He turned the cassette over. No title appeared on either side. A small piece of white tape had once held a label, and he could see the glue shadow where it had been removed.
He imagined her putting the cassette beneath the cardboard, arranging the vest above it, and pressing the lid closed with an expression he would never know. He reached for his phone to call Marcus, stopped, and set the phone back down. Marcus had told him not to go. Whatever this recording contained, Nolan would not risk losing it because someone else found the truth inconvenient.
At one in the morning, the refrigerator clicked and began its familiar knocking. Nolan lay in bed listening to it, the cassette safe inside the metal box beside his shoes. The image of Silas's trembling hands kept returning to him, followed by the abrupt retreat of Warren Pike. In the darkness, Nolan whispered the name Elias Vance once, then again, learning the sound.
He thought he would not sleep. Eventually he did, but only after deciding that tomorrow he would return to the Iron Ravens and play whatever message his parents had left. The clubhouse was twelve miles beyond the city limits, in a converted repair shop behind an iron gate. The buildings were low and plain, and the gravel yard held motorcycles in various stages of repair.
Nolan arrived just before eleven with the metal box on the passenger seat and Elias's vest carefully folded behind him. Three riders stood outside drinking coffee, their breath white in the sharp air. None asked him why he was there. One pointed him toward the main door and said, "Silas is waiting."
Inside, the place smelled of heated wood, leather, and machine oil. Mismatched chairs surrounded a long table scarred by decades of use. Old photographs covered the walls, along with maps of charity rides, memorial patches, and a framed list of members whose names Nolan had not yet learned. He had expected a room designed to intimidate outsiders. What he found was a working clubhouse, comfortable in the way a place becomes comfortable after people have repaired the furniture instead of replacing it. There were spare gloves near the stove and a handwritten reminder about a food collection taped beside the coffee machine.
Silas was seated with Decker, Reyes, and two people Nolan had not met. The first was Cord, a quiet man in his fifties who looked after the club's archived accounts. The second was Pauline, a retired county records clerk whose short silver hair and direct manner suggested she did not need a leather patch to hold authority in this company. She had known Elias through his work with displaced families and had already pulled several old property indexes from storage. When Nolan introduced himself, she shook his hand firmly and said, "Your father asked better questions than most men who thought they knew the answers. I remember that."