Chapter 10
Asha came to the prison with Daniel’s copy of the handling sheet folded inside a clear sleeve. She set it on the table between us but didn’t take off her coat, as if she expected someone to drag her out before she could finish.
“The knife had a partial print on the handle,” she said. “It was noted, but never compared against Rusk.”
I looked down at the typed lines. One small smudge, a few ridges—something so incomplete it had been left behind while the state built a case around my fingerprints.
“Why wasn’t it tested?”
“We don’t know yet. The original report calls it insufficient for identification.” Asha sat opposite me. “But the technology has changed, and the missing sheet means we also have to ask who knew it was there.”
I pressed my hands flat against the table. “You’ll have them test it?”
“I’ve requested a fresh comparison. Rusk’s known prints, and any other lawful comparison the lab can make.”
The words should have felt like a door opening. Instead, I saw the knife again in my mind—not its blade, but the dark shine of the handle under the kitchen light. My hands slick with Michael’s blood. The desperate, helpless pressure of trying to keep him alive.
“What if the print belongs to me?”
“It may. It may belong to someone who handled the knife before the crime. It may be too partial to tell us anything.” She held my gaze. “We don’t get to choose the answer.”
Asha’s phone buzzed. She read the screen, and the tiredness in her face tightened into something harder.
“Victor’s attorneys have filed to challenge the box.”
My stomach clenched. “The blue box?”
“They’re calling the ledgers unauthenticated and questioning how the box was found, who handled it, how it was sealed. They say the recording could have been altered.”
“But the box was under the floor.”
“That’s what we can show. Their argument is that we can’t yet prove who put it there, when it was sealed, or whether every page inside is original.”
I watched Asha slide the clear sleeve closer to herself. The state had once turned my bloodstained clothes into a story of guilt. Now Victor’s people were trying to make every piece of paper look like a story someone might have invented.
“Can they stop the testing?”
“They can challenge what the evidence means. They can’t make the court unsee that it exists.”
She said it with conviction. Her thumb, rubbing the edge of her phone, betrayed the strain beneath it.
Before I could answer, the device rang. Asha listened, then stood so quickly her chair scraped against the floor.
“Daniel, slow down. Was anyone hurt?”
She turned away from me, listening. I caught fragments: annex, side entrance, camera. Then Asha’s shoulders lowered by an inch.
“No. Don’t touch the room until the investigators document it.”
She ended the call and faced me. “Someone tried to break into the evidence annex overnight.”
The air seemed to leave the room. “The box?”
“Not there. The archived knife exhibits are stored in a secured area. The door to the corridor was forced, and the hallway camera was destroyed.” She paused. “The sealed items are intact.”
I gripped the table’s edge. “They knew about the print.”
“We don’t know that. We don’t know what they were after.”
It was the right answer, the careful answer. It didn’t stop my mind from filling in the empty space: a stranger in the dark, a ruined camera, a door that had nearly opened.
“Did they get inside?”
“No. The inner storage seal is unbroken. Investigators are documenting everything before anyone moves the exhibits.”
I tried to breathe slowly. My body had learned to recognize danger long before anyone explained it. It knew the taste of metal in my mouth, the cold sweat between my shoulders, the instinct to search for Chloe even when she wasn’t in the room.
Asha sat again. “Daniel sent a still image from the annex entrance to Grandma. He wanted to know if she recognized anyone.”
The word Grandma brought Chloe’s serious blue eyes into my mind. I pictured her tucked against the woman’s side in another undisclosed place, trying to understand why grown-ups kept vanishing into hallways to make calls.
“Did she?”
Asha looked down at her phone. “She called back.”
“And?”
“She recognized the man.”
The room narrowed to the space between us.
“She says he used to work security for Michael’s company. She remembers him as one of the guards who answered to Rusk.”
I stared at the sleeve around the handling sheet. A partial print. A guard outside an annex. Every new fact seemed to point somewhere, then stop just short of a name we could prove.
“Does Grandma know his name?”
“She’s trying to remember. She was sure of his face, not the name.”
“So he was there for Rusk.”
“That’s what she told me. It doesn’t prove Rusk sent him to the annex.” Asha leaned forward. “It gives investigators a person to identify and question.”
A person. Not an answer.
“What if he says he was there for something else?”
“Then we find out whether that’s true.”
Her voice was steady, but the skin around her eyes looked drawn. I wondered how many times she had used that same steadiness to carry something she couldn’t promise would hold.
“You keep telling me what we don’t know,” I said.
“Because I won’t lie to you to make this hurt less.”
For a moment, the room held only the hum of the fluorescent lights. I turned the question over in my mind: who touched the knife, who hid the paper, who had been willing to come back for it? Too many possible answers. Not one that could bring Michael back or erase the years Chloe had learned to live without me.
Asha’s phone rang again.
She glanced at the screen and answered. “This is Asha.”
Her expression changed as she listened. Not relief. Not quite fear. Something more guarded, as though an answer had arrived carrying another question inside it.
“When did the lab finish?” she asked. “And you’re certain?”
She looked at me.
I rose, though the chain at my waist tugged me short. “What is it?”
Asha held up one hand, still listening. The pause stretched until I could hear the distant clank of a door beyond the interview room.
Then she ended the call.
“The lab found a match for the partial print,” she said.
Hope struck so sharply it hurt. “Rusk?”
May you like
Asha’s face had gone pale.
“No,” she said. “It’s not Rusk.”
