Silas sat at the long table with Reyes, Boon, and a lean man named Cord who kept the club's accounts. A woman in her late fifties stood beside a filing cabinet with a laptop open before her. Silas introduced her as Pauline Mercer, a retired county records clerk who had spent thirty years learning where official records were stored and where inconvenient records were sometimes hidden.
"I don't belong to the club," Pauline said as she shook Nolan's hand. "I just happen to believe that a county ought to be able to explain where its land went."
"My father apparently believed that, too," Nolan said.
Pauline glanced at the photograph in the box. "Then he had more company than he knew."
Nolan placed the cassette on the table. Silas reached toward it, stopped, then drew back. "Elias carried a recorder in his jacket," he said. "I gave him one for his birthday before any of this happened. He said if people were going to argue about what had been said, he'd rather be able to play it back."
Reyes disappeared into the rear office and returned with a battered portable cassette player. He had repaired it years earlier and kept it because someone might one day need the machine more than he needed the space it occupied. Nolan found himself strangely grateful for that stubborn refusal to discard an outdated thing. He inserted the cassette. The machine clicked, hissed, and began to play. Wind filled the speaker first, accompanied by the low drone of an engine and a slight rattle from somewhere in the background.
Then a man's voice spoke, measured and deliberate. "If you're hearing this, then I didn't come back, or I came back too late to explain it myself. My name is Elias Vance. I'm recording what I know about Warren Pike, and why I have to leave before it reaches my family."
Nolan gripped the underside of the table. He had expected perhaps to recognize something in the voice, but recognition didn't work that way. It was a stranger's voice, and that made the experience more painful; the man who had given him life had become someone he was meeting for the first time through an aging strip of magnetic tape. Elias said he had spent seven months collecting property transfers, loan agreements, and testimony from families damaged by Pike's operation. He had discovered connections between a lending business called Meridian Capital Partners and land purchases made through several other companies. His sources were frightened, and he had promised not to expose them unnecessarily.
"I trusted the club enough to bring what I knew to Silas," Elias continued. "I thought the brotherhood could help me put it in front of people who would act. Somebody told Pike I was coming before I could finish. I don't know who, and I won't name a suspicion on a tape like it's a fact."
The recording paused long enough for Nolan to hear the road noise again. Silas's hands were flat on the table, his face immobile except for a muscle that worked near his jaw. Boon stared into his coffee.