At dawn, while the house was still blue with first light, you retrieved the flash drive from the bathroom and your father’s letter from your waistband where it had turned warm and soft against your skin. Then the three of you sat at the kitchen table like conspirators in a home that no longer belonged to innocence.
Rebecca plugged the drive into your father’s old laptop.
Folders appeared.
Dates. Invoice scans. Photos of license plates. Video clips from the garage security camera. Audio recordings. Bank deposits tied to LLCs with fake names. There was enough there to make your heart race, but not enough for you to know whether it would survive being challenged in court by men in expensive suits. Then Rebecca clicked on a folder marked IF THEY MOVE FIRST.
Inside were photos of your father’s truck.
Close-ups of the brake line.
One image showed a clean slice.
Not wear. Not rust. A cut.
Lily made a sound like a hiccup and buried her face in your arm.
Rebecca closed the laptop with shaking hands.
“No police station,” she said immediately.
You stared at her. “What?”
“If Mercer has friends there, and I think he does, we can’t just walk in with this. Your father said Detective Salazar. No one else.”
The letter had named her too. A detective in the county major crimes unit. Someone your father trusted from high school, apparently. But if Mercer had already moved against your dad, how did you reach one honest cop without alerting every crooked one around her?
The answer arrived in the ugliest possible way.
A black SUV rolled slowly past the house at 7:12 a.m.
Then again at 7:19.
Then parked across the street.
You noticed it because grief had sharpened everything and because Mercer’s kind of wealth always came with dark windows and engines too quiet for comfort. A man sat behind the wheel pretending to look at his phone.
Rebecca saw it too. Her face lost all color.
“They know,” she whispered.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
But you did.
The funeral home.
Someone must have seen Lily refusing to leave. Someone might have searched your father’s office or the shop already and found whatever had once been there missing. Mercer’s people were not looking for proof anymore. They were looking for whoever held it now.
Lily tugged your sleeve.
“He said there’s another place,” she murmured.
You turned to her. “What place?”
She frowned, concentrating so hard her whole forehead wrinkled. “The room with the snow globe. Where the floor smells like pennies.”
Rebecca blinked.
Then she shot to her feet.
“The storage unit.”
