Then came the second job. The call had come in the afternoon, from the Summit dispatcher, casual, as if it were routine. Same gate. Same road. This time, Deluca was told, they would need to get in even if the code had changed. Deluca had asked what that meant. The dispatcher had been vague. Deluca had asked again, and the dispatcher had said, "Bring the cutters if Pryce doesn't have them," and Deluca had understood, all at once, what the second night was.
He had not gone. He had called in sick, and his voice had shaken when he did it, and he had sat in his apartment all evening with his phone in his hand, waiting for news he was afraid to hear. When the news came โ Pryce arrested, lock scarred but holding, no one hurt โ Deluca felt relief and shame in equal measure, because relief meant he had been right not to go, and shame meant he had known enough to stay home and not enough, until now, to do anything else.
The photographs were still on his drive. Among them, filed under a date six days before the first intrusion, were the ones he had almost forgotten: the Pine Ridge patrol vehicle parked down the road from the Walker gate, and the propane driver, his hand at the keypad, entering the code. Deluca had taken those photographs himself, on a different patrol, when he had been told to document deliveries to the property. He had not understood, then, why a propane delivery needed documenting. He understood now. Someone had watched the driver, recorded the code, and handed it to Pryce for the first night.
Deluca sat with that knowledge for two days. He did not call Linda. He did not call Summit. He called, finally, a number he had gotten from a neighbor who knew a lawyer in Hamilton โ Frank Delgado's office โ and he asked, in a voice that sounded older than he felt, if he could speak to someone about a trespass case.
Delgado met him in person, in a small conference room with a window that looked out onto Hamilton's main street, and Delgado did not rush him. Delgado asked him to start at the beginning, and Deluca did, and when he got to the propane driver photographs, Delgado leaned forward very slightly, the way a man does when a piece of paper he has been waiting for finally appears.
"Do you still have them?" Delgado asked.
"Yes," Deluca said. "All of them. The cabin, the barn, the gate, the road measurements โ Pryce's wheel logs match them, I think โ and the driver at the keypad. I kept everything."
"Why did you keep them?" Delgado asked, not as an accusation but as a question he genuinely wanted answered, because the answer would matter when Deluca told the same story to someone else.
Deluca thought about it. "Because I was a surveyor's assistant," he said. "You don't throw away a measurement. Even if you don't like what it measures."
Delgado nodded, and then he explained, carefully, what would happen next: that Deluca's statement would be taken, that the photographs would be preserved, that Sheriff Harper would need to speak with him, and that telling the truth now would not undo the first night but would change what the first night meant. Deluca listened, and he felt the weight he had been carrying since 2:13 a.m. shift, slightly, to a place where he could set it down in front of someone else.
"I didn't go the second night," Deluca said, at the end, as if he needed Delgado to hear that part clearly. "I want that on the record too. I didn't go because I knew what they were going to do to that lock."
"It will be on the record," Delgado said.
When Deluca left the office, the afternoon light in Hamilton was bright and ordinary, and for the first time in weeks he did not feel as if he were waiting for a gate to open in the dark.
Chapter 27
Ethan met Ray Deluca for the first time in Delgado's office, and he was surprised by how ordinary the man looked. He had imagined, from the video, a stranger in a reflective vest, faceless in the dark. The man sitting across the table was older, gray at the temples, with hands that looked like they had held tools for a living and eyes that did not quite meet Ethan's at first, and then did, and held.
"I owe you an apology," Deluca said, before Delgado could introduce them properly. "Not a legal one. A plain one. I was on your property that night. I took pictures of your house. That was wrong, and I'm sorry."
Ethan looked at him for a long moment. Thirty years in law enforcement had taught him to distrust apologies that came too easily, and also to recognize the ones that did not. Deluca's apology was not easy. It sat heavily in the room, and it did not ask Ethan to forgive him on the spot.
"Thank you for saying that," Ethan said. "And thank you for coming forward."