"Please. I'll get a warrant on my end." Wade looked across the room at the chief's open door. "And Sergeant—I'll be bringing him in myself."
* * *
The chief offered to send someone else. She said it gently, standing in her doorway after he'd told her, with the thumb drive on her desk between them like something that might go off.
"Reggie can do it," she said. "Or I can do it myself. Nobody's going to think less of you, Wade. It's your family."
"That's why it has to be me."
"That's exactly why it's a bad idea."
"Chief." He made himself look at her. "Three days ago I got a call that pointed at a man because of what he looked like, and I went running. If I hand this one off because of who it is, then I'm doing the same thing from the other end. I'm deciding what to do based on who somebody is instead of what they did." He swallowed. "Reggie can come. I want Reggie to come. I want somebody standing there who isn't related to anybody. But I'll be the one to say it."
She studied him for a long moment, then nodded once and picked up the phone to call the judge.
They found Kyle at the end of his shift, a little after six, at the fuel dock at Vance Marina, coiling a hose. The sun was low and orange over the water and the whole marina had that gold, drowsy, late-afternoon look of a postcard: the sailboats nodding at their slips, the halyards clinking against the masts, clink and clink and clink, exactly the sound on the recording. Wade had known it would be. He'd known it since the Gas-N-Go. It still went through him.
Kyle looked up and saw Wade coming down the dock in uniform, with Officer Reggie Dupree a few steps behind, and he smiled, his quick wide smile, and started to lift a hand. Then he saw Wade's face. The hand stopped halfway up. The smile stayed on a second too long, the way a light stays on in a room after you've flipped the switch, and then it went out.
"Hey, Wade," he said.
"Hey, Kyle."
"You, uh. You want some gas or something?" He laughed. Nobody else did. He set the hose down very carefully on the dock, as if it might break. "What's going on, man?"