Chapter 11 On the Record #3
“One. I’ll make the disclosure real. Quietly, correctly, dated tonight.
What changes on the floor changes slowly, and I decide the pace, not the book and not the people upstairs?
You came to me before anyone could use it against you, and that buys you the version where I handle it.
” He held up a second finger. “Two. Brar. I know her staff inspector out there, we did our sergeant’s course together back when the dinosaurs had it.
I’ll find a way to put a roof over her that doesn’t have Wright’s name or yours anywhere near the paperwork.
Three.” He tapped the table once. “The system. I know a person. Retired out of financial crimes, does forensic data work private now, owes me the kind of favor that doesn’t expire.
You get no name and you make no contact. It goes through me or it doesn’t go.”
“Understood.”
“Four. Your camera trick.” He nodded at the laptop. “Did the jeweler know you still had that access.”
“No.”
“Then as of tonight you’ve lost it. Whatever that footage becomes, it gets requested from the owner properly, with a date and a signature, when there’s a file for it to live in.
You pulled the thread, fine, it’s pulled.
But from here everything is clean, because the day we finally stand this up in front of somebody who matters, that man will hire the best and they will pull on every corner of it.
Nothing gets to wobble.” He leaned back.
“And five. You’re going to hear the part you came all this way to not hear. ”
I waited.
“This may all come to nothing.” He said it evenly, without softening it.
“I’ve had IT in that system once already and it handed me a shrug.
My quiet person may go into those logs and find them overwritten, or purged on schedule, or clean as a whistle because the man’s more careful than either of us thinks.
Brar may take the roof I build her and still never say one word on any paper, and I wouldn’t blame her.
And then all you’ve got is what you had in the garage.
True and worthless.” Murphy leaned back against his chair.
Upstairs the floor creaked again, his wife crossing to somewhere, and Murphy’s eyes went up to the sound for half a second.
“But you knew all that before you rang my bell,” he said. “You did it anyway. So tell me why, and don’t give me the version with a bow on it.”
My phone buzzed on the table before I could answer. I’d have ignored it, except I never ignored it anymore, and Murphy nodded at it, so I looked.
Luke. You still out?
Sitting in that kitchen with three photographs of him in a folder eight inches from my hand, I read it twice. Then I typed, Out a while yet. Back soon, and put the phone face down on the wood.
“Luke?” Murphy said. Not a question.
“Yeah.” I kept my hand on the phone a second longer, and decided to give him the part I’d meant to keep to myself.
“Here’s the version without the bow. If it was just the flagged cases, I’d ride it out.
I’ve been framed before, by better, you saw that year up close.
If it was just the pictures, I’d burn them and sleep fine, because I know what I have and a photograph doesn’t change it.
But it’s him.” The words were finally in order and I said them slowly.
“Wright doesn’t want Luke, sir. Wright wants what standing next to him is worth, and Luke can’t see it, because the man spent those years making sure he never would, and every person Luke trusts thinks Wright walks on water, and the one person telling him different is the boyfriend everybody watched melt down on the floor.
He is alone inside this thing, and he doesn’t even know he’s in it.
” I looked at the folder. “He gave that man four years and the worst thing that ever happened to him, and Wright’s back for the rest. I can’t warn him.
I tried the little version of it, and it nearly broke us.
So, the only protection I can give him is to take Wright off the board before he gets to whatever he came for.
That’s why. Everything else, the files, the flags, my career, that’s the part I can afford to lose. ”
Murphy looked at me for a long time. Whatever he was reading, he didn’t tell me what he found.
“Finish your coffee,” is what he said. And then, when I picked up the cup, “You did right coming here. A year ago, you’d have gone at him alone.”
“A year ago, I didn’t have anything he could take.”
He grunted, which from Murphy was a whole conversation, and got up, and took the pot off the machine and topped me up like we were done with the hard part, which we were.
We spent ten more minutes on the mechanics of it.
How he’d frame the disclosure, what I should expect on the floor and when, a plain agreement that neither of us would say Wright’s name inside the building in any sentence we couldn’t afford to have repeated.
He walked me down the hall after. At the door he stopped, one hand on the latch, and looked out through the screen at his street.
He opened the door. “You’re the first person to bring me a corner of it I can hold. Don’t make me regret the signature twice, Carlson.”
“No, sir.”
“Thank my wife for the coffee on the way past the window. She’ll be watching you go. She watches everyone go, it’s her whole cinema.”
She was at the upstairs window when I came down the walk, and I raised a hand, and she raised hers, unembarrassed, and let the curtain fall.
I sat in the car without starting it. The folder went back on the passenger seat, the laptop on top of it.
Murphy’s porch light went off, then the front room.
Only then did I close my eyes and let myself take a breath.
I should have felt dread at starting a spark that would probably cause wildfire, but I didn’t. I think I was past the point of rescue.