Page 114 of In the Dark of the Past

That was River. She knew the difference between support and interference.

I parked a block away out of habit, or maybe superstition. The walk gave me time to do the thing I’d not been doing since we spread those folders open in the sublevel—grieve the version of this that wasn’t true.

I’d built a lot of versions over the years. Sean, who didn’t know. Sean, who’d been used. Sean, who’d been lied to by the same machine that had lied to everyone and who would be as blindsided as I was when the truth finally surfaced. I’d had that version. I’d kept it.

His signature was on six years of transfer authorizations. Six years. Not one bad week. Not a moment of weakness followed by a choice to extricate. Six years of quarterly disbursements from the MR-7 account, each one bearing his signature block and his office seal, each one routing operational funds to the Watcher enforcement arm.

He’d known. He’d always known.

I wasn’t here to find out if Sean was guilty. I was here to give him the one exit that still existed.

The DA’s office always smelled the same, like coffee and toner and the faint undertone of the wood polish Sean had insisted on since the first week he took the office. He liked surfaces to look right. He always had.

His assistant wasn’t at the front desk. I’d timed my visit just right.

I knocked once on his office door and opened it without waiting.

Sean was at his desk. He looked up, and the thing I watched happen in his face in the first half-second, before he had time to arrange it, was worth more to me than anything I’d have gotten elsewhere. It wasn’t surprise, it was recognition. The nod of a man who had been waiting for a knock on a door and telling himself it probably wouldn’t come but had.

He arranged his face, turning it warm, brotherly, relieved.

“Finn,” he said, rising. “You look like hell.”

“Long night.”

He came around the desk and clapped a hand on my shoulder. The easy familiarity of two men who had been doing this since childhood—shorthand, physical, the language of people who grew up in the same house. I let him have it.

“Sit,” he said. “Coffee?”

“No.”

I sat because it put him across the desk from me, where I could watch him and where he’d have to work to leave. He settled back into his chair after a beat—a second longer than it should have taken, which was a tell he’d had since he was twelve.

It told me one thing. He didn’t want to be in this position.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

I set one of the evidence bags on his desk.

He looked at it. His expression didn’t change. He was very good, I’d give him that, but his hands tightened slightly on the armrests, and the tightness traveled up through his forearms and into his shoulders.

“Transfer authorizations,” I said. “MR-7 account. Quarterly disbursements to the Benevolence Fund’s operational arm. Six years, Sean. Starting in the second quarter of the year you took office.”

He looked at the bag. Then at me. He didn’t say anything.

“Your signature is on every one,” I said. “Not Grant’s staff. Not a deputy DA. Not the ADA. You. The same signature you put on legitimate things. Consistent, identifiable, yours.”

The silence in the room had weight.

Sean breathed in, then breathed out. “Where did you get those?” he asked.

“The annex sublevel behind Stonybrooke. The one Grant has been maintaining since 1987. The one your name has been in for the last six years.”

Something shifted in his face then. It wasn’t guilt, exactly. More like the particular exhaustion of a man who has been carrying a thing for a long time and has just been told he can put it down. Except that putting it down will cost him everything.

“Finn,” he said. His voice was quiet. Careful.

I shook my head. “Don’t,” I said.