Al gave them a few minutes before explaining that the cassette should go to an audio specialist. It might play. It might not. Old tape could be damaged by a careless attempt.
Sarah wanted the voice now. She wanted to demand it as if waiting had already cost enough.
Instead she nodded.
“Please be careful.”
“We will.”
Hank stood near the wall. He had not touched anything, though his eyes kept returning to the recorder.
“You know what's on it?” Sarah asked.
“No.”
“But you think you do.”
“Michael recorded things. Ideas. Measurements. Stuff he wanted to remember.”
“Conversations?”
“Sometimes.”
Velez asked, “With permission?”
“Sometimes,” Hank repeated.
The detective made a note without commenting.
Sarah looked at the notebook again. Between two pages, Al found a folded drawing of a small horse. Measurements ran along the legs. At the top, Michael had written Try not to make it ugly.
Sarah laughed through her tears.
Hank closed his eyes, then smiled once with his whole face.
For a moment, Michael seemed close enough that all of them turned toward the same empty place.
Then Velez's phone vibrated.
She read the screen and stepped outside.
When she returned, she asked Al to finish documenting the box and requested that Hank come with her.
Sarah let go of Diana's hand.
“What happened?”
Velez looked at Hank before answering.
“We located a former officer named Daniel Rusk.”
Hank's expression emptied.
Sarah knew the name before anybody explained it. Not because she had heard it. Because there was only one kind of discovery that could make Hank look that way.
“The cop you trusted,” she said.
He nodded.
“Where is he?”
Velez's answer came carefully.
“He works for a private security company. One that has a contract with Raymond Cole.”
Hank put his hands flat against his thighs.
Sarah saw him choose not to move.
After a long moment, he said, “I want to make a statement.”
“You already did,” Velez said.
“No.” He looked at Sarah. “I want to make the one I should have made twenty-four years ago.”
The detective watched him in silence.
Hank took a breath.
“The recording wasn't the only thing I gave Rusk.”
Diana rose from her chair.
“What else?”
“A name.”
“Whose name?”
Hank's face had gone gray.
“Michael's contact. The man he thought could get the records outside Portland.”
Velez opened the door to the next interview room.
Sarah stayed where she was. She could feel her mother's hand searching for hers again, but she could not turn away from Hank.
“You said you never warned Cutter,” she said.
“I didn't know I was.”
For the first time, he sounded like a man asking to be believed.
Sarah understood then that learning the truth would not happen once. It would happen in rooms like this, one piece at a time, and each piece would change the weight of the others.
Yesterday, Hank had been the man who saved her.
This morning, he was also the man who might have led danger to her father without ever seeing it arrive.
She wanted those facts to cancel each other. They refused.
Velez asked Diana and Sarah to wait with Ruth while she spoke to him. This time Sarah did not argue. There were questions she wanted answered, but there were also answers she could not help produce by standing in the doorway and hurting.
Ruth guided them to a bench near a window.
Outside, the rain had stopped. Water clung to the bare branches of a street tree, and a city worker was picking litter from the curb with a long metal tool.
Sarah watched him put a crushed cup into a bag.
“How do you live with knowing somebody did a bad thing?” she asked.
Ruth sat beside her.
“Depends what they do after you know.”
“What if they can't fix it?”
“Most important things can't be fixed backward.”
Diana looked down at her ring.
Sarah rested her head against the cool glass.
Beyond the door, a chair scraped the floor. Hank began speaking, too quietly for her to make out words.
This time, he did not stop.
And this time, when Sarah's phone rang with an unknown number, she did not let it go to voicemail.
She answered before she could think better of it.
A man's voice said her full name.
Then he said, “Tell Hank I still remember what he owes me.”
The line went dead before Sarah could ask who was speaking or why he had called.
She waited.