Page 87 of Final Drive

Here it comes.

“I told him about you. In the stairwell. I told him you’d been three steps ahead of him since you found his alt account.”

“I heard.”

“And he didn’t react.” Her thumb stops moving. “At all. I said your name and watched his face and got nothing. He reacted when I said Sophia. He didn’t react when I said you.”

The quiet in the room develops a direction, and the direction is me.

I’ve had the answer in my chest for sixteen hours. I’ve been running probability on the best moment to hand it over, and there isn’t one. I should have predicted that. There’s never a good moment for information nobody wants.

“He didn’t react since there’s nothing for him to react to. I don’t have him.”

Eli’s head comes up.

“You have the messages,” Reese says.

“I have messages between two anonymous accounts. One is Kinsley’s, and I can prove that, since she tagged it from her real profile and I have the screenshot with the timestamp.” I open the laptop on my knees without looking at it. “The other is registered to a burner email and a prepaid number. No name. No billing address. No device I can tie to it.”

“You said it was his.”

“It is his. I’m certain.” I keep my tone level through the next part. “Certain isn’t the standard. I can put that account in a conversation with Kinsley’s. I can’t put Quinton Whitmore’s hand on the keyboard.”

Zane sits down on the floor.

“Sophia,” Bo says.

“Sophia’s statement describes an assault at Exeter, in a bedroom, at a party, and in their junior year of high school. It was reported. His father made it disappear. It’s four years old, it happened in another state, and Sable Ridge has no jurisdiction over any of it.” I close the laptop. “It’s context. Okafor can read it and believe every word, and it still won’t support a finding.”

“So where does it go,” Cameron says.

“In the file. Next to the part of the file that already worked.”

“Kinsley.” Reese says it before I have to. “Everything you found convicts Kinsley.”

“Yes.”

“And Kinsley’s already finished.”

“Yes.”

Nobody speaks for a while. I don’t time it.

I’ve been rehearsing how to phrase this all day, and none of the phrasings improve it, so I use the shortest. “He walks. Unless he gives us a new incident on the record, he walks. He knows he walks. That’s why my name didn’t move his face.”

Beckett gets up and leaves. The screen door bangs.

“How long have you known?” Reese asks.

“Since about four. I ran it seventeen ways first. I wanted to be wrong.”

“You should have told me this morning.”

“I was going to tell you tonight.” I take my glasses off and clean them on my shirt. It’s a thing I do when my hands need a job. I’m aware of it while it’s happening, and I do it anyway. “You had one thing you could still win today and it was in that room. If I’d handed it to you before you walked in there, you’d have carried it in with you.”

“That wasn’t your call.”

“No. It wasn’t.”