You're welcome to call your attorney, he said. The FBI is going to want to talk to them anyway. The word FBI landed. Puit's hand stopped moving toward his phone. Something passed across his face.
Not fear exactly, but the first genuine understanding of scale. The first moment he grasped that this was not a confrontation he could charm or threaten into a manageable shape. He tried once more. The voice softened. The posture changed.
He spoke about the stress he had been under, the weight of public service, the sacrifices he had made, how much he had given to this county, and how little anyone understood what that cost. His voice carried something almost convincing. The practiced self-pity of a man who had built a narrative in which he was always the burdened, misunderstood center. Copperhead's response was nine words. I'm not interested in your reasons.
Neither is she. The silence that followed was absolute. And then Randall Puit, Pulk County Commissioner, food bank board member, little league umpire for 11 consecutive seasons went still in a way that was not a strategy. The performance stopped. Nothing replaced it.
His shoulders dropped. Not the practiced relaxation of phase one, but the actual drop of a man whose weight had finally arrived. His hands, which had been open and gesturing, went still at his sides. "I was careful," he said quietly. "Not to them.
To himself. " "I was so careful. " The brothers said nothing. Puit looked at the baseboat under the tarp in his sideyard as if he had only just noticed it was there. At 9:03 a.m., three Pulk County Sheriff's vehicles, all unmarked, all driven by deputies from the county's northern district, none of them Wade Corbin, turned on to Crestwood Drive. Deputy Marcus Trent, stepped out of the lead vehicle. He had been building a parallel case for 7 months, ever since he had watched his supervisor dismiss Ironside's initial missing person report in 11 seconds.
And something had felt wrong enough to keep him up that night. He had the warrant. He had the charges. He had spent seven months being very careful not to let anyone who reported to Randall Puit know what he was building. He had been waiting for the final piece.
The brothers had just handed it to him. When Deputy Trent read his rights, Puit was standing in his own driveway holding his coffee mug. He had not put it down. He asked once quietly with genuine confusion whether someone could call his neighbor about his dog while he was gone. As if that were the immediate concern, as if the world he had built and the world he had destroyed required that administrative courtesy before anything else could proceed.
He was placed in the vehicle at 9:11 a.m., hands behind his back, face composed, and he looked through the window at the bassboat under the tarp as the door closed. He looked like a man interrupted during a normal Sunday, because to him, for 9 years, this had been normal. Tombstone heard about the arrest while standing outside Pulk County Regional Medical. He was looking at the parking lot. 500 motorcycles, 500 men from six states standing in the September morning because a child had spent 14 hours in a forest and someone had needed to see that it mattered.
His phone buzzed. He read the text from Copperhead. He put his phone in his pocket. The verdict silence pattern was not a vote this time. There was no gavvel, no raised hands.
It was simply this. 500 men and the stillness that came over them when the word passed through the crowd in the way news passes through a gathering of people who have been waiting for it. Not celebration, not noise, just the specific quiet of men who know that justice is not satisfaction. But it is better than the alternative. Tombstone looked at the hospital window on the second floor.
He thought about Daniel. He thought about Dennis Carver's wife, wherever she was on this Sunday morning. He thought about the yellow flashlight in Kala's coat pocket, battery full, never used. It was Razerback who found it, and he almost missed it. At 10:30 a.m., while Copperhead was at the sheriff's department processing the evidence transfer with Deputy Trent, Razerback was doing a final sweep of the financial documents on his laptop at the garage workbench.
He was about to close a filing window when a notification appeared on the burner phone number trace. A secondary number associated with the same device cluster as Puit's phone. This number had not called the serpent writers. It had called a number registered to Pulk County Department of Social Services, specifically to the office of a senior case supervisor named Victor Hadley. Razerback sat very still for a moment.
Then he opened a new search window and typed Victor Hadley's name. What came back made him put his coffee down. He said very quietly to no one in particular. He didn't just use one deputy, he used the whole net. The war room assembled back at the garage at 11 a.m.
Tombstone on one side of the folding table, copperhead and razorback across from him. Gravel, 61 years old, Vietnam era combat medic who had been at the hospital since Saturday and had not slept, standing near the door. Crowbar sat in his chair in the corner, silent, observing with the specific patience of a man who has watched too many things come apart to be surprised by any of it. Razerback opened his laptop. Three layers, he said.
Walk through them in order. Layer one, Puit's financials. They already had this. 9 years, $2,847,000 in controlled timber assets. $87,000 per year to the Serpent Riders front business. $592,000 in personal luxury spending drawn from operational accounts. Dates, dollar amounts, wire transfers, paper trail clean enough for a federal prosecution.
Layer two, the connected name. Victor Hadley, senior case supervisor at Pulk County D, had received 43 calls from Puit's secondary number over 31 months. Cross-referencing those call dates with DSS case records, Razerback had a contact who would not be named showed a consistent pattern. Every time a WATA Green Partners LLC property dispute generated a complaint involving a local family, that family's DSS file was flagged as priority review within 72 hours. Three families had lost housing assistance.
One family had experienced an emergency home evaluation that resulted in a temporary removal of children, later reversed on appeal after 11 months. The reversal noted in its filing language that the original evaluation had been conducted improperly. Razerback paused. Let the room absorb that. 11 months.
A family had lost their children for 11 months because needed them moved off land that Watcha Green Partners was acquiring. Layer three. The previous victim connecting to the same financial signature. Dennis Carver 2022 business partner life insurance policy taken out 4 months before death. Payout $163,000.
Cause of death, exposure, hypothermia, Wittita forest. Responding deputy Wade Corbin. Case closed in 3 days. The same financial pattern, Razerback said, on a different name two years earlier. Same forest, same method, same deputy, same ruling.
He's done this twice, Copperhead said. At minimum, Razerback said, twice we can document. Those are only the ones we found in the time we had. Nobody spoke. The refrigerator hummed outside.