Chapter 13
Dana Holloway looked at Grace, then at the folders in my hands.
"You were supposed to destroy those," she said.
Grace moved closer to me, her shoulder touching mine. "You said you were building a case."
Dana smiled. It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of a person who had stopped pretending a long time ago.
"I was building an inventory," she said.
She walked to the workbench and ran one finger along the row of monitors, the way a person might check a shelf for dust. She stopped at the screen showing Paula Reed bound to the chair in Henry Marsh's vacant house.
"Officer Reed became inconvenient," Dana said. "She was supposed to collect your little collection of bottles and mail and file it as nothing. Instead she started calling the property records office. She started asking about sanitation violations. So she is on emergency leave now, and her phone sent you a very reassuring text."
I found my voice. "You can't do this. You're a prosecutor."
"I am the prosecutor," Dana said. "That is the point you keep missing, Thomas. Prosecutors decide which cases exist. I decide which complaints get filed, which evidence gets tested, which officers get assigned. Your friend Paula learned that the hard way."
She turned to face me fully. The two security men had spread out behind her, blocking the corridor we had come through. Grace's fingers tightened on my sleeve. The two security men had spread out behind her, blocking the corridor we had come through, and there was nowhere left to run but forward.
"Someone inside the county selects the homeowners," Dana said, counting on her fingers. "Someone alters the health records. Someone removes the police complaints. Someone approves the emergency liens. It only works because the people who are supposed to investigate are the people running it. Curtis documents the conditions. I make sure no case is ever opened. The company buys the houses. Everyone is paid. Everyone is quiet."
"Not everyone," I said. "Henry Marsh found the corridor."
"Henry Marsh fell down his stairs."
"Pauline Marsh?"
"Pauline Marsh is confused and elderly, and her own daughter believes the paperwork instead of her mother." Dana's voice stayed level, almost bored. "That is how it always goes. The photographs are real. The records are real. The only thing manufactured is the story around them, and the story always wins."
She extended one hand toward me. "Now. Give me your file."
I held the folder against my chest. Inside it was the transfer agreement with my forged signature. The closing date was Friday. Two days away.
"What is so important about this house?" I asked.
Dana's expression changed. The boredom left her face. She glanced past me toward the opening in the concrete wall that led up into my basement. Through it I could see the painted wooden cabinet against the far wall β the same cabinet Curtis had walked straight to that morning, the one he had photographed, the one he had said would hold evidence of waste that was not there yet.
"This house was never selected because of its value," she said quietly.
She nodded to one of the security men. He stepped toward the opening with a crowbar in his hand.
Grace grabbed my sleeve. "Thomas," she whispered. "The cabinet. Whatever is behind it β your mother put it there. She found this corridor before any of us knew what it was. She collected records on every house they took, and then she hid the originals before she died. She was braver than all of us."
My mother had died six months before I bought this house. A heart attack. No autopsy. I had never known she had been down here, in this room, gathering evidence against the people who were now standing in it. I had spent the months after her funeral thinking she died believing her son was safe and settled. Now I wondered what she had been carrying alone.
The security man reached the opening and started to climb through. Dana folded her arms and watched him, calm as a woman waiting for an elevator, and I understood with a sick, certain clarity that whatever was behind that painted cabinet was the reason two months of garbage had been poured into my life. It was the reason cameras went dark at 2:47. It was the reason Paula Reed was tied to a chair. And I was standing in a concrete room beneath my own house, holding the only copy of my own forged signature, with a prosecutor who smiled while people were bound to chairs and a closing date two days away.