Chapter 4
Seth stepped forward, staring down at the little black machine. "The tape didn't survive in the dirt for ten years, Evan. The culvert floods every spring. That cassette would have been rotted into sludge inside six months."
Evan’s eyes narrowed. "Which means?"
"Which means someone dug him up," Seth whispered. "Someone dug him up a long time ago. They found the recorder. They cleaned the tape. And they've been waiting."
The realization hit the room like a physical blow.
Marcus looked up from the floor, his eyes wild with terror. "We have to run. I have fifty thousand in a safe at home. We take our cars, we drive north to Canada, we—"
"You won't make it to the turnpike," Evan snapped, kicking the recorder away. It skittered across the concrete, stopping against the tire of a rusted pickup truck. "Look at the timing. My driveway. Then this bay. Whoever has this tape isn't sending it to the District Attorney. If they wanted us in prison, state troopers would have kicked Julian’s door down an hour ago."
"Then what do they want?" Julian asked, his voice shaking.
"They want us running," Evan said, stepping over Marcus and walking back toward the office door. "They want us panicked. They want us cutting deals, pointing fingers, running into the dark like rabbits so they can pick us off one by one."
He stopped at the threshold of the office and turned back to face the other three. His face was carved from shadow, his eyes cold, empty, and lethal.
"Nobody calls the police," Evan said, each word spaced like a nail being driven into a coffin lid. "If Marcus so much as looks at the Sheriff’s station, I will cut his throat myself. We don't run. We don't pay. We find out who picked up that Sunfire, we find out who delivered this tape, and we put them in the dirt where Leo Wright belongs."
Julian swallowed hard, slowly lowering the revolver, nodding once with a grim, desperate twitch of his chin. Seth stared at the floor, his jaw tight, his silence an admission of surrender.
On the concrete floor behind them, the cassette player kept spinning its empty spool in the dark, the small plastic teeth clicking relentlessly against the silence.
The call came at four in the morning, thirty-eight hours after the tape finished spinning on the cold cement of Bay 3.
Evan didn’t answer the first two rings. He was sitting in the dark of his study, an unlit Cuban cigar clamped between his teeth, his Glock 19 resting beside an open bottle of Macallan on the mahogany desk. When the third call vibrated across the polished wood, buzzing like a trapped hornet, he thumbed the speaker.
"Julian is dead," Seth Alvarez said.
The voice was hollow, stripped of inflection, the sound of a man speaking from the bottom of an empty dry-well.
Evan took the cigar from his mouth. His heart didn't spike; it hardened, turning to pig iron behind his ribs. "Explain."
"The salvage shop," Seth whispered. "Julian is behind the wheel of an old Ford F-250 up on the center hydraulic lift. Main bay doors locked from the inside, deadbolts thrown. Engine ran until the tank went bone dry. The exhaust flex-pipe wasn't hooked to the wall vent. Carbon monoxide."
"Did someone find him?"
"Toby Callow," Seth said, his breathing shallow and brittle. "The nineteen-year-old kid Julian took on under the county youth diversion program. He showed up at three-thirty for the early towing rotation, saw the shop windows blacked out with exhaust haze, and peered through the bay glass. He panicked and called me."
Evan’s eyes narrowed, his fingers tightening around the heavy crystal glass on his desk. "Why you, Seth? Why in God’s name didn’t that boy dial 911?"
"Because Toby is on five years of paper for grand theft auto," Seth rasped. "Marcus got him into the diversion program as a political favor to his mother, but Julian had the kid stripping clean titles off wrecked chassis in the back shed. Toby thought the cops would pin Julian’s death on him, or find the chopped frames and violate his probation. The kid was terrified. My number was pinned to the shop wall as the secondary keyholder and diversion sponsor. The second I got here, I took his phone, threw him in the front guard shack, and told him if he touched a latch before you arrived, he’d spend the next decade in Mansfield Correctional."
Evan stood up, his heavy cashmere coat sweeping off the back of the leather armchair. "Is the kid still locked in?"
"Sitting on an overturned milk crate, shivering out of his skin," Seth said. "Evan... you have to see the dashboard. There’s something sitting on the instrument cluster."
"Touch nothing," Evan ordered, slipping his weapon into his shoulder holster. "Keep that guard shack bolted. If a single pair of headlights rolls down River Road before I get there, Seth, Toby won't be the only one facing a cage."
***
The rain had tapered to a cold, greasy drizzle that clung to the windshield like paraffin.
Evan killed the headlights of the Mercedes three hundred yards from Vance Auto Salvage, rolling silently past the perimeter fence. The salvage yard was pitch-black except for a solitary yellow floodlight buzzing above the corrugated metal guard shack near the front gate.
Evan stepped out into the damp chill. His loafers made no sound on the packed slag.
He didn't go to the main bay first. He walked straight to the guard shack, pulled the exterior hasp pin, and jerked the door open.
Inside, Toby Callow was curled into the corner beneath a wall calendar from 2011, his denim jacket soaked with sweat despite the near-freezing air. His knees were tucked against his chest, his eyes bloodshot, pupils wide with pure panic. On the greasy counter sat his flip phone, battery removed and laid beside the plastic casing where Seth had disabled it.
"Mr. Vance," Toby gasped, scrambling to his feet, his hands raised in surrender. "I swear to God, Mr. Vance, I didn't touch him! I came in for the five o'clock haul to Youngstown. I saw the smoke against the lights, I tried the front door, it was bolted—"
"Quiet," Evan said.
His voice wasn't raised. It was a flat, dead calm that sucked all the heat out of the narrow shack. He closed the door behind him, leaving them in the dim yellow glow.
Evan stepped close enough that Toby could smell the expensive tobacco and aftershave. He reached into his overcoat, pulled out an envelope thick with five thousand dollars in bank-wrapped hundreds, and set it on the workbench.
"You're a bright boy, Toby," Evan murmured. "Bright enough to know that an unattended death inside a salvage yard brings state investigators. They don't just look at the body. They check the salvage inventory. They check the VIN plates Julian cut out of those three F-350s sitting under the blue tarps in the west lot—the ones with your fingerprints all over the firewall."
Toby’s face turned the color of skim milk. His breath hitched in a strangled sob. "I was just doing what Julian told me—"
