Coyle's eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. For a fraction of a second, his grip on the wheel went white at the knuckles. "Judge Miller retired to Savannah six months ago, old man. You’ve been running errand-boy errands out of that dusty basement so long you don't even know whose name is on the county letterhead."
"Miller held emergency probate authority through noon today," I answered, keeping my voice entirely devoid of anger. "He signed the transit authorization at four. And you didn't check my left coat pocket."
Coyle didn't look down at the floorboards where he had tossed Arthur’s ledgers. He kept his speed at forty-five, hugging the fog line. "I took your wallet. That's all you had."
"You took my driver's license. The courier log had a duplicate state registry carbon, Coyle. In the breast pocket of my overcoat. When you threw me against the quarter panel, you didn't unbutton the coat."
His left hand dropped off the wheel. His jaw knotted, the muscle bunching hard under the skin. Through the mesh, I could see his gaze darting toward the mirror, calculating. He knew the protocol for county estate transfers: if a courier was stopped, the paper receipt remained with the registered carrier until formal booking, while the duplicate stayed pinned to the transport manifest.
He thought he had seized the only chain of custody by grabbing the bags and the three green ledgers. But Arthur Pendelton was not a man who trusted single copies. He had spent thirty years watching county commissioners buy marsh acreage for ten dollars an acre through dummy timber trusts, then sell the same land back to the state highway commission for two hundred thousand. Arthur knew every deputy whose house was built on an unrecorded drainage easement.
The cruiser didn't take the turn toward the substation annex. Coyle swung the wheel hard to the right, tires skidding on wet pine needles, and turned down an unpaved service access that led toward the decommissioned county water treatment plant at Miller’s Cut.
The headlights cut across a rusted chain-link fence, an abandoned corrugated pumping station, and a concrete loading apron slick with dark moss. Coyle killed the roof light and dropped the transmission into park.
Silence flooded the car, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the tick of the cooling manifold.