Page 6

She perched on the chair like she might need to leave in a hurry and turned the mug around in her hands. I took the desk, leaned back and gave her room. People talked more when you looked like you had all night.

The office was built for one man and a lot of paper. With her in it, there was nowhere safe to put my eyes. Her knees were a foot from mine. She’d pushed her sleeves up at some point, and there was a pale stripe of an old burn across the inside of her forearm, the width of an oven rack, I’d guess.

“So,” I said. “Talk to me.”

She took a breath. “It’s my dad.”

Of everything I’d run through walking down that hallway, Harry Laine was the last name I’d have bet on.

“He owns the old ice house out on Route 10,” she said. “You know it?”

I knew it. I knew every lease Harry Laine had signed in the last three years, and a few he thought nobody had seen. I nodded and let her tell it.

She told me the rest in a rush, the gate, the trucks, the man at the fence, her father calling them tenants and sending her home. I let her get it all out.

Then she slowed down.

“He wasn’t even surprised to see me.” Her voice dropped. “He was sitting there waiting. Somebody at that building saw me and called my father before I got back to town.” She shook her head. “I know that sounds paranoid, but I swear, it’s like he knew.”

I kept my face easy. Inside, pieces were sliding into place.

The club had been watching Laine since the business with Holly and the Curtis Freight offer. Back then I’d traced the shell companies behind half a dozen property grabs across town, and Harry’s name had turned up at the edges of three of them. After Switch shut down the mine track, two of the men we caught gave us more. Laine’s buildings. Laine’s leases. The ice house had been on my list since spring. Dead, as far as I knew.

The cartel had lost their access to a back road, so they’d moved in closer, somewhere with four walls and an owner happy to take their money. It looked like the ice house was that place.

That filled a gap. The phone call filled another. Harry was taking calls from the men renting his buildings, which put him a long way closer to the work than a signature on a lease.

Most of that was old news to the club, whatever Chelsea thought she’d brought me.

The news was her. Harry Laine’s daughter, sitting in my office, drinking my shit coffee and handing me her father. That took guts, and I respected it.

“What time were you out there?” I asked.

“About six-thirty.”

“The one at the fence. What’d he look like?”

She thought about it. “Forties. Heavyset. Mustache. He smiled the whole time. Kind of creepy.”

“How often do you see your father?”

“Dinner once a month.” She shrugged. “I’ve got a key to his office for when he’s out of town. He likes me to water the plant.”

“Who else have you told?”

“Nobody.”

“Keep it that way.”

“Why?”

“Because right now the only people who know you went out there are the men at that building and your father. I’d like to keep that list short.”

She looked down at the mug. Her hands had started to shake, and she tightened them around it to hide it.

I wanted to take the mug off her and hold those hands until they stopped. I kept mine flat on the desk instead.

“Why did you come to me?” I asked. “Of everybody out there.”