, her name signed at the bottom. All I did was mail it.” His shoulders twitch. “I knew that one was over a line. But it’s paper. Nobody bleeds from paper.”
My back teeth grind together. That letter caused her great distress. Paper, nobody bleeds. My ass.
“Then the bag,” Bram says.
“Then the bag. It came to me by courier, note already inside. He wanted it mailed from Lakeview. Said it’d land harder if she ever learned it came from home.” A beat of silence. “But most of all, he wanted her to know she’d been found. Make her scared.”
“And the kid?” I ask.
Wade breathes out through his nose. “The texts started changing. He wanted things broken. ‘Make her sanctuary leak money.’ ‘Slow their season down.’ I don’t do that, I find people.
But...” He hesitates. “He pays fast and doesn’t haggle.
So I hired the kid. Forty bucks to break some stuff. Kid stuff.”
“Show me the texts,” Bram says.
Wade walks up to his nightstand, where a phone lies.
“Also, I want everything you’re telling me written down,” Bram adds. “Start to finish, in your own hand. Signed, dated, sworn. A statement a court can use.”
That’s the one that lands. Wade comes sitting right back.
“No.” He shakes his head, slow. “Talking to you in a room is one thing. That’s air.
You want me to put my name on a sworn statement, against him, that walks into a courtroom?
” He almost laughs. “That ends me. Part of the whole job is being the guy who never talks. I sign that and I’m finished in this business. ”
Ash hasn’t moved from beside the door. Arms crossed, no smile on him.
“Look, it’s very simple.” Ash says. “Write and sign a statement, and you’re a witness a man lied to and used. Don’t, and you’re the man who stalked an omega for cash. That’s the whole choice, Wade.”
Wade looks at the window, then at the folder, his scent going sour.
“Fine,” he says, exhaling through his nose. “I’ll do it.”
Bram lays two clean sheets on the desk with a piece of carbon paper between them, squares the stack, and taps it once. “Start at the beginning, and press hard.”
So Wade writes it longhand. The date he was hired.
The rate. Every instruction, every delivery, every payment.
When he goes vague, Bram taps the page, and the vague goes away.
Then the phone gets unlocked and Wade scrolls the thread from the top, slow, slower, Bram says, while I photograph every screen twice.
The hire date. The letter. The bag. The bins.
And then the newer ones, where the asks get uglier.
I hand Ash the phone and go stand by the window for a minute. The creek’s still there, the dog’s still hollering. In through the nose... Save the burn.
By the end there are three pages in Wade’s own crabbed handwriting, with a carbon twin of every one underneath. Signed, dated, sworn, witnessed by a deputy and one civilian. “Two civilians,” I say, and sign my name under Ash’s.
Bram reads it through twice, peels the carbon copies free, slides one set into the folder, leaves one with Wade, and lays out the rest in the dullest voice he owns.
“Monday, nine a.m., the county building, Detective Marsh. You walk in on your own two feet and you give her all of it, same as you gave it to us. And Wade. You’re paid through Sunday.
Stay paid through Sunday. If that car of yours points north early, I’ll hear about it before the engine’s warm. ”
Easy to know that when we’ve got a Pearl on our side.
We’re already at the door when Wade speaks up.
“He won’t stop without me.” He’s still in the chair, elbows on his knees, staring down at the carpet with his jaw working. “The guy’s obsessed. If I were you, I’d stop risking my neck for some simple omega who—”
Crack.
“Thanks for the cooperation,” I say, already standing over him. “And the comment.”
He looked up just in time for the meat of my open hand to catch him square across the cheek. Now he just blinks at me, stunned, a hand floating up to press against the blooming red print on his face.
“For helping a psycho find her.”
Burn, out.