Jesse described a phone call he had overheard an hour earlier, with Clay arranging for Deputy Gary Holt to stop vehicles on the northern route out of Kingman. The pretext was a reported stolen truck, though no truck had been stolen. "The description will change when he needs it to," Jesse said. "A motorcycle, a blue pickup, whatever gets the officer close enough to identify who's inside." His voice hardened with disgust. "I've watched them do it before."
"How did you know we would use that road?" Danny asked. "I didn't. I knew where Clay thought you were going and where his deputy was taking a position. That's all."
Jesse rubbed both hands along the legs of his jeans. "I could have called in anonymously and kept driving. But I can't go back now. He's already asking where I am."
Grim studied the young man more carefully. His fear seemed genuine, but genuine fear was not proof that he was telling the truth. Grim had known frightened liars and honest men who looked perfectly calm. "Why risk your neck for Sarah Cole?" he asked. "You work for Clay. What made tonight different?"
Jesse looked toward the dark end of the parking lot. When he answered, the words were almost too quiet to hear. "A girl named Natalie Vance," he said.
"Nineteen. She worked part-time at a place in Bullhead City. She went missing eight months ago, and Clay told everyone she had run off with a boyfriend. I was there the last night anybody saw her with him." He stopped, breathing in through his nose as though forcing himself to continue.
"What happened?" Grim asked. Jesse shook his head.
"I can't say it all standing in a parking lot. I can tell you I should have done something. I didn't. And then I kept seeing things I couldn't explain away."
He looked directly at Grim. "There are others. Not just Natalie. Names that come up in Clay's books and then disappear. Payments that don't make any sense unless somebody is being paid to keep quiet."
"How many?" Danny asked. Jesse swallowed.
"Seven that I could find. Maybe more that I couldn't." The drizzle gathered on his lashes and made him blink hard. "I've been copying records for six months. Every time I thought I had enough, I found something worse."
He reached slowly inside his jacket and drew out a small black USB storage drive on a key ring. It was ordinary enough to belong on an office desk, not something that looked capable of changing an entire county's balance of power. Jesse held it by the edges as if the plastic had weight beyond its few ounces. "There are spreadsheets, scanned invoices, bank transfers, phone lists, and audio recordings I made on a little digital recorder," he said. "Some of the files are backed up in other places. I didn't want everything to depend on one thing."
Grim did not take it immediately. "You copied this from Mercer's business?" "From machines I had permission to use for deliveries and invoices," Jesse said. "But I know taking copies wasn't part of what I was hired to do."