Page 37 of Wells

"Good."

Cera turns and walks out without looking back. The heavy glass door swings shut behind her.

I stand there, watching her walk away through the glass to the elevator, and let the silence settle.

My heart is still going too fast, but my hands hold steady now, even if I have to force them. The edges of control lock back into place, familiar as old armor I know how to wear.

I walk back to my desk and sit. The chair is exactly where I left it. The room looks the same. Nothing is out of place except me.

I notice an unread notification. I pick it up and click the bubble, needing anything to pull me out of this moment. It's a text from Ridge.

Need you to look at the quarterly logistics audit. Flagged discrepancies in the Miami terminal.

I open the file and scan the data. Everything is as it should be. His request is an easy one to trace.

It's no use. My focus is completely shot.

It's Saturday morning. I sit down at the desk with coffee and three monitors and the intention to look at the discrepancies in the Miami terminal for Ridge until my head clears.

I never open the Miami file. I click back to the search I started yesterday into Ronnie Louvre's death. It's probably nothing, but it keeps nagging at me, so I want to know more about what he's been doing for the last sixteen months, where he was getting his supply from, and if this really was an accidental overdose.

Cera's face surfaces, and behind it, Peoria's. I shove them both down.

Last night I bent an employee over that desk, a woman who knows my name and what it is worth, and handed her the exact leverage I've been carefully building to never give anyone. And somewhere out there, I am still paying another woman for the exclusivity I didn't reciprocate last night.

The case is the one thing that can pull me out of my own head, so I go back to the screens. The alerts are still running. The same ones I set up after my father died and never took down. Most days, they sit quietly, background noise I stopped hearing years ago.

I click through the most recent data it pulled, looking specifically for Ronnie's name or any reference to him or his partner at the docks that night.

When I mentioned it to Ridge yesterday morning, he told me to let the case go. The Duvalls were blamed, they are gone, and the investigation is closed. His biggest thing since the Feds finally let everything go was to leave well enough alone so we could keep the business moving forward.

I've never been good at leaving well enough alone.

Getting in is never the problem. I have had a quiet way into the parish coroner's system since the year my father died, one of a dozen doors I keep open and never mention. The only question is what I am willing to pull, and this morning I am willing to pull a dead stranger's file with no case and no permission behind me.

Overdose, needle in the arm is the textbook overdose scene. My father's "mugging" was also textbook, and it was nothing of the sort.

The ruling is the easy part, the line they wrote on the certificate. The full tox panel lives in the lab's system, where the family never sees it, and the press never asks for it. I take it from there.

It comes back clean. Fucking clean. How does a man overdose with nothing in his system?

I sit back and let it sink in.

I dig further. There are no priors, no history of use, no scripts in the prescription database, nothing that says Ronnie ever had a habit to die from. The workup is thin too, with an external exam and a tox screen. It's the short version a presumed overdose gets, which means no one ever looked for what actually killed him.

A clean panel under a needle in the arm is a contradiction that stops a careful office cold. But the scene read like a hundred others that month, so the coroner signed it off as an overdose pending tox and moved on. The body went in the ground, and when the lab came back clean, there was no family asking and no detective waiting. No one went back to square the two.

The gap between the ruling and the lab is the loudest thing in the room.

Someone carefully staged it, and a system too buried to look twice signed off, and between them they put a man in the ground without ever meeting. Staging a death that an overworked coroner will wave through takes someone who knows precisely how these cases die quietly. It was not a junkie's bad night. It was a professional closing a loop.

I pull the old file on the two guards and run both names. I know Ronnie is dead. Dane Carter still has a thin but current footprint, recent enough to indicate he is alive.

I don't know who is cleaning up. I only know I have to reach Dane before whoever this is does.

A dead witness sits on one screen and a live one on the other, the closest I have come to my father's killer in over a year, and the back of my mind has already wandered off it, to Monday, to her, to the next time I can get her alone.

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