Chapter 2

Nora Kane was up at six.

Not because her alarm went off. Because she’d been lying in the dark since four thirty thinking about two things simultaneously the way she always thought when a case was taking shape in her mind.

The first thing was Henderson.

The second thing was Carter.

She’d been doing this long enough to know that the story was never in the documents. Documents came later. Documents were what people constructed after they’d decided what the story was going to say. The real story lived in the gap between what people said officially and what they said when nobody official was listening.

She called Joshua at six fifteen.

He answered the way he always answered. Like a man who hadn’t really been asleep.

“You’re up early.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“No.”

“Me neither.” She had her notebook open on the kitchen table and her coffee going cold beside it. “What do you know about David Henderson?”

A pause. Not the pause of someone who doesn’t know. The pause of someone deciding how much to say and in what order.

“Fourteen year veteran. Commendations for valor in 2019 and 2021. One excessive force complaint in 2020 that got dismissed.” Another pause. “And a reputation.”

“What kind of reputation?”

“The kind that doesn’t make it into official records. The kind that lives in the break room and the parking lot and the bar two blocks from the precinct where the third shift goes after their rotation.” He paused. “Henderson is old school. And not in a good way.”

“Meaning what specifically?”

“Meaning he came up in a different era. Meaning he has opinions about Ten Pines and the people who live there that he doesn’t bother to hide as much as he should.” He paused. “Meaning this is not the first time his name has come up in a conversation like this one.”

Nora wrote it down. “Has anything ever stuck?”

“No. Because Henderson is smart enough to keep his people close and his paperwork clean.” A pause. “Until now maybe.”

“Carter.”

“Brian Carter. Eight months on the force. Came from a family of cops. Father was on the job for twenty years. Retired clean. Brian went to the academy expecting it to be one thing and I think he’s finding out it’s something else.”

“You think he’ll talk?”

“Not yet. He’s scared and he’s young and he doesn’t know which way this goes. Right now he’s doing what scared young cops do when a senior officer tells them how it is.” He paused. “But his report is different from Henderson’s.”

Nora stopped writing. “You’ve already seen the reports.”

“I have a contact. The reports were filed at two seventeen this morning. Henderson’s is clean and tight and reads like a man who had several hours to think about what he wanted to say before he said it.” Another pause. “Carter’s reads like a man who wrote down what he actually saw and then got scared halfway through and tried to make it match Henderson’s without quite being able to commit to it.”