Decker stepped in from the porch and reported that the neighboring road was clear. Silas considered the address in his notebook and the remaining daylight. He was unwilling to put the documents or the men at risk for what might be an empty garage, but Garrett's account offered the possibility that evidence had survived in a second location, beyond Pike's reach.
Nolan looked back at the man in the armchair. "You have a choice now," he said. "You can tell investigators what you did while you can still remember it clearly, or you can keep hoping the past will spare you. It hasn't spared anybody else."
Garrett nodded once. Whether the decision was remorse or fear, Nolan couldn't yet tell, and he no longer needed to decide it. Outside, the sky was losing what little light the afternoon had offered. The name Harwick Auto Repair sat in Silas's notebook like a door that might still open.
The Harwick property stood beyond a strip of second-growth woods, several miles from the nearest highway. Its old sign leaned against a fence and was almost impossible to read through the rain gathering on Nolan's windshield. Behind a stand of white oaks, three broad bay doors faced a yard slowly being reclaimed by weeds. Silas had called the other members on the way south. When Nolan pulled into a disused roadside lot to meet them, more than twenty motorcycles were already waiting beneath a light that cast yellow circles on wet asphalt. Men who had been eating dinner or repairing engines had put on their jackets and come because Silas had told them there was a chance to recover what Elias had left.
Nolan looked at the line of bikes and wondered whether his father would recognize the club. He had joined a group of men defined partly by their independence, and now their collective response to a twenty-two-year-old injustice looked like a kind of discipline. That didn't erase the wrongs in their past, but it made their willingness to correct one of them feel real.
"Nobody gets heroic tonight," Silas told the assembled riders. "We are looking for documents. If we find them, we preserve them. If we encounter anybody with a lawful claim to the property or a reason to stop us, we step back and sort it out. No one gives Pike a crime scene to point at in place of his own records."
Decker nodded. Several men looked disappointed by the absence of action, but most appeared relieved. Silas had learned in his years as president that the most dangerous part of leading strong personalities was persuading them that restraint could be harder, and more valuable, than force. They approached the old garage carefully because the property was unstable and the neighboring fields offered little shelter from the weather. Recent tire marks crossed the dirt near the loading area, faint but visible where rain had not washed them away. A set of modern padlocks hung from otherwise corroded door hardware.
"Somebody's been here," Decker said.
"Somebody's been keeping this shut," Nolan corrected.
They checked for a notice identifying a current caretaker or owner. None was posted, and the county information Ruth had supplied indicated a long and unresolved receivership following the former owner's death. Silas knew that did not make the building theirs to enter; he also knew Pike's people had apparently been there before and might