One of them was Tommy Briggs at maybe 25. Thin and serious. The particular intensity of a young man who had not yet figured out what to do with himself. One was stone. He looked at himself, 26, maybe 27, a face that had not yet accumulated the lines that came later.
Vest, both of them squinting against the sun. Stone did not remember who had taken the picture, did not remember the specific day. But he knew the period, late '8s, desert southwest, a chapter of his life that was as far from this Montana bar as anything he could imagine. He said, "I've had it for 35 years." Tommy said was going to bring it.
The first time I came, I forgot. He paused. I didn't forget. I just wasn't ready. He looked at the photograph.
My best man stone at my first wedding. Stood up there in that church in Flagstaff in a suit that didn't fit and you looked so uncomfortable that my mother felt sorry for you. He almost smiled. He gave a toast. That made my father-in-law cry.
And he was not a man who cried. Stone looked at the photograph for another moment, he said. Tommy's first wife. She had died in 2003. That had come fast and left nothing to argue with.
Tommy said quietly. She was a good woman, Stone said. Best, Tommy said. And then they were both quiet. The way men are quiet about things they have both lived and both survived and do not need to perform grief about because the grief is simply presence and known between them.
Tommy finished his coffee. He stood up. He put his hand on Stone's shoulder for exactly one second. The same way he had done the first time he came. The way men communicate the things they cannot fully say.
Built something decent here, Tommy said. Stone nodded. On it every day, he said. Tommy walked out. Stone heard the motorcycle start.
Listen to it pull away down the highway until the sound became nothing. Months after the arrests, the trials began. Cole Harrington was represented by a private attorney who made three attempts to have key evidence suppressed and failed each time. Prosecution was handled by the U.S. Attorney's Office with Agent Shea's case file as the foundation and it was clean and thorough and documented in the way that only cases built by people who actually experienced the harm can be. Sentencings came on a cold November morning.
Stone did not attend. He had given his deposition months earlier, clear and precise, and had decided that he had no desire to be in the same room as Cole Harrington on the day the man's reckoning arrived. One, he had made his peace with what had happened. He did not need to watch it end about it from Shea who called it that afternoon. Shea said federal sentencing guidelines aggravated by the fabricated evidence and the witness intimidation did not appear to have much sympathy.
Buell Stone asked he's cooperating with the investigation into two other jurisdictions where similar operations were identified. A pause. The the judge that signed the warrant lost his license and received a three-year suspended sentence. Cooperating fully. Stone was quiet.
It's over. Shea said. Is it? Stone said. Shea paused.
You know it's never entirely over. He said honestly. There'll be men like Harrington in other towns already are. I know. Stone said.
I meant this chapter. She said is closed. Yes. Stone thanked him. He hung up.
He went to the bar and looked at the vest on the wall and stayed with it for a moment. He picked up the phone and called Anna. It's done. He said when she answered quiet on the other end for a moment. 12 years, he said.
Pause. Then she said, "I'm on my way in. It's your day off," he said. She said, "I'm on my way in." She arrived 20 minutes later.
She came in without her apron, which was unusual, and sat at the bar. One Stone poured coffee for both of them. They sat there for a while without saying much. Gay played on the jukebox. The bar was quiet between the lunch and evening rushes, just the sound of the afternoon and the settling of the building and the low familiar music.
Anna said, "Do you remember what you told me the first day I came back to work after the inspection?" After Harrington's people had been in here and done what they did, Stone thought, I told you we were going to document everything, he said. For that. She said that that morning you said you said that keeping the door open was a form of strength. She looked at her coffee said that for 11 years you had kept this door open and that the thing you were not willing to let happen was for someone to take that from you remembered.
Yes. He said I've been thinking about that a lot. She said what it takes to keep a door open for 11 years. That actually costs most people when they've been through what you've been through the way most people process it is by closing things and walls up making themselves smaller so that less can reach them. She looked at him.