Chapter 44
Elena gave her statement in a conference room down the hall from where Graham died.
Gabe stood in the doorway and watched. Cara stood beside him, shoulder pressed into his. Two of Becky's agents sat across from Elena with a recorder between them. Elena looked tired but surprisingly calm, hands resting flat on the table.
She described the drugging, Pirelli entering her room each night, then the days that simply stopped — not blacked out, not forgotten, just absent, like pages pulled from a book while she slept.
One of the agents stopped writing. Just stopped, pen hovering over his pad, and listened.
Elena didn't notice. She stared at a point on the wall behind them as she spoke, voice firm. She'd earned that. She'd walked back into this building standing up, and she was giving her testimony the same way.
Not rescued. Self-recovered.
In the hallway behind them, Tom sat on a bench against the wall with an ice pack pressed to his jaw.
His cracked glasses lay folded in his shirt pocket.
He'd given his own statement an hour ago and now he was just waiting — eyes on the floor, breathing slowly, the way a man waits when there's nothing left to do but be where his daughter could find him.
Footsteps thundered around the corner at speed.
"Dad."
Piper flew down the hall and went straight for him. She grabbed Tom's face in both hands and examined the swelling jaw with the furious tenderness of a kid who had spent too much time imagining the worst.
Finally she pulled back. "You look horrible."
Tom grinned, though the movement looked painful. "Love you, too."
"Seriously. Terrible." She made a face.
"I'm good." Tom stilled her hands and looked straight into her young face.
"Your glasses are broken."
"I have a spare pair."
She hugged him. Hard. Tom closed his eyes and cupped the back of her head.
Gabe felt Cara slip out of the doorway and into the hall beside him. She watched Tom and Piper for a moment, then turned her face away. Gabe knew what that was. He didn't say anything.
A moment later Elena emerged from the conference room, an agent at her elbow. Piper let go of her father and intercepted Elena with a hug — quick and fierce and wordless.
Over Piper's shoulder, Elena's eyes found Cara's. Cara nodded once. Elena nodded back.
Then Piper made a beeline for Wade, who was leaning against the opposite wall with a butterfly bandage above his eyebrow, and inspected it with a critical eye. "That's going to scar."
"I'm counting on it," Wade said. "What good's getting dinged up if you got nothing to show for it?"
Piper stilled, clearly thinking that through. Then her face cleared. “Can I drive the truck back to Haven Cove?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Wade. I’m responsible—“
“No.”
She grinned at him. He almost grinned back. For Wade, that was practically a group hug.
Tom was sitting on a bench in the hallway when Reagan came back inside.
She’d been coordinating with the agents—logistics, evidence chain, the machinery of aftermath that somebody had to run.
She stopped in front of Tom, straightening his crooked glasses with a gentle touch.
Tom caught her wrist. She leaned her forehead against his for a moment that lasted longer than a moment, and neither of them said anything, because they didn’t need to.
Gabe looked away. Cara gave him a small half-smile that said she’d seen it, and that it was good, and that some things didn’t need commentary.
Wade slipped out through the fire exit. Gabe heard his voice through the cracked door—low, soft.
“Yeah. It’s done. We’re coming home.” A pause. “No, everybody’s fine.” Another pause, longer. “I’ll stop by Giovanni’s. The cat must be out of salmon by now.”
Gabe couldn’t hear Diane’s response, but whatever it was made the big man chuckle.
One of Becky’s agents—a woman in her forties with short hair and the patient expression of someone who’d been filling out forms in ugly situations for a long time—found Gabe in the hallway. She had a clipboard. And questions.
“Chief Sawyer, I need to clarify something for the report.” She glanced past him at the hallway full of people—Cara leaning against the wall, Wade coming back through the fire exit, Tom on the bench with Reagan’s hand still on his shoulder, Piper sitting cross-legged on the floor next to Elena.
“Who are these people? What agency? What jurisdiction authorized this operation?”
Gabe opened his mouth. Where to begin? “Uh…”
He looked at Cara, who took a long, slow breath. “We’re––“
“They’re my friends.” Elena interjected.
The agent eyed the battered, mismatched, exhausted collection of people in the hallway. She wrote something on her clipboard.
“Friends,” she said. “Got it.”
“Thanks,” Gabe murmured.
The woman’s face softened in a grin. “No problem. It’s not like we don’t have about a zillion other loose ends to tidy up.”
“Probably that won’t happen,” he said.
She paused, pen poised over her clipboard. “Agreed.”
He knew the feeling. Unlike on TV, most cases left dangling threads. Ulcer-makers, if you let them grind away at you.
This case would have more than a few. Pirelli’s name was on every dosing log Tom had pulled.
A warrant was being drafted—though Gabe had a hunch it would never be served.
Pirelli had gone quiet the same week Voss started tightening the operation.
The doctor was almost certainly in a landfill, a marsh, or at the bottom of a bay somewhere along the coast. The body wouldn’t turn up unless the prosecutor considered offering Voss, or one of his goons, a plea deal.
Which Gabe didn’t think likely. They had Voss dead to rights for murder, and the thugs as accomplices.
Voss would likely have to answer for Julian Whitfield’s death, though. Becky assured him the case had already been referred back to the county medical examiner with a note that made the word reopened unnecessary.
All in all, the best outcome they could hope for. Justice done, if too late to save Elena’s father.
Gabe thought about his own huge, loose ends. He had no idea what came next, but he knew who he wanted beside him while he figured it out.