“Okay.”
Luke looked sideways at her.
“You realize that means three hundred pages of old interviews.”
She reached for the file before he could.
“Good thing I read faster than you.”
His mouth twitched.
Scout leaned back in his chair.
“There he is,” he muttered. “Thought you’d forgotten how to flirt.”
Luke shot him a look.
“I’m not flirting.”
“Sure.”
For the first time all morning, the corner of Burke’s mouth almost moved.
Then he looked back down at the faded photograph clipped to the front of the file.
Caroline Simms.
Eight years gone.
His father’s handwriting ran across the bottom of the page.
No body. No scene. Somebody knows.
Burke stared at it a second longer.
Then he closed the file.
“Let’s find out who.”
20
Evening at Harper & Associates
The courthouse steps felt longer at the end of the day.
All one hundred and four of them.
Reid Calloway descended them slowly as the last of the daylight faded behind the ridge above Sylva. The square below was settling into evening—storefront lights flickering on one by one as people drifted home.
He reached the bottom, rolling tension from his shoulders.
Parking on Main had seemed harmless at the time.
Now, after a day of calls from Raleigh, two reporters, and one very pointed email from the attorney general’s office, he was reconsidering the wisdom of surrendering his courthouse space to a busload of fifth graders touring the museum wing.
He unlocked his car as the streetlights blinked on.
Out of habit, his eyes lifted across the square.
