the phone of a man I didn’t know. Hell, I had one of our geeks in the computer lab run satellite searches over the Umpqua National Forest and couldn’t find a damn thing that stuck out. If they were doing anything, it’d have to be well hidden.”
“They were talking about moving,” I say suddenly, flashes of conversation running through my head. “They said things were getting too close.”
“Who?” he says excitedly.
“Walken. Griggs. Traynor. A couple of others.”
“How do you know this?”
I hesitate, only because Cal doesn’t know the full story here either. But I’ve already opened my mouth, so I spill the rest of the story about the night I stood under the sheriff’s window. I get to the part about Walken threatening Traynor, and Corwin lets out a low whistle. “That guy’s got some balls if he tries to bully Traynor. That is not a man I would want to fuck with.”
“Tell me about it,” I grumble. Corwin arches an eyebrow at me and I show him my arm, the bruises still identifiable as fingers wrapped around my wrist. Cal lets out another growl as Corwin touches my hand gingerly. Corwin pulls out his phone and says, “May I?” I nod and he snaps some photos, first one side and then the other.
“You didn’t tell me any of this,” Cal says through gritted teeth. “Why couldn’t I see it? The thread? What is going on here?”
“What?” Corwin asks, bewildered.
I panic for a moment and shake my head at Corwin. “We’ll talk about this later,” I say to Cal.
“Planning on it,” he snaps at me.
“You think my father was murdered too, don’t you?” I ask Corwin. It feels odd, this certainty I feel. Having validation, after so long wondering on my own, is surreal.
He sits back against the booth and drums his fingers on the table with one hand, looking at the photo of my wrist on his phone with the other. “I talked to him three more times,” he finally says, “over a period of two months. Tried to trace the number each time he called, but he was smart. The numbers were for disposable cell phones. Couldn’t even ping them on any cell tower. He was quick with the phone calls.”
“I looked at his cell phone records after he died,” I say, wondering just how I missed all of this, how I could have been so blind. My father must have gone to great lengths to keep this hidden from us. I can’t help but feel anger toward him, that he could have kept this to himself, that he was making secret phone calls to the FBI without saying a damn thing about it. “The one for the store phone too. Never found anything that wasn’t supposed to be there. He made sure of that.”
“Hey,” Corwin says with alarm. “That’s not why I’m here, Benji. I’m not trying to dig at old wounds or say anything disparaging against your father. What he did was a brave thing, contacting us like he did. He didn’t have to. He could have kept on going with his life and not said a word. He spoke up.”
“And he died,” I snap. “He fucking died for it. What the fuck does that do for me?”
Corwin looks sympathetic when he says, “Sometimes we have to risk everything for the chance to do one thing right. I’d like to think your father knew that.”
“It was you, wasn’t it?”
His eyes widen. “What?”
“You convinced him to meet with you,” I say coldly. “That’s where he was going that morning. Not to see any friends. He was going to meet with you. He didn’t want to. He told you he didn’t. But you made him go anyway.”
Corwin flinches as if I’ve raised my hand to him. “The last time he called, I told him it was important for my case that he come in and meet me face to face. I told him that unless he was a material witness, nothing he’d told me would mean a damn thing. I couldn’t find enough proof to support the claims. I’d tried to convince him the other times he’d called, but… I pushed him this time. Hard.” Corwin looks away. “I told him to think about his son. Did he want his son to grow up in a place where he could be exposed to this bullshit? What if they found out he was speaking to me? Wouldn’t that put his family in danger?”
“You used us against him? What the