Then Hail said, "You'll regret this. I've regretted things in my life." Jackson said, "This won't be one of them." He ended the call. He stood in the corridor for a moment.
Then he went back to where Ryan was sitting and said, "Hail just called me directly." Ryan went very still. Jackson told him the full conversation, word for word, including the implied threat about Ryan's parents. Ryan's face went through things anger first and then something colder and more deliberate. The same settling process Jackson had watched happen at the storage unit and again in the gas station parking lot.
He threatened my parents' reputations, Ryan said after killing them. Yes, Jackson said. He's panicking, Ryan said. Yes, Jackson said. And panicking men make mistakes.
Ryan looked at him. You recorded it. Jackson held up his phone, which had an app that Manny had installed three years ago after a situation that had made recording capability seem like basic operational sense. Every word, he said. Prine exhald slowly, "Call Reyes," he said.
Jackson was already dialing. Reyes came out of the interview room at 4:37 in the afternoon with the expression of someone who has just spent 3 hours listening to testimony that has rearranged there. Understanding of a situation that was already significant. She looked at Ryan first, then Jackson. Derek Puit's cooperation is substantial.
She said his direct knowledge of the financial mechanism, his testimony about what Daniel Carter brought to him and what he did with that information and his evidence of his father's original involvement in establishing the Shell Company network. It fills gaps in Emily's documentation that would have taken us months to establish otherwise. She paused. But combined with the audio recordings from the storage unit, we have enough to move forward significantly faster than I anticipated yesterday. Ryan absorbed this.
How much faster? We're talking to the US attorney tonight, Reyes said about timing and scope. She looked at both of them carefully. I need to ask you both directly. Neither of you have has any intention of taking independent action between now and when we move.
No, Jackson said. No, Ryan said. Then what does moving look like? What's the actual end of this? Reyes considered how much to say.
Charges, she said finally. Multiple counts of wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, potentially more. Depending on what forensic accounting surfaces regarding the property acquisitions, she paused. And depending on what further investigation reveals about the circumstances of Daniel Carter and Emily Carter's deaths, Ryan looked at her. You're saying potentially more than financial charges.
I'm saying we follow the evidence wherever it goes, Ry said carefully. Ryan nodded. One more thing, Jackson said, and he played her the recording of Hail's call. Reyes listened to it without expression. When it ended, she said, witness intimidation and obstruction.
She looked at Jackson. He called you after we took the evidence into custody. Yes, Jackson said. That's a gift, she said flatly. An extraordinarily stupid gift from a man who apparently believes he can talk his way out of anything.
He spent 25 years being right about that. Jackson said, "Not anymore," Reyes said. She went back inside to make calls. The chapter gathered that evening at a restaurant outside Nashville, a real meal, the first one anyone had eaten properly in 2 days. And there was a quality to it that Jackson recognized from years of riding with these men.
The particular looseness that comes after something hard and unresolved finally resolves. Not celebration. Not yet. But the release of sustained tension, the body remembering how to breathe normally. Ryan was there.
Laura was there. Puit was not left with his attorney after a statement to begin whatever came next for him. Danny raised his beer and said to Emily Carter and the table set it back without ceremony, without performance, just the simple collective acknowledgement of a woman none of them had known who had done something extraordinary. Ryan raised his glass and then didn't drink right away. He sat with it for a moment and his face had the particular quality of someone doing internal accounting what this cost, what it gave back, whether the math balanced.
She never got to see it. he said. Not to anyone specifically, just out loud. She did all of this and she never got to see it matter. She knew it would matter. Laura said she paid 5 years rent on that storage unit.
You don't do that if you think it won't matter. You do that because you're certain someone will eventually find it. Ryan looked at her. That's an act of faith, he said. She had good reasons for it, Jackson said.
Ryan looked at him. You, he said again, the same word he'd said at the storage unit carrying the same meaning. And you, Jackson said, she wrote to both of us in that letter. She needed both of us. A man to hold the key and a son to use it.
He paused. She knew Ryan Carter wasn't going to be 4 years old forever. The table was quiet for a moment, the comfortable quiet that falls when something true has been said and doesn't need adding to. Then Hector said, "What happens to the families, the ones who lost their money?" Manny sat down his glass.
Asset recovery, he said. Reyes mentioned it yesterday. If the property acquisitions can be legally linked to diverted charitable funds, which the documentation appears to support, there's a mechanism to compel liquidation and restitution. It's complicated. It takes time, but it's possible. possible or likely, Hector said, depends on the scope of what the forensic accounting surfaces, Manny said.
But the legal theory is sound, and Puit's testimony adds a direct human voice to what otherwise would be a pure paper trail. That matters in court. How many families? Ryan said, Manny thought for a moment. In the three counties I documented conservatively, a few hundred families who were denied assistance they'd applied for and qualified for. the actual number of people who were displaced from neighborhoods that were subsequently redeveloped.