Later, Nolan approached Boon, who had been seated alone near the end of the table. Boon was a thickset man with oil permanently worked into the lines of his hands. He had been the club treasurer for years, although Cord handled much of the current recordkeeping. His silence at the diner had not seemed like Reyes's patient silence; it carried a strain Nolan could not forget. Nolan sat across from him and asked whether he had been here when the fundraiser money disappeared.
"I was," Boon said. He kept holding an empty coffee mug, turning it without noticing that it had been empty for some time. "And you believed the ledger?" Nolan asked.
Boon looked down at the cup. "I believed it might be real. That's the honest answer. The entries looked wrong, but they were in places that mattered, and I didn't know who had changed them."
He rubbed his jaw. "A good lie doesn't need to make everything false. It only needs to make the right person uncertain at the right moment."
"Did you tell Silas that?" Nolan asked. "I told somebody," Boon said. "The wrong somebody, as it turned out."
He explained that at the time the road captain was a man named Garrett Cole, a longtime rider with access to records and enough standing in the club to make his opinion count. Boon had shown Cole the entries and admitted that something about them was too neat. Cole listened, promised to review the matter, then returned days later saying there was nothing to find. After Elias disappeared, the case was gradually closed inside the club because keeping it open was tearing the members apart.
"What made you doubt Cole?" Nolan asked. Boon hesitated.
"Three weeks after Elias vanished, Cole bought a new motorcycle. Paid cash. He never had that kind of money before, and nobody could explain where it came from. He claimed he'd sold land to a cousin, but the timing never sat right with me."
Boon met Nolan's eyes for the first time. "I thought maybe the cash was payment for helping Pike. I couldn't prove it, and Cole had friends who would have called me a liar. I was afraid I'd break the club trying to save its honor."
"Where is he now?" Nolan asked. "Retired out fifteen years ago. Lives somewhere north of here, or did the last time I heard." Boon set down the cup.
"You're entitled to be angry with me. I was a grown man who saw something he couldn't explain and chose not to look much closer." Nolan considered him, noticing how much the admission seemed to cost. "I'm angry that nobody found my father," he said. "I haven't decided who that belongs to yet."
He took the information to Silas in the back room, where old account books lay across a workbench. Silas listened without interruption until Nolan said Garrett Cole's name. Then the older man's jaw tightened.