Marcus Webb came in at dawn with his notebook in a grocery bag, as if it were something shameful he was returning to a store, and he talked for six hours.
Jordan Cole recorded every minute of it, with a state investigator present — Jordan had made one phone call, to Helena, the morning after Webb's, and the machinery of the state had turned toward Yellowstone County with the slow, immense interest of a battleship changing course. What Webb brought was the body that the spine had been waiting for.
He had been recruited, he said, in February — summoned to the sheriff's ranch house after hours and given, in the calmest voice in Montana, a story about a dangerous outlaw club grooming a runaway girl as a courier, and an order framed as initiative: get something into her locker before Thursday; what it is will be provided; don't look at it too closely; this comes from me and it stays with me. The package had been handed to him in the sheriff's own garage, from the lockbox of a black SUV with no plates that everyone at the station knew better than to log. He had done it at 9:17 on a Thursday morning with his heart trying to leave his body, and he had gone home and vomited, and gone to church, and gone to work, and watched a seventeen-year-old girl get arrested in front of her brother's caseworker for the thing he had carried in under his arm, and he had not slept a whole night since.
"I kept the notebook because cops keep notebooks," he said, at hour five, to the table in general. "Dates. Times. What he said, near as I could write it. I wrote it the night after the raid. I think I knew, when I was writing it, that I was writing it for this. For a room like this one. I just needed—" he looked at Ava, who had insisted on being present and who Jordan had, after one look at her face, not attempted to exclude "—I needed to see whether she was what he said she was. And then she rode past the station at twenty-five miles an hour on a little bike, in front of seven hundred and fifty people who love her, on her way to visit her little brother, and I went home and sat in my cruiser in the dark and I thought: I know exactly which side of this my notebook is on."
There was more, and the more was the case: Webb's testimony unlocked the SUV's history (a forfeiture vehicle, held off the county's books at the sheriff's direction), the burn barrel at the ranch (retrieved, and in it, half-melted, a dealership key tag from Reaper's service visit — the sheriff's own hand, it turned out, had written Ava's father off once already when he paid an orderly's cousin at the dealership to leave the president's bike unchained in the service lot for one specific night). Jordan's investigators, working from Webb's dates, pulled the dealership's security footage before anyone thought to lose it. The brake line, the note, the SUV, the frame: each thing connected to the next with the clean, machined fit of parts from the same engine.
And through it all, Ava asked only one question of Marcus Webb, when the six hours were done and he stood to leave, hollowed out and strangely lighter, a man who had set down a load in the only right place.
"Why Thursday?" she asked. "The raid. Why then?"
Webb looked at her with red-rimmed eyes. "Because of the home study," he said. "The sheriff said — I wrote it down — he said, 'We put the drugs in her life on the same morning the county comes to judge her life. One visit, two verdicts.' He wanted Miss Brennan there. He wanted the caseworker to see."
Ava nodded slowly. "Thank you," she said, "for writing it down." And because she was her father's daughter and her mother's, and because the club had taught her the etiquette of debts, she added: "What you did to me was a crime. What you did today is the beginning of paying for it. I won't forget either one, Deputy. In the right order."
The state filed its charges within the week, and the United States Attorney's office — which had taken a sudden, deep interest in a cassette tape and a set of photographs concerning a murdered federal informant, seventeen years cold — filed its notice of intent to appear. The custody judge and the criminal judge, confronted with two proceedings that were in truth a single proceeding wearing two coats, did what Jordan Cole had petitioned them, in filings of immaculate boredom, to do.
The drug charge and the custody petition would be heard together, in one courtroom, on one morning, before Judge Maria Santos.
"One room," Jordan said, in the office, with the whiteboard finally, finally, fully connected — every column joined to every other by straight red lines. "All of it. The footage, the notebook, the tape, the photographs, the sheriff. He built his whole war out of separate rooms where nobody could see the whole shape. So we put the whole shape in one room, in front of one judge, with the press in the gallery and the record open. That's the ambush, Ava. Seventeen years in the making. Your father built it. You're going to spring it."