Nothing behind me that I could identify. Is that a medical observation or something else? Just a historical fact. A pause. Sometimes the most helpful thing a man can do is know when to stop digging.
The line went dead. I drove two more blocks, pulled over, sat completely still for about 30 seconds. Then I called Torres back. She picked up before the first ring finished. Someone just called me, I said.
And I think you need to hear what they said. There was a short, hard silence on her end. Don't go home tonight, she said. Where are you right now? I told her.
Stay there. I'm sending someone to you. She didn't hang up and for the next 4 minutes until the headlights of a sheriff's vehicle appeared at the end of the street. Neither did I. They came for the storage unit at 11:00 that night.
Not federal agents, not county sheriff. Two men in civilian clothing who cut the lock on the unit door with a cordless angle grinder while a third man watched the road. The storage facility's camera system caught all of it. The unit was empty by the time they realized what we'd already removed the photographs from my phone. Backed up three times, sitting in a server somewhere that wasn't on Alderton Road or in Alderton storage or in any place they could reach with an angle grinder.
Daniel had split his evidence into two locations so that finding one wouldn't destroy the other. We'd done the same thing without realizing it. He'd thought of everything. Even the things he couldn't have planned for, even the contingencies he never got the chance to build. The truth he'd spent the last year of his life protecting had survived every attempt to bury it.
And now it was in federal hands, and nothing that happened at Alderton's storage at 11:00 on a Wednesday night was going to change that. Torres had me at her field office by 7:23 the next morning. Not the county sheriff's department, a different building, a converted office suite on the third floor of a commercial block downtown. The kind of space that looks deliberately unremarkable from the outside. No signage, keypad entry, a waiting area with three chairs and a water cooler and nothing on the walls.
I'd spent the night in a Hampton Inn 6 mi from Alderton Road after the sheriff's escort confirmed nobody was following me. I slept 4 hours, maybe five. I was on my second coffee from the lobby machine when Torres opened the inner door and waved me through. Beckford was already inside along with a woman I hadn't seen before older. Reading glasses pushed up on her forehead, a cardboard file box open on the table in front of her.
She looked up when I came in and assessed me the same way Torres had the day before. Fast complete, Mr. Mercer. I'm Diana Frell, State Attorney General's office. Environmental Crimes Division.
She didn't extend her hand, just nodded toward a chair. Sit down. We have a lot to cover. I sat. Torres set a recorder on the table.