Page 38 of Patch

“That’s a hell of a lot worse,” Brazil said.

“Yes.”

Slider spoke then, for the first time since the name went on the table. “You never told me he existed.”

“I told you there were people in that house.”

“You never said a kid.”

“No.” She looked at him. “I did not.”

“Why?”

“Because you had already killed a man for me,” she said, “and I did not know then how many more of them there would ever be. If I had said there is a boy also, you would have carried it around for nineteen years the way you carry the others.” Her chain came up. “You would have made it your business to find out what became of him. I know exactly what you are. So no. I did not tell you.”

Nobody in that room touched that. Slider’s hands stayed flat on the wood and his eyes went down to them and stayed there a good long while, and Vasha stood behind her chair and let him have it.

“All right,” Fox said, eventually. “Thank you.”

Then she went out, and Slider went out about ten seconds behind her, and Church sat with it.

Knox broke the silence, because Knox is the only man at that table who can put a number on a silence and decide it’s costing too much. “I’d like to raise something nobody’s said.”

“Raise it,” Fox said.

“We’re building toward a solution and it doesn’t exist.” He had his hands folded in front of him. “Money doesn’t work on a licensing board investigator.”

“We haven’t damn well tried.”

“We don’t want to try, Hornet. That’s not a woman with a mortgage. That’s a state employee with a case number, a supervisor, and a file that already exists in a system in Jefferson City whether she personally lives or dies.” He turned a pen over once. “The moment we touch Dana Whitlock, we convert a paperwork problem into a federal one, and we do it on top of a girl whose initials are already on the page.”

“So what does work?” Brazil asked.

“Nothing we own.” Knox looked down the table at me. “Force doesn’t. Money doesn’t. Disappearing her doesn’t. Patch, I’m not being clever. I’m telling you the club has three tools and this is the first problem in twenty years that fits none of them.”

Boots shifted. Leather creaked. Nobody argued with him, and that’s the part that landed, because somebody always argued with Knox.

“Then we take the other end,” Fox said. “We can’t stop the audit. We can end the reason there’s product moving through that clinic. Surge, you keep pulling. Gunner, I want everything on Tarasenko by tomorrow. Brazil, routes.”

“And the vet?” Hornet said. “Kessler.”

“What about him?” Fox asked.

“Sixteen months of orders through his own purchasing account. Either he’s the dumbest son of a bitch in three counties or he’s been taking a payment.”

“He’s been taking a payment,” Surge said.

“You know that or you think it?”

“I know it. There’s a lease agreement filed with the county. Kessler to a holding company, six hundred a month, signed two years ago.” He turned the laptop around. “It’s for the backroom. He wrote it up like a storage rental. There’s a line in it about after-hours access.”

“He put it in writing,” Knox said, and there was something almost admiring in how disgusted he sounded. “He put it in writing at the courthouse. That is either the stupidest damn thing I have seen this year or a man deliberately building himself a paper trail that says landlord instead of accomplice.”

“Which one?” I asked.

“Ask me after I’ve seen his bank statements.”

Six hundred dollars a month. I sat with that number, because numbers were what I did.