"Leave your truck idling, Arthur," Miller told me, turning his back on the sedan. "Get your coat zipped up. Follow the county rig down to the substation. Don’t take the river spur."
"My auxiliary line is still hot, Paul," I said, pointing through my open door where the red indicator bulb glowed beneath the dash seam. "It’s drawing four amps off the dry cell. If I shut the ignition off, the relay’s going to hiss until the coil burns out."
"Let it hiss," Miller said. "Every word that went down that wire is already burned onto the aluminum master reel in the basement annex. Shutting it down now won’t wipe the tape, and leaving it open won’t make Ray look any dirtier than he already wrote himself down to be. Just drive the van."
I climbed back into the torn vinyl seat of the Econoline. The twelve hundred dollars was gone from the hood—swept into an evidence pouch Miller had pulled from his trunk alongside the torn purple-pencil voucher—but the cold mud where Ray’s boots had kicked my driver's door still smeared the floor mat. My left shoulder flared hot every time I pulled the steering wheel down through the hairpins, a deep, grinding stitch where the joint had taken the clay shelf. Behind me, the radio transmitter kept humming its high, thin carrier tone, vibrating the metal bulkhead like a hive of trapped wasps.
We wound down through the hemlock breaks in a three-vehicle crawl. The wet road smelled of dead ferns, crushed limestone, and diesel exhaust from the rescue truck’s stack ahead of me. At the bottom of the ridge, where the county blacktop cut across the south fork of the creek, two state patrol cruisers sat parked broadside across the quarry road. Their blue roof lamps spun silently in the drizzle, painting the wet pavement in rhythmic, icy pulses.
They weren't looking at the timber road. Their grills were pointed straight at the corrugated metal gate of the crushed stone depot.
Miller didn't turn toward the courthouse in town. He swung the unmarked sedan right, crossing the timber bridge into the quarry turnout. The rescue engine followed, and I eased my rattling Ford in behind them, stopping twenty feet from the scale house.
The heavy glass door of the office was already propped open with an iron wedge. Through the rain-slick window, I could see Don Vance—Ray’s younger brother—standing with both palms pressed against the laminate counter. A state trooper in an oiled campaign hat stood between Don and the grey telephone banks mounted on the wood-paneled wall. On the counter between them sat the master terminal for the quarry's automated scale system, its green phosphor screen blinking with interrupted haul logs.
Miller didn't hurry. He got out of his car, reached into the back seat for his black-bound ledger, and gestured for me to follow him onto the concrete porch.
"Stay behind the rail, Arthur," Miller said under his breath as we crossed the threshold. "Don’t reach for your receipts. Don’t say a word about the voucher until I ask you to read the ledger numbers."
Inside, the room was stifling, heated by a kerosene stove that hissed in the corner with a sweet, nauseating reek. Don Vance’s face was the color of curdled cream. He wore the gray twill work shirt of the quarry depot, but his collar was unbuttoned, and his hands were trembling hard enough that his knuckles kept drumming against the counter edge.
"Chief," Don said, his voice cracking like dry kindling as Miller walked in. "You can’t impound the terminal logs. The stone cooperative owns these phone lines. We lease the property from the county, but the scales are private business records."
"They were private records until twenty-two minutes ago, Don," Miller said, laying his black book squarely on the rubber desk mat. He opened the ledger to the fresh page where he’d jotted his notes up on the ridge. "At ten-fourteen, you logged voucher seven-eighty-four to Arthur here for eleven hundred dollars in repair services."