Micro Industry's Arc

Chapter 9 of 14

Silas laid his scraps across the station floor by locker twenty-seven. A checkout card with the consultant's name. A note about the drugged victim. The forged complaint. Each piece pointed at the killer. None of them tied him to a body. He knew it. Any lawyer would tear the pile apart in ten seconds. He needed one thing that fit the consultant's hand to a death. He took his coffee-stained notepad and drove his lawful errand to Amos Kettridge's back room. The blind clerk sat at his table, cane leaning by his knee, the inked drawers dark on his forearm. He tilted his head at Silas's footsteps. "You've got proof that proves nothing," Amos said. "I can hear the shuffle. A man moving paper and getting nowhere." "I need the consultant tied to a killing," Silas said. "Not access. A date. A body." Amos went still, the way he did when he opened a drawer inside his head. "There was a second death two years back. A singer, come through on tour. Marina Onwards. Found cold in her room. They ruled it a bad heart." He tapped the table once. "The consultant filed a visitor's log at her hotel that night. I filed the copy myself. Same drug the pharmacist found in your harbor man—if you match them." Silas's pen skidded across a coffee ring. "A log puts the consultant in the room. The drug ties the room to a murder." He looked up. "Willa can match the poisons." "Then you don't have scraps anymore," Amos said. "You have a chain." Silas took the log copy to the pharmacist's agency that afternoon. Willa read the drug name on the old death report. She pulled her harbor file. Her finger stopped between the two lines. Same compound. Same trace. "This is the consultant's hand on a corpse," she said. "Marina Onwards didn't die of a bad heart." "Now I can accuse them," Silas said. "Now it holds." But Willa's face changed. She crossed to the room she'd believed locked. The door hung open. The evidence shelves stood bare where the consultant's files had sat. "They ran," she said. "They cleared the shelf and ran." Silas stood in the empty doorway. He had built his chain at last. A log, a drug, a matching death. Enough to charge the consultant and walk it into the chief inspector's office without being laughed out. He had the proof he'd chased for weeks. And the man it named was gone. The consultant had felt the net and fled town, likely by the river, before Silas could set a hand on him. Silas gripped his notepad. He held a case strong enough to close. He no longer held the killer.