That's someone inside the disposal operation protecting themselves. Someone who wanted leverage. Clare looked at me steadily. Someone who knew too much and wanted insurance. We both stood with that for a moment.
Daniel found the shaft, I said. And someone else had already been using it to store insurance against the people they were working with. Two separate people in the same garage with the same secret, and neither one knew about the other ill changed. Until something changed, she repeated. I didn't leave until 7:15.
Before I got in my truck, Clare walked over from where she'd been talking to Torres and stood in front of me. I owe you more than I can calculate, she said. You don't owe me anything. I came to fill a sinkhole and instead you stayed for. She gestured at the street, the vehicles, the whole situation.
Sometimes a job is more than a job. She was quiet for a moment. Then can I tell you something? Sure. Last night at Janet's after you left, I couldn't sleep either.
I was lying there thinking about Daniel, about all the things I'd assumed about the last year of his life, the things I'd decided he was hiding from me, the story I'd built up over 6 years about what those phone calls meant, what the locked workshop meant. She paused. I was so angry at him for so long. Not because he died, you can't be angry at someone for dying, but because I thought he'd shut me out. Because I thought the man I married had turned into someone who kept secrets in a room I wasn't allowed to enter.
But he wasn't keeping secrets from you. He was keeping the danger away from you. I know that now. But 6 years is a long time to misunderstand someone you loved. She looked at the house.
I can't get those years back. I can't unbe angry. She turned back to me. But I think I understand him now in a way I didn't before. And that's something I nodded.
Claire, there's one more thing I've been thinking about. What? The shaft in the garage. The insurance documents. The person inside the operation who was keeping records for leverage.
I held her gaze. Whoever they were when Daniel found the shaft, he found those records, too. That's why everything accelerated in those last 8 months. He didn't just have Evans evidence about the dumping. He had the internal financial records of the operation itself.
She went still. He had everything, she said slowly. He had the outside documentation and the inside documentation, which made him considerably more dangerous to these people than just a concerned citizen with some photographs. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, I could see her recalculating the same thing I'd been doing.