Page 113 of In the Dark of the Past

It took forty minutes.

We photographed every transfer record in the MR-7 box. Every directive folder with Grant’s signature. The full TARGETS series—all thirty-seven years of cycles, all the names, all the notations. My father’s folder. My mother’s folder. My folder.

We took the physical originals for the most recent three cycles, the ones with Sean’s signature, and placed them in evidence bags Atlas had had the foresight to bring. Everything else, we documented in place and left where it was. Disturbing the full archive would tip off Grant immediately. What we needed was a clean chain of custody on the pieces that would matter the most to a prosecutor. Someone who wasn’t in on this. We might have to be creative with who we reported this to.

Atlas checked his watch as we came back up through the maintenance door into the cold. “The state board convenes soon.”

“We have enough,” I said.

“The physical originals plus the photographic record plus Jordyn’s testimony…” Finn said.

“It’s enough to go to the AG,” I said. “Maybe not the state board, especially since Grant owns the oversight process. But we can go over his head.”

Finn looked at me.

“The AG’s office,” I said again. “We bypass the county system entirely. We walk in with a sworn deputy, the original documents, a corroborating witness, and records. We let the AG decide whether the mayor of Maple Ridge filing a complaint against the sheriff who found his records vault constitutes a conflict of interest.”

Atlas laughed. It was short and not entirely mirthful, but it was real. “She’s not wrong.”

“No,” Finn said. “She’s not.”

He was looking at me with the expression he wore when he was thinking more than he was saying, which was his default state but more visible than usual in the gray of a pre-dawn morning in a parking lot behind a condemned building with evidence bags in our hands.

“What?” I said.

“Your mother spent years trying to get into that room,” he said. “She never made it.”

The weight of that settled over me. “No,” I said. “But she made sure I could.”

The cedar chest. Keep the things that matter. The letter in the false bottom, written in pieces during whatever slivers of privacy Stonybrooke allowed, making sure the path was clear even if she couldn’t walk it herself.

She’d gotten me here, and I’d gotten in.

Finn took the evidence bags from my hands so I didn’t have to carry them to the car. It was a small thing. He did it without making it a gesture.

I let him.

“Okay,” I said. “Sean next.”

Finn’s jaw set.

“Sean next,” he agreed.

We got into the SUV and drove back toward town, the evidence bags on the back seat, the sky beginning its slow dissolution into something that was almost a nice morning.

Somewhere in the county courthouse, Lucas Grant was probably already working the phones. Probably very confident that whatever had been in that building would never see the light of day.

He wasn’t wrong about the building.

But he was wrong about what we’d carried out of it.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Finn

I left River at the station with Atlas and drove to Sean’s office alone.

She didn’t argue. She’d read my face after the annex and understood—not everything, but enough—that this was the part I needed to do without an audience. She’d pressed her hand flat against my chest for one second, not gripping, just placing, and then she’d stepped back.