Page 44 of Diesel’s Desire

It’s a long time before Johnson comes back around the side of the ambulance, face still pale, notepad hanging loose in one hand like he forgot he was holding it.

“Chief needs you,” he says, voice rough. “Inside.”

“I’m not leaving her.”

“EMT’s got her. She’s stable. He needs you.” He swallows hard. “You’re gonna want to hear this from somebody, and I’d rather it be me than you walking in blind.”

I climb down, tell the EMT I’ll be right back, and follow Johnson a few yards off, out of Addison’s earshot.

“Guards,” he says. “Three of them. Two dead near the front entrance, single shots, close range. One’s alive, zip-tied to a drainpipe out by the pool house, gagged. He’s not talking yet, but he’s breathing.”

“And Pemberton?”

Johnson’s jaw works. “Basement. Beaten up bad before he got shot. Face is—” He stops, shakes his head. “Naked. Robe open. Sitting in an armchair facing a bed. A little girl’s bed.”

I don’t say anything. I can’t, not right away, and my hand finds my stomach again, pressing flat against the uniform there, because even knowing—even having built the theory myself, having felt it in my gut—hearing it laid out plain still lands like a fist.

That motherfucker.

I search myself for the horror I know I’m supposed to feel about two men executed near the front door, one man beaten and shot in a basement built to look like a child’s bedroom. I search for the part of me that’s supposed to care, that took an oath to protect due process even for monsters, that’s supposed to want a trial, a jury, a system working the way it’s meant to.

I don’t find it. Not even a little.

If it were up to this town’s police chief, up to the mayor he answers to, up to every layer of money and favor that’s protected Douglas Pemberton for years, that man would still be sitting in that basement tonight, and there’d be a fourth family somewhere out there lying to their neighbors about relief they don’t feel.

Does that mean something’s wrong with me? Maybe. I’m a cop. I’m supposed to want the law to have done this instead of men I spent a decade and a half resenting.

I don’t tell Johnson who did it. I don’t tell Morris. I’m not sure I’ll ever tell anyone, not even years from now, not even if somebody asks me directly under oath. There are things I’ll carry to my grave rather than hand over, and this is going to be one of them.

“You okay?” Johnson asks, studying me carefully now, the earlier hostility drained out of his voice.

“No,” I say honestly. “But I will be. Let’s get to work.”

CSI arrives from Knoxville a little after four, and the same tech from County Road 9 shows up with her hair scraped back just as tight, setting up floodlights across Pemberton’s lawn. I watch her work the scene the same slow, methodical way, cataloguing bodies before anyone’s allowed to touch them, and I stand off to the side taking my own notes because that’s what I’m here to do, that’s the account I need on paper by morning.

Morris finds me near the ambulance a while later, Addison already gone, transported to the hospital with a deputy riding along and social services meeting them there.

“Her parents,” he says, voice hoarse. “I need them detained. Questioned.”

“Bring in the other three sets of parents too,” I say. “Doss, Whitfield, Pruitt. We need their statements.”

He looks at me, and something in his face cracks a little further. “Penny⁠—”

“They knew,” I say, quieter now, not cruel about it, just tired enough that I can’t soften the truth. “Maybe not everything. Maybe they told themselves it was something else. But they knew enough to lie to their neighbors and call it relief. That’s not nothing.”

He runs both hands down his face, and for a second he looks every one of his sixty-some years, haggard in a way I’ve never seen on him, not even during the Halvorsen case, not even last night, yelling at me across his desk.

I find it hard not to blame him. I want to believe he’d have kicked that door down himself if he’d known for certain what Pemberton was doing. But he wouldn’t let me ask the questions that might have proved it.

Not knowing isn’t much of a defense when he refused to look. I can’t forgive that yet.

“We need statements from all four families,” he says finally, voice flat. “I’ll call the DA’s office at dawn.”

Morning comes and goes without me really noticing the transition, gray light sliding into gold while CSI keeps combing the property inch by inch. I walk the perimeter twice, take statements from the surviving guard once he’s finally coherent enough to talk—which isn’t much, just confirms masked men came from the treeline, doesn’t remember faces, doesn’t remember anything useful enough to matter.

I find my way into the house again eventually, once the scene’s been cleared enough for me to move through it without stepping on anything critical. The surveillance room sits just off the kitchen, a bank of monitors gone dark, and I stand in the doorway a long moment looking at melted circuit boards and cracked drive casings, hardware damaged enough that I can’t tell what, if anything, can be recovered.

I breathe out slow, a small, private relief settling into my chest that I don’t examine too closely.