Chapter 5

Thursday morning the county building smelled like burnt coffee and floor wax.

Sable sat across a metal desk from an investigator named Ruiz while the video played on the county's own monitor. Clem had sent the file overnight - to the sheriff's tip address, and to the library account Sable checked on the branch computers, with three words under it: be careful, ok. Then he'd gone quiet.

Ruiz watched it twice. She didn't react the way Sable wanted.

"Walk me through what I'm seeing," Ruiz said.

"A hand putting the watch in my bag. Before she ever said it was missing."

"A hand with a ring." Ruiz paused the frame on the opal. "Whose hand?"

"Odelle Brant. My manager. It's her ring. Everybody who's worked a week there knows that ring."

"You might be right." Ruiz leaned back. "But watch what I don't have. I don't have a face. I don't have a time stamp I can trust off a cracked phone. A defense attorney looks at this and says that's any right hand, any ring, and the watch was recovered from your bag, not hers."

Sable's jaw set. "So it's nothing."

"I didn't say nothing." Ruiz slid a form across the desk. "I said not by itself. It's a thread. Give me a second thread and a third, and threads make a rope. You got anything else?"

"Not yet."

"Then we build it." Ruiz tapped the form. "This logs your copy into the file. It doesn't clear you today. These things take weeks, not an afternoon. You understand that?"

"I've got rent due tomorrow," Sable said. "I understand weeks fine."

Cormac was in the hallway when she came out, standing with his hat in his hands like a man at a funeral. He'd been making calls. She could tell by the way he held his phone, screen down, thumb worrying the edge.

"I had my accountant request an outside audit of the diner's registers," he said, no greeting. "I own a stake in the franchise group that runs the place. That gives me standing to see the books."

"An audit." Sable tried the word out. "On Odelle."

"On the books. Whatever's in the books." He looked at her the way he'd looked at the scar. Careful. Starved. "It'll take a couple weeks to mean anything. These people move slow on purpose."

"Everybody keeps telling me weeks."

"Because it's the truth, and you've had enough lies." He turned the hat in his hands. "I want to ask you something, and I want you to be able to say no."

Sable waited.

"A paternity test," Cormac said. "A cheek swab. A real lab, accredited, so nobody can wave it off. Three weeks for the result." His voice stayed level, but the hat kept turning. "My wife was Mirelle. My daughter was Briony. She was three. I've spent twenty years not knowing if the water gave her back somewhere and I was too far to hear it."

Sable thought of the shortbread tin. The small silver plate worn soft by somebody's thumb.

She hadn't told him yet. She wasn't ready to hand a grieving man his dead daughter's name until she knew what it would cost.

"I found something," she said instead. "In my gramma's things. A bracelet. It's got that name on it. Briony Grace Lassiter."

Cormac went very still. The hat stopped turning.

"Then you already know why I'm asking," he said quietly.

"Knowing a name on a bracelet isn't the same as knowing," Sable said. "I had a gramma. Glenna Nance. She raised me and she loved me, and I'm not trading her in for a story just because a man in a nice suit wants it to be true."

"No," Cormac said. "You shouldn't."

"I'll do the test." She folded her arms over the scar out of old habit. "On one condition. You don't just go hunting a daughter. You help me prove I'm not a thief. Both. Or neither."

"Both." He said it fast, like he'd been waiting for the chance. "I don't care what the swab says, hear me - I'm not letting your name go down over a watch I never missed until she waved it around." His hand closed over the brim. "I won't let a forty-dollar job end you."