Page 134 of In the Dark of the Past

River was already moving.

I followed her.

The records were clean in the way forged records always were. Too clean, no transaction history before the three deposits, no payroll, no utility payments, no behavior that resembled an account any living person actually used. Opened at a branch in the next county over, the three transfers in the years following originated from a shell entity that Autumn traced in forty minutes to a Benevolence Fund disbursement account that had been closed and rerouted.

“He rerouted it to cover the origin,” Autumn said, screen-sharing on Zoom with Solis’s laptop. “But the closure paperwork has Grant’s office as the authorizing party. That’s the thread.”

Solis looked at the screen for a long moment.

“Dr. Bennett,” he said, turning to River. “The public filing this morning characterizes your investigation as motivated by your father’s case rather than independent evidence. I want to ask you directly. How do you want to handle your role in what we’ve built here?”

River considered that. I watched her consider it.

“Sure, my interest has to do with my father,” she said. “And my mother. That’s true, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. And I wouldn’t be doing the work I’ve done if I hadn’t grown up knowing that something was wrong.” She paused. “But it started as a genuine need to bring justice to the family of a missing woman. To get closure for her. The evidence we found in the annex is not my father’s case. It’s years of documented targets, authorized by Grant’s family going back to the eighties, with my father and mother entries among hundreds. The annex records are not about me. They’re about Maple Ridge and what has been done to it.”

Solis looked at her.

“Can you say that on the stand?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then we’re fine,” he said.

He closed the laptop.

“I’m issuing a preservation order on the county recorder’s filing as of now,” he said, standing. “Grant can’t withdraw it. Which means the fabricated transfers are now part of the public record, and we can demonstrate they’re fabricated, which makes them evidence of obstruction rather than exculpatory material.” He looked at me. “He handed us something by filing that this morning.”

I nodded.

“My team will be in Maple Ridge by four,” Solis said. “We’ll move on Grant tonight.” He looked between us. “Get some rest if you can.”

He nodded once, picked up his jacket, and left with Evan the way he’d arrived, efficiently and without ceremony, taking the entire weight of the federal case-building with him.

The house was quiet after his car pulled away.

Outside, the pines were still in the morning light. The sky over the ridge was clear and pale and very large.

River picked up her jacket.

“I’ll be an hour,” she said. “Maybe two.”

I didn’t ask where she was going. I knew. She’d made a promise to a dying man in a cabin in the dark, and River Bennett was not the kind of person who let those types of things lapse.

“Take Atlas,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Cole’s in custody,” I said, “but until Solis’s team is fully in place, I don’t know if Grant has anyone else mobile. It’s not a risk worth taking.”

She held my gaze for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”

I stood at the window and watched them go. River’s shoulders were set the way they got when she was carrying something difficult and had made her peace with carrying it. I thought about what she was walking into. Jordyn Vale in protective custody, who had been embedded in my department and who had not, by any accounting I could do, known the full shape of what her brother was into. Who had cooperated fully once she was cornered. Who was about to be told by a woman she’d barely met that her brother was dead and that his last words had been about her.

No version of that conversation was easy. River knew that, but she was going anyway.

I turned back to the kitchen. The legal pad was still on the table with its four pages of what we could prove, and underneath all of it, written in the margin at some point between five and six in the morning without my fully registering it was, Sean kept his word.

I looked at it for a moment. Then I went to make more coffee, because there was still a long day ahead, and I intended to be standing at the end of it.