Page 112 of In the Dark of the Past

Or maybe they’d made sure I came back.

“Finn,” I said.

He was beside me in three steps. When he looked at the photograph and the notation, he didn’t say anything. His jaw set, and he put his hand on the back of my neck—not pulling, not steering, just there. Weight. Warmth.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “Keep going.”

I kept going.

“Got it.” Atlas’s voice came from the other end of the room. We went to him. He’d pulled a box labeled TRANSFERS / MR-7 and had three folders spread open on the shelf.

“Financial records,” he said. “Going back to the nineties. The MR-7 account is the operational fund. It receives disbursements from the Benevolence Fund’s public budget and routes them to enforcement actions. Payments to contractors. To facilities. To personnel.”

“Jordyn’s salary supplement,” Finn said.

“Among others.” Atlas tapped a page. “Every transfer has two authorization signatures. One is Grant’s, the same signature block every time, consistent across his time, morphing to his father before him. The second—” He paused. “The second changes. Different signatories at different periods. Like the role was filled by whoever Grant’s current operational deputy was.”

“The shadow,” I said.

Atlas looked at me.

“My mother’s letter described it,” I said. “Someone to act when Grant couldn’t. Someone young or low-level enough to be underestimated.” I looked at the most recent transfers. “Who’s the current secondary signatory?”

Atlas turned the folder so I could read it.

The signature block read, S. CALLAHAN / DISTRICT ATTORNEY.

The room was very quiet.

I didn’t look at Finn, then I looked at the signature. I stared at it, knowing it was the kind of fact that had been true for a long time and was only new because we were reading it now.

“How long?” Finn said. His voice was controlled. Barely.

Atlas checked the earliest folder with Sean’s signature block. “Looks like six years.”

“Six years,” Finn said.

“The transfers before that have a different secondary. Someone who left the county in”—Atlas squinted—“2017. Retired early, apparently.”

“Or was replaced,” I said.

I finally looked at Finn again. His expression was the same as he’d had at the quarry when Sean stepped out of the SUV. The face of a man absorbing something he already knew in his bones and was finally seeing in front of him in writing. The acknowledgment of confirmation. Of having hoped, somewhere deep down, that the bones were wrong.

They weren’t.

“Finn,” I said.

“I’m okay.”

“I know,” I said. “Keep going.” I echoed what he’d said to me earlier.

He looked at me, and something moved in his face. The corner of his mouth moved slightly. It wasn’t exactly a smile, but it was adjacent to one.

“We photograph everything,” he said. “Every page. Every signature. Every folder.”

“Already started,” Atlas said, his phone in hand.