He stood. Kline stood with him. They shook hands across the desk. Kline's grip was firm and brief.
"If there's anything my office can do to support the task force officially, let me know."
"I will."
Noah walked to the door. He turned back. "One more thing. The memo you wrote declining to reopen. Who else saw it?"
The question caught Kline in the act of sitting back down. He paused, half-seated, then completed the movement. "The DA at the time reviewed it. Standard procedure."
"Anyone outside the office?"
"No."
Noah nodded. "Thanks again."
He walked down the marble hallway, past the portraits, down the stone steps, and out into the afternoon. The courthouse lawn was quiet. Two lawyers were talking by a bench. A woman pushed a stroller along the sidewalk. Elizabethtown in September looked like a postcard, brick buildings and old maples beginning to turn, the kind of town that didn't believe anything bad could happen inside its borders.
Noah stood on the sidewalk and breathed.
Kline had answered every question correctly. That was the problem. His explanations were reasonable, his language was measured. There was nothing in what he said that was wrong. But something in how he said it stayed with Noah. A slightly off note that lingered after the music stopped. The rehearsed quality of the answers. The pen moving when his voice didn't.
Kline had made a decision about the Hale case and he did not want it examined. Whether that was because the decision was sound and he was tired of defending it, or because the decision was compromised and he couldn't afford to have it questioned, Noah couldn't tell. Not from a single conversation. Not from a pen rotating between fingers.
But the wall was there. He had seen it in Hugh's kitchen. He was seeing it again.
He walked slowly along the sidewalk, past a diner with a lunch special chalked on a sandwich board, past a law office withgold lettering on the door, past an antique shop that looked like it hadn't changed its window display in five years.
Noah glanced over his shoulder.
He wanted to go back. Sit across from Kline and say what he was carrying. Tell him about the list. About the names that had fallen away and the ones that hadn't. Tell him that if the connection was real, his name sat at the bottom of a sequence that had already claimed three lives. That the man with the rifle was not random, not ideological, not an abstract threat from a behavioral profile. He was specific. He had a list. And Kline's two-paragraph memo might be the reason his name was on it.
He couldn't. Every version of that conversation led somewhere he wasn't ready to go. How do you know? What led you to the Hale case? And those questions would pull threads that ran back through the Parabon report, through Hugh's denial, through the DNA that tied the Sutherland family to a murdered woman's children. Warning Kline meant exposing everything.
So Noah walked. And Kline sat in his office behind a heavy door with a window overlooking the courthouse lawn, unaware that a conversation he refused to reopen over ten years ago might be the thing that brought a sniper to his door.
Elizabethtown's Main Street was short. A few blocks of shops, a diner, a post office, a hardware store. He passed most of them without looking.
Then he stopped.
There was a storefront on the left. It was small. A green awning spread over a single display window filled with books. The sign above the door read BIRCHWOOD BOOKS in hand-painted letters, white on dark wood.
Through the glass he could see shelves inside, warm light, a counter near the back. A man stood behind it, helping a customer. Late twenties maybe. Dark hair. He reached forsomething on a high shelf, smiling at whatever the customer had said. Noah couldn’t make out the face clearly from the sidewalk.
It was nothing. Just a bookstore on a quiet street.
But something about it held him for a second longer than it should have. A thread that wasn’t a thread. A pull with no explanation attached.
He looked away and kept walking.
20
The lake was still when Noah got home.
No wind. No boats. The water held the last of the day's light in a flat sheet of copper that darkened at the edges where the mountains came down to meet it. A loon sat motionless near the far shore, so still it looked painted on the surface. The air smelled like pine and woodsmoke, someone burning brush on the far side of High Peaks Lake. The temperature had dropped enough that Noah could see his breath when he stood on the porch and looked out.
He hadn't planned the evening. It assembled itself. Callie arrived at six with a bag of groceries and the kind of expression that said she needed to not think about work for a few hours. He didn't argue. He opened the door and she walked past him into the kitchen and started pulling things from the bag. Chicken. Garlic. A lemon. A box of pasta. A bottle of something red that she set on the counter without comment.
"You're cooking?” he said.
