She said their strongest argument is still chain of custody and their strongest version of that argument requires a witness who will testify that someone access the safe before 6:00 a.m. on November 9th. They don't have that witness. A pause. They're going to keep looking. Let them look, Cole said.
I want you prepared for the possibility. Reyes said carefully that they find someone who will say they saw something. Not because it happened, but because Garrison has resources and patience, and he's been buying testimony since before I was in this job. Cole absorbed that. What would that do to the case?
Create a hearing, she said, which we'd win because the physical evidence doesn't change, but it would take six months and cost you personally, professionally, in terms of exposure. Your name would be attached to a legal proceeding in ways that are visible. My name is already attached, Cole said. More visibly, she said. The kind of visible that brings cameras.
Cole looked at the whiteboard Patrice had put on the backroom wall, the one that was already covered in his handwriting, names and connections and the developing shape of what he was building. Reyes, he said, "Do you think the case holds?" Yes, she said without hesitation. I think it holds. I've been building cases for 19 years, and this is one of the two or three cleanest ones I've assembled.
The only way Garrison walks is if his lawyers manufacture enough confusion to make a jury doubt. And to do that, they need a credible witness, and they don't have one. Then we hold, Cole said. Cole, she said, and there it was again. That slight shift in register, the move from professional to real.
I want to tell you something. Not officially. All right. Garrison made a mistake, she said, coming after the chapter, coming after Kirby, Danny Faulk, the others. He thought it would destabilize the people who knew what he'd done.
Instead, it brought you back. That's not what he expected. She paused. He expected you to stay hidden. He thought 11 months of quiet meant you'd lost whatever made you dangerous.
He was wrong. Cole was quiet for a moment. He wasn't entirely wrong. He said 11 months changed things. It changed how you fight.
Reyes said, "Not weather." Cole held on to that after the call ended. He sat in the back room with the whiteboard and the decent coffee maker Patrice had sourced from somewhere and the new chairs with all four legs intact and he sat with what Reyes had said and found it more true than comfortable. It was the second week of December when Gerald Foss came back. He'd been coming in every few days.
the 3:00 meeting on the day. Cole returned, arriving through the back entrance with his coat and his hat and a yellow legal pad, sitting across from Cole at the back room table and demonstrating in the methodical and thorough way of a man who spent 37 years assessing risk for a living that his offer to be useful had not been casual or sentimental. He brought contacts. He brought knowledge of the county's legal and financial infrastructure that would have taken Cole years to accumulate independently. He brought perhaps most valuably the specific credibility of a locally known, widely respected, retired professional whose involvement in something gave it an immediate legitimacy that Cole's complicated, externally visible, connected to leather vests and federal warrants could not have supplied alone.
On this particular afternoon, Gerald Foss came in with his legal pad and something in his expression that Cole recognized as the look of a man carrying information that changes the shape of things. " Sit down," Cole said. Gerald sat. He opened the legal pad to a page covered in neat, precise handwriting. The handwriting of a man who had taken notes professionally for four decades and had never lost the habit.
I've been making calls, he said carefully to people I know and trust about the situation with Garrison's operation and the kinds of harm it's done. He looked up at Cole. Do you know how many people in this county alone have been touched by that operation in some form? Businesses that were undercut, loans that were influenced, properties that were devalued by strategic adjacent development. How many?
Cole said 23 that I can identify with reasonable confidence, Gerald said. And that's one county. That's preliminary. That's me making phone calls for 2 weeks. Cole looked at him.
23 people, 23 ordinary lives that had been bent or broken by the patient. Methodical operation of a man who had run his criminal enterprise with the patience and structure of a legitimate business. Because that was what Garrison had always been. disciplined, long-sighted and completely without conscience. What do these people need?
Cole said different things, Gerald said. Some of them need documentation records of what was done to them that could support civil actions against Garrison's entities. Some of them need legal help navigating the process of recovering property or business value. Some of them just need someone to tell them they're not imagining it, that what happened to them was real and was done deliberately and they're not alone in it. He paused.
That last one is more of them than you'd think. Cole sat with that. The weight of 23 and the knowledge that 23 was the beginning rather than the total. Can you connect them to the right kind of legal support? He said, "I can identify it."
Gerald said, "I have relationships with three attorneys in the county who do this kind of work, two more in Nashville." He looked at his legal pad. The problem is coordination. Someone needs to sit in the middle of all this and understand the whole picture. Someone who knows which case connects to which, which piece of evidence matters, to which filing, who needs what in what order.
That's what the back room is for, Cole said. Gerald looked at him over the top of the legal pad with the careful assessing attention of a man who has been waiting for confirmation that the thing he'd committed to was as real as he hoped. " Yes," he said. " That's what I thought." Then the back door opened and Cutter walked in.
He was alone, which was unusual enough that Cole straightened slightly. Cutter was a man who moved with other people around him, not from weakness, but from preference, from the particular comfort of a man who had spent his adult life embedded in a structure. Alone, he looked slightly larger, slightly more raw, as if the social context that normally modulated him had been removed. He looked at Gerald Fosss, then at Cole. You said come to Harrisville, he said.