Chapter 8 - The Photograph
1049 Words
I don't stay in the diner.
I know he told me to. I know the smart, sensible thing is to sit in the vinyl booth with my cold coffee and let him handle whatever is happening in that parking lot. But I have spent the last forty-eight hours being told to stay put by men who are keeping things from me, and I'm done.
I'm through the door twelve seconds after he is.
The parking lot is small. Three streetlamps, one broken. Cain is standing ten feet from the woman, and the space between them is so charged that I stop walking the second I come outside, like I've hit an invisible wall.
She's my age. Maybe younger. Dark hair pulled back, jaw set, eyes that would be Cain's eyes if they weren't so much angrier. She's wearing a jacket two sizes too big and boots that have walked serious miles, and she is very clearly alive, and she is very clearly not happy about it.
"You're supposed to be dead," Cain says. His voice is wrecked. Completely wrecked, in a way I've never heard from him.
"You're supposed to be smarter," she says. "Guess we're both disappointed."
"Rosa—"
"Don't." She says it quiet but it lands like a slap. "You don't get to say my name like that after six years. Not yet."
I take one step closer and her eyes cut to me, fast and sharp.
"You're Wren," she says.
"I am."
"Eli talked about you constantly." Her voice doesn't soften exactly, but something underneath it does. "He said you were the only person in your family who ever actually looked at him."
My throat closes completely.
"You knew my brother," I say.
"I was with your brother when he died."
The parking lot tilts. I grab the edge of a car hood to stay upright and Cain moves toward me automatically, hand on my arm, and I let him even though part of me is still angry enough to pull away.
"You were in the car?" I ask.
"Not in it. Behind it." Rosa's jaw is working like she's been holding this for months and hasn't decided yet whether she's ready to let it go. "I was following him out of the city. We'd planned it together — me first, three days earlier, then Eli, then we'd meet at a rest stop on the interstate and drive the rest of the way out together."
"Together to where?"
"Somewhere that wasn't here." She looks at Cain when she says it. Something passes between them — six years of grief and accusation compressed into one look. "I got out clean. New name, new city, new everything. I had the money from the account—"
"The account was for Eli," Cain says.
"The account was big enough for two," Rosa says. "He insisted. He said you'd understand." A pause. "He was wrong about that."
"You took the money," Cain says, and his voice has gone very flat. "Half of it. The access attempt two days ago — that was you."
"I took what Eli told me I could take. And I came back when I saw the news about Marsh." Her eyes sharpen. "I've been watching this city for two days. I know what you told the detective. I know what Marsh said before they shot him. And I know there's something neither of you have figured out yet."
"Then tell us," I say.
Rosa looks at me, then at Cain, then back at the door of the diner like she's calculating exactly how much trust this moment can hold.
"Marsh didn't act alone," she says. "The night your brother died. The man who was supposed to meet him on Route 9 to make sure the accident looked right — the one Marsh called his cleaner — I saw him."
"You saw the man who staged Eli's crash."
"I saw him leave the scene," Rosa says. "I had a camera. I had a plate number." Her hand goes to her jacket pocket. "I've been sitting on this for six years because the man in those photographs has been untouchable. But if Marsh is going down — if the whole thing is finally coming apart—"
"Show me," Cain says.
Rosa pulls a photograph from her pocket. Old, printed on actual paper, creased down the middle from years of folding and unfolding.
She holds it out. Cain takes it.
I watch him look at it. I watch his face go through four different expressions in about three seconds — recognition, confusion, something close to nausea — and then he goes completely still.
"That's not possible," he says.
"That's what I said the first time too," Rosa says. "Then I said it every day for six years until I stopped being surprised."
I take the photograph from his hand. It's grainy, shot in the dark, a man caught half-turning away from a camera he doesn't know is there. The image is blurred at the edges, but the face is clear enough.
I know that face.
I have known that face for three years.
Detective Halloran is standing at the side of the road in the photograph, and he is wiping his hands on a rag beside a car with Eli's license plate, and the timestamp in the corner says forty minutes after my brother was supposed to have already crashed and died.
The phone in my pocket buzzes. A number I actually recognize this time.
Halloran.
Ms. Calloway. We need to talk. Alone. Don't bring Reyes.
Cain's hand is still outstretched, waiting for the photograph back. Rosa is watching me. The parking lot is cold and the diner light is warm through the window and my brother is dead and the man investigating his murder just texted me to come alone.
I look at the photograph one more time. Then I look at Cain.
"There's something you should know," I say, and I turn the phone screen toward him.
He reads it. His expression doesn't move, but his hand drops to his side.
"You're not going," he says.
"He's the only detective left on this case."
"He's the man in that photograph."
"I know." I look at him steadily. "Which is exactly why I have to go."
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