Page 8 of Fatal Fame
Callie was quiet for a long beat, her hands tightening slightly on the steering wheel. "Rebecca was... complicated. The town's version of the story is cleaner than the truth usually is."
"What do you mean?"
"There were whispers. About her personal life. About people she might have been involved with." Callie said. "Including a cop."
Mia's pulse quickened. "Which cop?"
Callie's eyes flashed toward the dashboard camera, then back to the road. "You want answers, learn to ask better questions."
The rest of the ride passed in tense silence, Mia's mind racing with implications she couldn't quite grasp.
Dusk settledover the Sutherland house like a heavy blanket, bringing with it the scent of pine and the promise of rain. Noah sat in his study, surrounded by the familiar comfort of leather-bound books and the less comfortable presence of cardboardboxes. The desk lamp drew a hard circle of light in the gathering darkness, illuminating legal pads covered with his careful handwriting and photographs that told stories he'd been trying to decode for years.
Thomas O'Connell sat across from him, grayer than the last time they'd met, his trench coat draped over the back of his chair. He held a manila folder in his hands, and his eyes carried the weight of a man who'd seen the same fire from different angles.
"Coffee's getting cold," Noah said, gesturing toward the untouched mug beside Thomas' elbow.
"Oh, right." Thomas took a sip then opened the folder and spread its contents across the desk—photocopied documents, redacted reports, the paper trail of investigations that had died unnatural deaths. "Did your father ever mention the Ashford Royale Casino probe?"
"No. Probably because it went dormant.”
"It didn’t go dormant. It was killed." Thomas' finger traced a line on one of the documents. "We were close, Noah. We had servers, transaction records, a digital paper trail. Then one day, I get a call telling me I had been reassigned, effective immediately. Case files were sealed pending a review."
Noah leaned forward, studying the documents. "A review that never happened."
"A review that was never meant to happen." Thomas pulled out a memory stick, no bigger than a thumb drive. "I had a feeling this would all go away, so this is what I managed to save. Not much, but enough to see the pattern."
"What pattern?"
“The same pattern you saw in the warehouse raid." Thomas set down a photocopy, a redacted ledger snippet with a series of numbers barely visible through the black ink. "Look at this sequence. Now look at this." He placed another document besideit, a state fuel card purchase, months after the casino probe had officially died. "Same numbers."
Noah felt the familiar tingle of connection, the moment when seemingly random facts began to form a picture. "So you believed Ashford had someone inside."
“One, maybe two people. Someone with access to state resources, state intel, state protection." Thomas’ voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "Your father helped me a lot back then, you know. Hugh had good instincts about people. Though I will never forget the day they pulled me off that casino job."
“And today? Do you still think there's someone compromised inside?”
"I think whoever killed the casino investigation is still out there. Still pulling strings. Still making problems disappear." Thomas' eyes were hard, reflecting years of frustration and unanswered questions.
Noah wanted answered. But Thomas was right to be cautious. In a game where the rules kept changing, accusations without proof were just suicide notes written in advance.
"This town scrubs fast," Thomas continued, his tone shifting to something darker. "Suicides get clean sheets. Murders get new wallpaper." He looked at Noah with knowing eyes.
After Thomas left, Noah sat alone in the circle of lamplight, staring at the memory stick and thinking about patterns within patterns, about investigations that had ended before they had begun.
The dining roomsmelled of roast chicken and thyme, with wet coats steaming by the register and the sound of rain pattering against the windows. The table was set for four, but it felt tooquiet for the number of people gathered around it—like a stage where the actors had forgotten their lines.
Hugh sat at the head of the table, his gray hair neatly combed and his eyes bright with the kind of alert intelligence that came and went these days, depending on whether his medication was working and how tired he was. Mia sat to his right, bright-eyed but careful, the way she got when she was processing information she wasn't supposed to have. Ethan slumped across from her in full black-on-black teenage armor—dyed hair, black nail polish, sleeves pulled down over his hands like he was trying to disappear inside his own clothes.
Noah floated between host and referee, serving dinner and monitoring the emotional temperature of his family with the same attention he brought to crime scenes.
"How's track going, Ethan?" Noah asked, cutting into his chicken.
"Fine."
"Coach says you've been missing practice."
"Yeah."
