Chương 10
“Nate.”
“I love you.”
His voice nearly failed.
“I’m hanging up now.”
He ended the call.
Ben stood in the doorway.
Nate had not heard him approach.
“Grandma mad?”
“Yes.”
“At me?”
“No.”
“Is Uncle Marcus in jail?”
Nate considered correcting the word.
Then decided it did not matter.
“He’s being held.”
“Because of me?”
“No.”
Ben looked unconvinced.
Nate crouched in front of him.
His knees complained.
Forty-one suddenly felt older than it had a month earlier.
“You told the truth about what you remembered. Adults made decisions after that.”
“If I didn’t remember?”
“The evidence would still exist.”
“What if Mom didn’t hide the stuff?”
Nate looked at his son.
“Then things might have been harder.”
“So she got him arrested.”
“No.”
Ben frowned.
“Then who did?”
“Marcus.”
The answer came without hesitation.
“Marcus made choices. That’s why he’s there.”
Ben thought about that.
“Did you make bad choices?”
Nate sat on the floor.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to jail?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That didn’t sound confident.”
Nate almost laughed.
“No. It didn’t.”
He leaned against the cabinet.
“I signed something I should have checked more carefully because Marcus told me it was fine.”
“Is that illegal?”
“It might be part of something people need to investigate.”
Ben sat beside him.
“You believed him.”
“Yes.”
“I believed him too.”
Nate looked at his son.
“That doesn’t make what happened your fault.”
Ben picked at the hem of his shirt.
“Does it make it yours?”
Nate wished children were less efficient.
“Some of it.”
Ben considered that.
“Mom was mad at you.”
“Yes.”
“Before the crash.”
“Yes.”
“Did she still love you?”
Nate looked across the kitchen.
Leah’s coffee mug remained beside the sink.
Nobody had moved it.
“I think so.”
“You think?”
“She said she did.”
“Then why do you think?”
Nate rubbed his eyes.
“Because adults make simple things complicated.”
“That sounds dumb.”
“It is.”
The investigation into Leah’s crash changed three weeks later.
Police located the black SUV.
It had been repaired at a body shop forty miles away under a false insurance claim.
The shop owner had not known the vehicle was connected to a fatal crash. He did know the customer.
The customer was Daniel Creel, a former Northline operations manager.
Creel initially denied involvement.
Then investigators showed him traffic-camera images, payment records, and messages establishing that Marcus had contacted him repeatedly before the collision.
Creel requested an attorney.
Two days later, his attorney contacted prosecutors.
The account that emerged was uglier than a clean murder plot.
Marcus had not ordered Creel to kill Leah.
He had ordered him to retrieve the documents.
Creel had followed Leah from the house that morning.
He had tried to force her vehicle toward a parking lot after she refused to stop.
The collision happened when Leah accelerated toward the intersection and Creel struck the side of her car.
Afterward, he panicked and fled.
Marcus had known about the collision before Nate received the hospital call.
That detail broke something different inside Nate.
Marcus had stood beside him in the auditorium at 7:51.
He had watched Nate stare at the hospital number on his phone.
He had said, Answer it.
He had known why they were calling.
Later, Marcus admitted through counsel that Creel had been working for him but denied ordering any dangerous confrontation. He claimed he was trying to recover government documents Leah had improperly removed.
He also denied tampering with Ben’s IV.
The evidence disagreed.
But the explanation mattered to Nate for one reason.
Marcus still thought he had been protecting something.
Not merely himself.
An institution.
A command.
A reputation.
A story about who he was.
That made him more familiar, not less.
Nate met Marcus face-to-face for the first time after the arrest in a secured interview room at a federal facility.
The meeting happened through attorneys.
Sloan disliked it.
Nate’s lawyer disliked it more.
Nate insisted.
Marcus entered in plain detention clothing.
Without the green uniform, he looked older.
The red slap mark was long gone.
The man remained.
They sat across a bolted table.
A lawyer stayed near the wall.
So did an investigator.
Marcus looked at Nate’s gray sweatshirt.
“You finally changed clothes.”
Nate stared at him.
Marcus smiled faintly.
“I’ve been saving that joke.”
“You always save bad material.”
“True.”
Silence.
Marcus looked thinner.
Nate hated noticing.
“How’s Ben?”
“You don’t get to ask.”
Marcus lowered his eyes.
“Fair.”
“Did you put it in his IV?”
The attorneys shifted.
Marcus’s lawyer said, “My client is not going to discuss—”
“I’m asking him.”
“He is not answering.”
Marcus looked at his lawyer.
Then at Nate.
“I wasn’t trying to kill him.”
Nate stopped breathing.
Marcus’s lawyer closed his eyes.
“Marcus.”
Marcus ignored him.
“I needed him asleep.”
“You put a drug in a nine-year-old’s IV after a major crash.”
“I knew the amount.”
“You are not a doctor.”
“I had medical training.”
“Twenty years ago.”
“I knew what I was doing.”
“No.”
Nate leaned forward.
“You knew what you wanted.”
Marcus’s jaw tightened.
“That is not the same thing.”
Marcus looked away.
Nate saw shame.
Maybe.
Or exhaustion.
He no longer trusted himself to name expressions.
“You said you were sorry to him.”
Marcus’s eyes returned.
“He heard you.”
“I know.”
“You knew he might die.”
“No.”
“You knew it was possible.”
Marcus said nothing.
Nate nodded slowly.
“That’s why you apologized.”
Marcus pressed his palms together on the table.
“I had lost control of the situation.”
“You killed Leah.”
“I did not tell Creel to hit her.”
“You sent him after her.”
“Yes.”
“To steal evidence.”
“To recover classified material.”
“Don’t.”
“That is what I believed.”
“Don’t put a uniform around it.”
Marcus’s face hardened.
“You think this started because I wanted money?”
“I think it continued because you did.”
“You don’t know what Northline was.”
“I know they billed equipment that never arrived.”
“I used them to move resources when formal channels failed.”
May you like
“And then?”
Marcus did not answer.
