Ground Already Broken

He should have called Bright first. He knew that even as he was pulling to the curb two houses down, killing his headlights, walking back on foot with his phone already dialing and his thumb hovering over send instead of call.

The side gate was still chained, still climbable. He went over it quiet, the flashlight beam ahead of him swinging near the far corner of the yard — not near the rose bed, he realized as he got closer, but near where the old cage had stood before the crime scene unit hauled the wire frame away for evidence. There was a second patch of disturbed ground there too, one nobody had flagged, because nobody but Corinne had known to look.

A man knelt over it, jacket collar up, digging fast with a folding trowel, a canvas bag already half full of dark soil beside him.

"Police already searched here," Callum said, louder than he meant to.

The man's head snapped up. Not Roland. Older, heavier through the shoulders, a face Callum recognized after a half-second from a company website photo he'd stared at for an hour two nights ago.

Grady Pruitt.

"You," Grady said, and something in his voice had none of Roland's practiced calm. This was a different kind of dangerous — the kind that hadn't had six years to plan, only two weeks to panic. "You're the ex."

"What are you digging up?"

Grady's hand found something in the loose soil — a waterproof case, black, about the size of a hardback book — and closed around it like a man closing around the last thing keeping him out of prison.

"Nothing that concerns you."

"It concerns the four million dollars missing from eleven hundred retirement accounts."

Grady stood slowly, the case in one hand, and Callum only then registered the other hand, the one that had been resting near his hip this whole time, and the shape it was holding that wasn't a trowel.

"You shouldn't have come back here," Grady said.