Page 115 of In the Dark of the Past

“I was going to say⁠—”

“I know what you were going to say.” I kept my voice level. “You were going to tell me it’s complicated. That you didn’t have a choice. That Grant has something on you, or on the family, or on someone you were trying to protect. And maybe some of that is true, Sean. I’m not here to tell you it isn’t.”

He was very still.

“But Marta Bennett is dead,” I said. “She was in that building—the building these funds helped operate. She died in their custody, and it was written up as a suicide and filed by the same office that signed the disbursements. But it’s also clear it was anything but. And Eleanor Jenkins is also dead. And River’s father is dead. And there is a list in that sublevel with River’s name on it, Sean. River’s name. With a pending notation.”

The color left his face. It wasn’t performative. It was real.

“I didn’t know about River,” he said. It came out low and cracked at the edges. “I didn’t know they’d put her on⁠—”

“But you knew about the list,” I said. “You knew there was a list.”

He closed his eyes. One second passed. Then two. “Yes,” he said.

The word sat between us.

I’d known it was coming. I’d known it in the quarry, watching him with Grant. I’d known it in the annex, reading his signature. Yet I’d still hoped, somewhere in the part of me that didn’t consult the evidence, that when I asked him directly, he’d find a way to make it untrue.

He hadn’t.

“How did it start?” I said.

He opened his eyes, looked at his hands. “Grant came to me the week before I took office,” he said. “He said there was an arrangement. A legacy fund that handled community stabilization. He said every DA going back to the eighties had been part of it. That it was how the county actually ran, under the public structure. He made it sound—” He stopped. Started again. “He made it sound like infrastructure. Like being read into a classified program. Like I’d be naive not to understand how towns actually work.”

“And you believed him,” I said.

“I told myself I was being pragmatic,” Sean said. The word came out with a bitterness that told me he’d been turning it over for a long time. “The first year, I signed three authorizations. Quarterly payments. Operational expenses. That’s how they were labeled. I told myself I didn’t need to know the operational details. That it was above my pay grade. That I was new, and Grant had been doing this for ages, and maybe that was just how it worked.”

“When did you find out what it actually was?”

His jaw tightened. “Year two. A man named—” He stopped. “A county clerk. He’d been asking questions about a zoning irregularity. Routine, as far as I could tell. Then he was gone. Relocated, they said. But I knew the firm that handled the relocation. It was in the transfer records I’d been signing.”

“And you still didn’t stop.”

“I went to Grant,” Sean said. “I told him I was done. That I wanted out.” He looked up at me. “He told me the authorizations I’d already signed were sufficient to make me complicit in everything that had happened. He said the only question was whether I was a useful partner or a liability.”

“And you chose partner.” It came out harder than I meant it.

Sean flinched. “I chose to keep my family safe,” he said. “He made it very clear what happened to liabilities in this county.”

“Clearly. River’s mother was a liability.”

The silence had a different quality now. Sean looked at the evidence bag on the desk. At the wall behind me. At something I couldn’t see.

“I know,” he said. Quiet. Final. The voice of a man arriving at a destination he’d been avoiding for years. “I know what happened to her. I know what the Fund is. I know what it does to people it decides are in the way.” He swallowed. “And I signed the authorizations anyway. Because I told myself the people being relocated, or silenced, or—” He stopped. “I told myself they must have done something. That Grant wouldn’t just target someone without reason. I tried to convince myself that the system had logic I wasn’t seeing.”

“Did you believe that?” I asked. “Or did you tell yourself you believed it?”

He didn’t answer. Which was its own answer.

I let the silence sit for a moment, then I reached into my jacket and set my phone on the desk beside the evidence bag.

“Quarry,” I said. “Three nights ago. We have your words on a recording that has already been copied and is not in this building.”

He looked at the phone.

“We have the transfer records,” I said. “The recording. Jordyn Vale is in protective custody and has already made her statement. And the AG’s office will have all of it by nine this morning, whether or not you’re part of that conversation.”