Creel stared at the table.
“Me.”
Mara felt no dramatic shock.
Only an enormous emptiness.
“You planted the money in my father’s office.”
“Yes.”
“Did Baines order you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know what it would do to him?”
Creel swallowed.
“I told myself he’d be suspended.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“I didn’t think it would destroy his life.”
Mara laughed once.
“You hid forty-three thousand dollars in a police lieutenant’s office.”
“I was twenty-nine.”
“And?”
“I was afraid.”
“So was he.”
Creel looked up.
Mara continued.
“You got promoted.”
“Yes.”
“My father lost his career.”
“Yes.”
“You attended his funeral.”
Creel’s eyes dropped again.
“Yes.”
Mara had not known.
She could not remember faces from that day.
Only snow.
Black coats.
Her mother’s hand.
“And you kept doing it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Creel took a long breath.
“At some point, admitting what you did yesterday becomes harder than doing something worse today.”
Mara stared at him.
It was the most honest thing he had said.
“How did you know I was coming?”
Creel hesitated.
Mara already suspected the answer.
“Sheriff Baines?”
“He knew there was a state audit.”
“How?”
“He has a contact.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
Investigators later found the leak in a regional administrative office.
A mid-level employee who had known Baines for years.
He told Baines an evidence audit was coming but did not know Mara’s identity.
That came from somewhere else.
The anonymous whistleblower.
Or so Baines thought.
Someone had sent information to both sides.
Mara’s scheduled meeting that night had not been random.
The anonymous source had instructed her to come alone.
Baines intercepted part of that communication through a department email account still forwarding old messages.
He knew the vehicle only because a county traffic camera captured Mara leaving the state office parking lot after she picked up the rental.
A dispatcher associated the registration after Baines asked.
Creel then ordered Ryan to make the stop.
“Why plant drugs?” Mara asked.
Creel looked at her.
“To discredit the audit before it started.”
“How?”
“If the lead investigator was arrested transporting narcotics…”
“The entire review becomes compromised.”
“Yes.”
“And the anonymous source?”
Creel shook his head.
“Baines wanted to know who you were meeting.”
Mara’s stomach tightened.
“Did he?”
“I don’t know.”
The source still had not appeared.
The answer came from a nursing home twenty-two miles away.
Mara received a phone call on Thursday morning.
“Is this Mara Ellis?”