I'm back at the morning I'm named as a suspect on the news.

The diner was called The Blue Heron, an old stainless-steel Pullman car that had been dropped onto a cinderblock foundation beside the railroad tracks in 1954. It smelled of griddled onions, dark-roast coffee that had been on the burner twenty minutes too long, and diesel exhaust from the switch engines idling in the yard.

I sat in the back corner booth, my back to the wall, watching the snow begin to fall again in heavy, fat flakes that stuck to the diner’s grease-filmed windows.

Across from me sat Sergeant Greg Miller.

The old cop had taken off his uniform jacket, revealing a faded brown cardigan with leather buttons. In front of him sat a white ceramic mug of black coffee and a plate of cherry pie that he hadn't touched with his fork.

"The extradition papers cleared the federal judge in Miami twenty minutes ago," Miller said, his voice tired, stripped of the mechanical hardness he used at the station. "Arthur’s on a Coast Guard cutter heading for Key West right now. He started singing the minute the Bahamian constabulary kicked his door in. Gave up three bank accounts in Zurich, a safe deposit box in Toronto, and the registration for a forty-foot catamaran he bought with the deposit advance."

"He always was a coward," I said, cutting into a plate of corned beef hash. "Arthur liked the money, but he couldn't stand the sight of blood. That's why he made Bradley do the field work."

Miller looked down at his coffee, turning the heavy mug between his calloused hands.

"Nate," he muttered, his eyes refusing to meet mine. "About this morning... on the porch."

"You did your job, Greg," I said.

"No, I didn't," Miller snapped, his voice sharp with thirty years of accumulated regret. "I stood on your lawn and let Brad Vance run the scene like his own personal stage play. I saw the false bottom in that toolbox. I’ve searched three hundred work trucks in my life, Nate—I know what an old steel partition looks like when it's been in a bed for ten years, and I know what a clean zinc sheet looks like when it was cut yesterday with tin snips."

He stopped, his throat working heavily.

"I saw the fresh scratches on the paint, Nate. And I didn't say a damn word because Brad was the sheriff’s nephew, and my youngest girl’s tuition payment is due on the first."

I set my fork down with a quiet clatter against the thick white porcelain.

"Greg," I said, leaning forward until our eyes were level. "You walked down to that IT lab with the drive. You called Springfield. That’s the difference between a man who made a mistake and a man who belongs in a cell."

Miller let out a long, ragged breath that smelled of peppermint and stale tobacco. He reached into his cardigan pocket, pulled out an official county envelope, and slid it across the laminate table toward me.

Inside was a cashier's check for sixty-four thousand dollars, drawn on the county general fund.

"The board approved the release of the survey escrow thirty minutes ago," Miller said. "Every dime the township owed your firm for the arterial highway project. Plus statutory interest from the date the contract was frozen."

I looked down at the blue check. In my first life, that frozen escrow was the stone that dragged my business under; without that cash, I couldn't pay my equipment leases, couldn't make payroll for my three technicians, and couldn't hire an attorney who knew how to challenge a county search warrant.

"What happens to the department, Greg?" I asked.

"The Sheriff resigned at eleven-thirty," Miller said, looking out the window toward the tracks. "County board named an interim administrator from the State Police post in Joliet. Half the command staff will be gone by Friday. Brad’s looking at twenty years minimum under the federal civil rights statutes."

Miller picked up his fork, finally breaking the crust on his cherry pie, but his appetite was gone. He pushed the plate away.

"You knew, didn't you?" Miller asked suddenly, his gaze snapping back to mine with a fierce, penetrating intensity. "You didn't just find out this morning. You set those cameras three days ago, Nate. Before Arthur even missed his first flight to Fort Lauderdale."