Chapter 27: Six A.M.

Tobias's POV

The judge answered her own door at ten past midnight in a gray robe, with her silver hair down.

She looked at the state investigator, then at me, then at the gray ledger under my arm.

"This had better be a child," she said.

"It is, your honor. It's a child's money. It leaves the country at six."

She stepped back and let us into her kitchen.

She read Whitney's signed statement standing at the counter.

She listened to the recording on the investigator's laptop, once, all the way through.

When Philip Carraway said the word leash, she closed her eyes.

"He said that out loud."

"To the mother, in his boathouse, and he knew she was recording by the end."

"Did he." She opened her eyes. "Mr. Garrison, where is Mrs. Carraway?"

"With her daughter. She told me to come."

"Not you?"

"She decided it. I asked her first."

The judge gave me a long look over the page.

"You asked her first," she said.

"Yes."

"Good. Hand me a pen."

She wrote on the back of her own grocery list, because the court's forms were a mile away.

She froze the trust and every account that touched it.

She ordered the bank to recall the Nassau wire, and she forbade Philip to leave the state or move a dollar.

She ordered his passport surrendered to the deputy.

She signed it, and she dated it, and she wrote the time.

"Serve it yourself," she said. "I won't have it sit on a clerk's desk until nine."

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