Chapter 19: The Front Door

Finnegan's POV

On Friday night I put my whole case file under a door.

It was the nurse practitioner's front door, with a brass knocker shaped like a duck, and Willa was on the other side of it.

Three weeks of work were in the folder.

It held the tapes, the transfers, Benton's second account, the warrants and the plan for Saturday, every page copied and none of it blacked out.

My supervisor would call it a violation, and my supervisor would be right.

I knocked twice and said through the wood, "That's everything. Same day."

She didn't answer.

I stood on the porch for a full minute, and then I went back to the truck.

At eleven that night, a note came back, slid under my own motel door by a nurse practitioner with silver hoop earrings and no expression.

It was one line in Willa's block capitals, the ones she'd used on the dialysis forms.

SATURDAY 7:40. DON'T COME IN UNTIL I'VE SAID IT.

I read it four times.

It wasn't forgiveness, and it wasn't a no.

It was a woman telling me where to stand, and I would have stood there until the building came down.

The other call had come Thursday.

I had been in the interview room at the detention center, waiting for Dray to finish eating his lunch, when he pushed the tray aside.

"I have one more page," he said. "It's not for the judge. It's for you."

In three weeks of interviews he had never once asked about my sister.

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