“I understand it better than you think,” Bhatt said, something in her voice telling me she’d read Wyatt’s old file more closely than she’d let on. “Which is exactly why I’m not going to make the mistake somebody made with his.”
I gave her the forty-eight hours, though each one felt like eleven years compressed into something almost unbearable. Nadia’s promised rotation held steady the whole time — herself in the diner’s back booth through both my shifts, two prospects trading off outside Emmett’s garage after dark, nobody making a show of it, everybody making sure I noticed anyway.
Marcus Deveraux, it turned out, didn’t intend to give us even that long.
He came to the diner himself on the second night, alone, and sat across from me in the same booth where I’d first shown Emmett the photograph, like a man who’d decided a direct conversation was worth the risk of being seen doing it.
“Ms. Kessler,” he said, using a name I hadn’t heard spoken by a stranger in eleven years, “I understand you’ve been telling my contractor some very serious stories.”
“I’ve been telling him the truth,” I said. “Something a Nevada trooper’s insurance retainer made sure never made it into an official file eleven years ago.”
Deveraux’s smile didn’t waver, but something behind his eyes went flat. “Your Mr. Coen made accusations he couldn’t prove, and it cost him his life on a grade he shouldn’t have been running that heavy in the first place. I’d hate for your new friend to repeat that particular mistake. Not everyone gets a second warning.”
It wasn’t quite a confession. It was close enough that when Emmett stepped out from the kitchen doorway where he’d been listening, phone raised and recording every word, Deveraux’s careful composure finally cracked all the way down.
“That’s a threat,” Emmett said, “made to a federal witness, on tape, less than a hundred feet from where you tried to have me killed three days ago.”
Deveraux was on his feet fast, reaching for the booth’s edge, and ran straight into Otis Marrow’s chest, because half the Ridgeback Riders had been sitting quietly at the counter the whole time, waiting on exactly this. Agent Bhatt’s team, alerted the moment Emmett’s call went through, arrived within ten minutes — faster, she told me later, than she’d ever gotten a warrant moving in her career, because a recorded threat against a cooperating witness cuts through paperwork that circumstantial brake data never could.