Page 148 of Weight of Guilt

Every few seconds, the scene inside the house replayed in his head.

Jacob twisting beneath him. The gun trapped between them. The barrel moving. The shot.

For half a second after the gun went off, Nash hadn’t known who’d been hit.

That half second kept coming back.

So did another one.

A different house. A different case. A different man bleeding while Nash tried to convince himself he’d made the only choice he could.

And under it, the other thing. The thing he had no right to be turning over anymore.

Prine had been clear. He wasn’t part of this. Not the interviews, not the evidence, none of it.

His head hadn’t gotten the message.

A dead man in a root cellar off Pilcher Road—an arsonist nobody had an address on since 2020—and no reason on earth for him to be there. Everett Voss, who owned that land under his mother’s name and had renewed a driver’s license in March using an address where he hadn’t lived in years. Three curved lines carved low into a support timber, close enough to the dirt that a man would have to be sitting down to cut them.

Nash still couldn’t place that mark. He’d been trying since Monday. He had a feeling Luke hadn’t asked Christian about it yet either. Too much had happened. They still needed to, just to cover all their bases.

Then Jacob. We. There’s a greater purpose in all of it. A man who took a boy and left him fed and unharmed in a house he’d handed them the address to.

Somebody had wanted them in that house. Not to trap them. Jacob had been surprised to find them there.

You came too soon.

Which meant something else was supposed to have happened first.

Nash didn’t know what. He didn’t know who Roy had been checking on out past the county line for ten years, or who was still out there doing it now.

He only knew the shape of it was bigger than one man on a stretcher.

His chest tightened.

“Nash.”

He turned.

Luke crossed the yard toward him, his hands resting on his duty belt. “You okay?”

Nash almost laughed. “Depends on your definition.”

Luke stopped beside him and followed his gaze toward the ambulance. “You did the right thing in there.”

“A man was shot.”

“An armed man who kidnapped a child and was trying to take that child and his mother somewhere else was shot. The gun went off during the struggle.”

“Doesn’t change what I said.” Nash rubbed a hand over his jaw.

Luke was quiet a moment before adding, “You know what guilt does if you let it?”

Nash glanced at him. “I have some experience.”

“I figured.” Luke shifted his attention toward the mountains beyond the house. “People talk about guilt like carrying it proves you care. Like if you put it down, you’re saying what happened didn’t matter.”

Nash said nothing. He couldn’t argue.