Annette took that in with the kind of silence that meant paperwork would bleed later.
“All right,” she said. “You get her attorney those records. You cooperate with responding law enforcement. You don’t freelance yourself into a cell because you decided to be romantic at a crime scene.”
Jade’s eyebrows lifted.
I turned away from her because my face had apparently decided this was a fine time to betray me.
“This isn’t romance,” I said.
Jade snorted behind me.
Annette sighed. “Men are exhausting. Call me when someone official has your statement.”
“I’ll call.”
“And Dex?”
“What?”
“You did the right thing. I’m going to be furious about it after coffee.”
The line went dead.
I lowered the phone.
Ike had gone quiet against the truck, too quiet for a man who’d arrived believing Frank Dugan had built him an exit.
I crouched near him, out of range of his boots. “You want to start helping yourself before the deputies get here?”
His face twisted. “Frank said he’d keep my name off the worst of it.”
“Frank sent you to do the worst of it.”
“He said the records wouldn’t matter if Crystal was dead.”
Crystal flinched.
Jade’s hand tightened around the tire iron.
I kept my voice level because Jade was already holding enough fury for both of us. “Frank’s going to say this was all you.”
Ike stared at me.
His eyes shifted toward the gate, then the banker box at Crystal’s feet, then the phone in my hand.
Ike swallowed. “He told me when you’d been sent, where the girl worked, where she lived, and what places she might run. He said if you followed the records, I followed you.”
“Keep talking,” I said.
Ike turned toward the approaching flash of red-blue light beyond the gate.
His face drained.
“Then you better make sure they’re recording,” he said.
BY THE TIME THE SUNcleared the ridge, Ike Pendleton was in custody, Frank Dugan was being picked up, and Crystal’s attorney had the flash drive in her hand.
It wasn’t a courtroom, and it wasn’t a clean ending yet, but the records were in hands Frank didn’t control.
