Page 101 of In the Dark of the Past

Atlas said nothing. Which was its own kind of answer.

The evidence room smelled wrong the moment I opened the door. The shelves looked untouched. Everything neat and correct.

Except the center rack. The priority ongoing cases.

Three boxes were gone. The gaps were precise, pulled cleanly, not grabbed in a hurry. Someone who knew exactly what they were taking and had the time to do it carefully had done this.

River stood in the doorway and read the gaps the way I’d watched her read other things.

“Darren’s confession materials,” I said. “The original audio. The forensic items from Birchwood.”

“The flash drive,” she said.

“Gone.”

“Everything that connected Darren to the drop box.”

“Everything that put the Watchers at Birchwood.”

She turned. Her face was controlled, but there was something moving behind it. It was the look she’d had at the quarry when Sean walked out of the SUV. The look of someone recalibrating.

“They’re not covering their tracks,” she said. “They’re rewriting. Taking out the evidence that supports our version and leaving the story empty.”

“So, when we go to the AG,” Atlas said from behind us, “there’s no physical chain. Just testimony and a recording they’ll call manufactured. All circumstantial and flimsy.”

“Which means,” I said, “we need something they can’t take.”

River was already there. I watched her get there. Saw the moment when the pieces arranged themselves. She went still.

“Stonybrooke,” she said.

Atlas looked at her.

“If the Watchers have been using it as a records vault—my mother’s institutionalization, my father’s fabricated evidence, Eleanor’s file—the physical documents are there. There has to be a paper trail. Original signatures. Things that exist in only one place and can’t be looped or deleted or taken from an evidence shelf.”

She looked at me. “That’s the one place they can’t erase.”

I thought about the building. It was half-condemned and flood-damaged. The kind of place that required knowing what you were walking into and being prepared for it to be worse.

I thought about what River’s mother had written.

Follow the money. Look deeper.

“We’d need to move at night,” I said. “Only a small team. Before Grant or Sean can get wind of any of it.”

Atlas crossed his arms. “I know a structural engineer who owes me a favor. I can get a current floor plan by tonight.”

“Do it.”

River’s shoulders were back, her chin was raised. It was the posture of a woman who had woken up to a quiet morning with warm coffee and decided she wasn’t going to let that be the end of it.

“We’ll make a plan,” I said.

She nodded.

Then she said, quietly enough that Atlas probably didn’t hear it, “They sent that message while we were still in the kitchen.”

“I know.”