"Don't," I tell him.
"You're going to need it." He pours a healthy shot into the cup.
"You said that at the memorial."
"It keeps being true." He picks up a glass and begins polishing it. "Your cousin came through about an hour ago."
Early morning is unusual for Thayer. His relationship with the hotel is performative, the warm Aldrich stopping in to shake hands and make the staff feel valued, and he typically does itat midday when the lobby is full enough for the performance to have an audience.
An hour ago the lobby held Vera and the overnight bellhop.
"Did he come from upstairs?"
Keaton sets the polished glass on the rail, picks up another, and resumes. "He came down the main stairs, stopped at the desk, and asked Vera about the woman with the messenger bag."
I wait.
"What specifically?"
"Her name, how long she's staying, whether she'd met with anyone."
"And Vera told him."
"Vera told him everything. The room number, the length of the reservation, the fact that she had a drink at the bar last night with Greer."
Greer's name in a file I can control is one thing. Greer's name in Thayer's hands is another, and the heat that climbs the back of my neck has nothing to do with strategy.
Thayer's warmth pointed at a stranger is performance. Thayer's warmth pointed at her is something I can feel in my jaw, in the tightening across my shoulders, in the part of me that watched him hold her hand at the memorial a beat too long and filed it in a place that has nothing to do with a cabinet.
"Did Thayer ask follow-up questions?"
Keaton's hands pause on the glass for a count of one, then resume. "That's the interesting part. He didn't."
Someone who needs to knowwhystarts withwhy. Someone who skips it already has the answer.
At the memorial, his gaze held on Greer a beat too long, and I clocked it as assessment. Now he's running the same pattern on the state investigator: collect the logistics, skip the purpose, move on.
Where Thayer's information is coming from is the question I keep circling. It isn't coming from me, and Ward doesn't share operational details with his son the way he shares them with his nephew. Thayer has a channel I haven't mapped.
I set the glass down. "Where is he now?"
"He left through the front." Keaton nods toward the lobby. "He smiled at Vera on the way out. She smiled back. Everybody smiled."
I take the stairs to the second floor. My office is where I left it, the desk clean, the files organized, the view of Main Street framed by the window I chose specifically for its sightline to the county building.
My email holds nothing from Ward and nothing from Rick Halston's office, which means the administrative hold I placed on the permits is still in effect, or it means Rick has been told to stop communicating with me about it. Both are possible.
The silence itself is the information.
Last night I followed Greer home and said five words I didn't plan to hand her.'She can open the mine.'My discipline has a blind spot shaped exactly like her, and the cost of that blind spot is a sentence I can't take back.
She stood in the porch light with her arms crossed and her jaw set and the cold reddening the skin above her collar, and what I wanted to do was close the distance and put my mouth on the hollow of her throat where I could see her pulse hammering, and take her inside, and put my hands on everything the investigation is trying to take away from me.
Instead I said goodnight and drove home.
She caught the slip. She catches everything. Tonight she'll sit across from me and make me finish the sentence, and I'll have to decide how much truth to put on the table beside the bread.
I text her:
