Page 124 of Silent Bones
"Convenient."
"Very. Look, Noah, I know this screws the case against Ashford, but?—"
"There is no case without Ashford," Noah interrupted, the bitter truth of it settling in his chest like a weight. "Mack's confession dies with him. The nod he gave me isn't admissible, wasn't recorded, didn't happen as far as any court is concerned."
Mia was watching him with growing concern, her pancakes forgotten. Noah tried to force a reassuring smile, but knew he was failing.
"What about the smuggling network?" McKenzie asked. "All that information about the route, the drop points?"
"Hearsay now. We can investigate it, maybe roll up some of the smaller players, but without Mack's testimony connecting it to Luther..." Noah let the sentence hang.
"I'm sorry, Noah. I know how much this meant to you."
Noah stared out the diner window at the ordinary afternoon traffic, people going about their ordinary lives while justice died in a jail cell miles away.
"Yeah."
He ended the call and looked across the table at his daughter, who was studying him with the too-perceptive eyes of a teenager who'd grown up around police work.
"Bad news?" she asked quietly.
"Yeah, sweetheart. Bad news."
"About the case?"
Noah nodded, not trusting himself to speak for a moment. The weight of it was crushing, all those hours of investigation, all the evidence they'd gathered, all the connections they'd made, and Luther Ashford would walk away clean. Again.
"Sometimes the bad guys just win," he said finally.
Mia reached across the table and squeezed his hand. "But you stopped the person who murdered those kids, right? Dale?"
"Yeah. We stopped Dale."
"Then you did win, Dad. Maybe not completely, but you saved people. You saved that girl."
Noah looked at his daughter's earnest face and felt something ease in his chest. She was right, in her way. They'd stopped Dale, exposed the truth about Wallface, saved Avery's life. It wasn't complete victory, but it wasn't complete defeat either.
"You're pretty smart, you know that?"
"I get it from my mother."
He laughed.
They finished lunch in comfortable silence, the shadow of the phone call gradually receding. As they prepared to leave, Noah's mind was already shifting to the camping trip, to the simple pleasure of spending time with his kids away from murder investigations and corrupt officials and the endless grinding machinery of a justice system that protected the powerful and discarded the inconvenient.
But in the back of his mind, Luther Ashford's face lingered like smoke. The man had won another round, and got to disappear back into his world of wealth and influence and untouchable connections.
For now, Luther was free. But Noah had learned patience in his years as a detective. He'd learned that justice sometimes moved slowly, that the arc of investigation was long but could bend toward truth if you kept pushing.
Someday, Luther would make a mistake. Someday, the corruption would crack just enough to let the light in.
And when that day came, Noah would be waiting.
But for now, he had a camping trip to plan and a daughter who still believed her father could save the world, one case at a time.
That would have to be enough.
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