Page 86 of In the Dark of the Past

I had to stop for a moment on ‘corrections.’ The clinical precision of it. The way it dressed up murder in the language of maintenance. I made a note in the margin of the transcript—’[see annex records, MR-7 account, cycles 2004–2021]’—and kept going.

Finn wants a face. That’s why we gave him the phantom Watcher. Keeps him occupied while we decide what to do about the Eleanor situation.

You can’t spin this. People will want someone to blame.

They always do.

A beat. Then Grant’s voice again, quieter.

We just have to remove the emotional anchor.

And that anchor is River Bennett. She makes this personal. She makes it a story. If she’s discredited, if she leaves, if she disappears—Finn has no narrative. He’s just a sheriff who dug up a cold case and lost.

I was a liability to be managed. That was the whole of it—not personal, not specific, just operational. The same calculus they’d applied to Eleanor, to my father, to my mother. If a person became inconvenient, you removed the inconvenience.

The distinction between ‘discredited’ and ‘disappears’ in the phrasing was doing a lot of quiet work. Both were options. Neither was ruled out. The choice between them was a matter of what was easiest.

I made another margin note and kept typing.

I didn’t sign up for that, either.

Grant’s voice came back—flatter now. The patience colder.

Then maybe you become number eight.

Jordyn’s silence after that line lasted four seconds. I counted them on the timestamp. Four seconds of a woman being reminded that the thing protecting her from the system she worked for was her continued usefulness to it, and that usefulness was not guaranteed.

I understood that silence. I’d been in the vicinity of it myself.

The next voice on the recording stopped my hands over the keyboard.

I had known it was coming. I’d been there on the ridge. I’d watched Finn absorb it in real time and had made the choice to keep the phone steady while the man beside me understood that his brother was standing in a quarry at ten in the morning discussing the operational management of Maple Ridge’s dead.

Knowing it was coming didn’t help.

Sean Callahan’s voice on the recording was exactly what it had been in person—measured, clipped, the voice of a man accustomed to being the most prepared person in any room. He sounded like Finn, if Finn had spent thirty years making different choices.

Watch your tone, Jordyn.

Four words. But the authority in them—the casual assumption that he had the standing to manage her—told the whole story of his role in the arrangement. He wasn’t giving orders the way Grant gave orders. He was ‘tidying.’ Managing the people beneath him the way a DA managed a complicated caseload. This was just another file.

We all have roles to play. The arrangement is straightforward. You provide intel. We ensure the department stays uninformed. Simple.

I glanced at Finn.

He was looking at the table. Not at the phone, not at my laptop—at the grain of the wood, the way people looked at things that weren’t the thing they were actually seeing.

I typed Sean’s words verbatim and did not soften them.

The seven have always been the mechanism. The Fund doesn’t operate without the mechanism. The DA’s office ensures the mechanism stays invisible. That’s the arrangement. Has been for six years.

Six years. Since he took office.

I made a note:

‘[duration of cooperation—cross-reference MR-7 transfer records, 2018 cycle onward].’

The recording continued through the rest of the exchange. Grant wrapping up, Jordyn’s final fearful acquiescence, the sound of car doors, engines, gravel. I transcribed it all. When I reached the end and the file showed 00:00 remaining, I stopped the playback and sat back.