Chapter 18: The Officer

The retired officer lived in a small gray house at the end of a gravel road.

An aluminum boat was pulled up on the grass beside his dock.

He was sitting on his porch in the last of the light when Gideon's truck came up the drive.

The county investigator pulled in behind us.

The old man didn't stand.

He was sixty or so, with a gut and a white mustache.

On the table beside him sat a thick envelope with a bank band around it.

"I figured somebody would come," he said.

I got out of the truck by myself and walked to the bottom of his steps.

"I'm Margo Tennant," I said. "You wrote the report on Mill Road."

"I know who you are, miss."

He looked at my left leg, and for a moment he looked at nothing else.

"A fellow from the Foundation was here at noon," he said. "He left that on the table. Said it was a gift for my service, no strings."

"Are you going to take it?"

"I've had it in front of me for six hours."

The investigator climbed the steps and stood quietly with his hands at his sides.

"I wasn't a bad cop," the old man said, to me.

"I was a tired one. Two years from my pension, a man I'd never met sat in a kitchen and told me what the report would say."

"And you said yes."

"I said yes. That night I went home and couldn't eat."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"What would I have said? I was already in it."

"You could have said it today," I said. "Instead of him."

He lifted the envelope and put it down again.

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