“I have enough for an arrest warrant.” Harker straightened his tie. “He’ll be in custody today. Before the gala.”
Three years. Evan turned the number over while the marshal packed her kit. Three years of containers moving through a Wilmington broker, which meant the ornament theft wasn’t a desperate man’s first bad idea. It was the loudest move in a long, quiet game. The scrap he’d lifted out of an empty room with two fingers had just become the thread that tied all of it together.
He looked at Margot. She looked at him. The pier stretched out behind them, the fireworks cabinet closed and certified, the harbor bright, calm, and ignorant of how close it had come.
Five years ago, a pier, a crowd, and Christmas lights had been the last thing he saw before everything went wrong. Tonight, the same three things would be the first thing he saw when it went right.
“The gala still happens,” Margot said.
It wasn’t a question, but he answered it anyway. “The gala still happens.” He rested his hand flat on the cabinet, on the warm gray metal. “But this time we control the ending.”
Harker frowned at both of them, opened his mouth, and closed it. “I’ll call you when we have him.”
Then, he walked back down the planks toward his car.
Margot pulled out her phone and texted Jolene.Gala is on. Team meeting at six fifteen. Kitchen. Bring your clipboard.
Then she tucked the phone away and stood there a moment, looking down the length of the pier toward the resort. The white clapboard caught the sun. Staff were rolling out tables and untangling light strands, building an evening for two hundred people who would never hear the words,crossed leads.
“You caught it.” She held his arm. “You understand that, right? Whatever else happens today. You walked out here and you caught it.”
“I had to open the hatch first.”
“Evan.”
“I understand. I’m working on the rest.”
They walked back down the pier together, footsteps in sync on the old planks, the harbor wide and glittering around them, and the thing between them stronger than anything Caleb Henson had tried to break.
The wires were straight now. Tonight, the first shell would go up instead of out. He intended to be standing right there when it did.
Chapter thirty-nine
Both Hands Empty
HarkerarrestedCalebHensonat two o’clock in the afternoon, in the resort parking lot, in full view of six vendors, and a cluster of returning guests. A Channel 12 news crew that had come for a story about Christmas in July and gotten a better one.
Margot watched from the terrace, both hands on the railing.
She couldn’t hear the words from that distance, but she could see the shape of them. Harker’s measured approach across the asphalt. The badge glinting once in the sun. Two officers flanking him.
Caleb turned from the open trunk of his van with chicken wire in one hand and a roll of tape in the other. A man in the middle of an ordinary errand. The smile he wore for vendors and guests and sisters disappeared.
He didn’t resist. He set the wire down on the bumper, then stood still while Harker cuffed him. The Channel 12 camera drank in every second of it.
Then he looked up. Past the cameras. Past the frozen vendors. Directly at the terrace. Directly at her.
His expression carried nothing she could name. Not anger. Not defeat. A chill walked up her arms in the July heat.
The cruiser door closed. The car pulled out, turned onto the highway, and was gone. The parking lot exhaled. Somewhere below, a vendor laughed.
Evan appeared beside her at the railing. He didn’t say anything. He stood with his shoulder against hers and watched the empty stretch of road where the cruiser had been.
Two weeks. Two weeks of coffee in the dock shed, evidence on butcher paper, and hands finding each other across workbenches and bench seats.
“It’s over.” She exhaled.
“Almost.” He glanced at her. “The ornaments are still out there.”
