He asked Cord to give them a moment alone. When the door closed, Silas admitted that he had suspected Cole for years. He had heard about the expensive motorcycle and later learned that Cole had met privately with people connected to Pike. None of it had established a provable connection to the missing money.
"Why didn't you confront him?" Nolan asked. Silas rested both palms on the workbench. "Because I wasn't certain, and because a president has to be careful about accusing a brother when all he has are rumors. That's the answer I used for years."
He paused, and the room seemed smaller around them. "The less comfortable answer is that I didn't want to discover I had trusted the man who destroyed Elias. I thought leadership meant holding everybody together. Sometimes it meant I was protecting myself from a fact that would have changed what I had to do."
Nolan wanted to argue that Silas had failed, but the older man had already said so without asking for forgiveness. The admission was difficult to listen to because it made the story less clean. Silas was not a villain. He had kept an imperfect club alive, maintained charitable work, and spent years carrying suspicion he could not substantiate. Yet Elias remained missing, and Nolan had spent two decades believing himself abandoned. Good intentions had not prevented a terrible result.
"We need to find Cole," Nolan said. Silas nodded reluctantly. "I know approximately where he lives. I've checked a few times over the years, though I never went to the door."
Nolan pointed to a ledger entry Cord had marked with red pencil. "If Cole helped Pike frame Elias, he might know where the evidence went or why Pike couldn't find it." Silas looked toward the main room. "And if Pike thinks the old trail has reopened, he'll want to know whether Cole is going to talk."
A phone buzzed against the workbench. Silas picked it up, read the message, and went completely still. He turned the screen toward Nolan.
A photograph showed the front of Nolan's apartment building taken from across the street that morning. Beneath it were five words: STOP NOW. LAST WARNING FOR YOU. The image was recent enough to show a delivery truck Nolan had passed while leaving for the clubhouse.
"Who sent it?" Nolan asked. "Unlisted number," Silas said. "And whoever took that picture wanted us to know he had been there."
Nolan felt heat rise in his face, followed by an unpleasant cold. Someone had stood outside his apartment while he carried his mother's last possessions inside. Someone knew where he slept and what he drove. It was the same kind of knowledge Elias had described on the tape, assembled not because it was interesting but because knowledge could be turned into pressure.
Silas looked at him carefully. "Who knew you were going to the Blackbird on Thursday?" Nolan answered without hesitation. "Marcus Webb. A friend from the garage."