Before they left, Vasquez walked them to the front of the station, and she stopped at the doors and looked at Hank, and then at Sarah, and she said something Sarah did not expect.
Detective work is slow, Vasquez said. "But I want you both to understand how this goes from here. Your chapter —" she looked at Hank "— works with us, not around us. No one follows Ray. No one leans on witnesses. No one does anything that gives his lawyer room to say this case was built by intimidation. We do this clean, or we don't do it at all."
Hank nodded. "We've already agreed. Same thing I told my brothers this morning. We're witnesses now, not soldiers."
Good, Vasquez said. "Because this case is going to be won on paper and testimony, not on the street. And I intend to win it."
Outside, the rain had stopped, and the light over Portland was the thin, silver light that comes after rain, and Sarah stood on the station steps with Hank and Priya and felt something she had not felt since the morning in booth nine: the sense that the ground under her feet, while still uncertain, was no longer entirely hers to hold alone. There were other people holding it now. A detective with a shelved file. A lawyer with a steady voice. A brotherhood that had agreed, formally, to be lawful. And a father whose letter, written in fear twenty-four years ago, had finally reached the room where it could do its work.
The call came on a Tuesday, just after dawn, while Sarah was setting the clubhouse table for breakfast.
Vasquez's voice on the phone was flat and professional, the way people's voices go when they are carrying news too heavy to carry any other way. "Danny talked," she said. "He's leading us to the site this morning. I want you there, Sarah — not at the dig, but nearby. You should hear it from us, first, and not from the news."
Hank drove her. They followed the police cars out of Portland and into the hills, where the road narrowed and the trees closed in and the rain from the night before still dripped from the branches onto the windshield. Sarah watched the woods go by and tried to imagine her father here, twenty-four years ago, on a road like this, in a truck like the one in the photographs. She could not do it. The woods were too green, too quiet, too indifferent. They did not look like a place where a man's life ended. They looked like a place where nothing had ever happened at all, and that, she thought, was the cruelest part: the world had gone on being beautiful without him.
The staging area was a gravel pull-off half a mile from the site, with a sheriff's van, two patrol cars, and a canopy under which a young officer stood with a clipboard and tried not to look at Sarah too directly. Vasquez met them at the barrier tape and walked Sarah to a folding chair under the canopy, and Priya arrived ten minutes later with coffee that Sarah held but did not drink.
You don't have to stay, Vasquez said. "If this gets to be too much, Hank takes you home. No one will think less of you."
I'm staying, Sarah said.
So she stayed, and the morning stretched, and the woods gave up their sounds one by one: the distant thud of shovels, the murmur of voices through the trees, the crackle of a radio, the long silences in between. Hank sat beside her and said nothing, and his silence was the best thing anyone had offered her all week, because it did not ask her to be anything. After a while, though, he spoke, quietly, as if the woods themselves were listening.
He laughed when he was nervous, Hank said. "Not a big laugh. A short one, under his breath, like he was apologizing for it. The last time I saw him, we were working on my bike in his garage, and he kept wiping his hands on a rag and saying he had something to tell me, and then not telling me. I thought it was about money. I thought he'd ask me for a loan." Hank stared out at the trees. "It was the ring. It was always the ring. And I went home that night thinking he was just quiet, and I didn't call him the next day, and then the next day he was gone."
Sarah took his hand. It was the second time she had done it, and this time it felt less like reaching for help and more like offering it. "You didn't know," she said.
No, Hank said. "But knowing that doesn't bring back the day I didn't call."
They sat with that, the two of them, in the cold, while the shovels worked somewhere beyond the trees and the radio crackled and the woods kept their own counsel. She thought about the box Diana had given her — the watch, the photographs, the letter — and she thought about the watch in particular, because a watch was a thing a man wore every day, a thing that had ticked against his wrist while he worked, while he laughed, while he saved for a plain band for a woman who didn't like fancy things. She wondered if it was still ticking down there, under the earth, and then she felt ashamed of the thought, and then she felt nothing at all, just the cold seeping up through the soles of her shoes.