The officer at the front desk that day was Cole Priestley. Cole was twenty-nine, Tanner’s first cousin, and had been on the Mil Haven Police Force for four years. He was polite enough when Joe walked in, offered her coffee, took notes on a yellow legal pad while she explained what happened. But as soon as she said Tanner’s name, something in Cole’s posture changed. Subtle, but unmistakable.
“Look,” Cole said, setting his pen down. “I know Tanner can come across a certain way. He’s intense. But he’s not the type to actually hurt anybody. You know that, right?” “I’m not saying he hurt me,” Joe said. “I’m saying he made me uncomfortable, and I want it documented.” “Sure, sure,” Cole said, picking the pen back up. Though his tone had already shifted into something closer to going through the motions. “I’ll note it down. But between us, if this turns into some kind of he-said, she-said thing, it’s not going to go anywhere. No witnesses, no contact, nothing physical, just words.”
“There were witnesses,” Joe said. “Half the class heard the comments he made inside the gym.” “The gym stuff? Sure,” Cole said. “That’s different from what happened outside, though. That’s just your word.” Joe studied him for a moment. She had dealt with plenty of people who did not take her seriously over the years. Usually, she found a way around it. This time, she just filed what she could, thanked him for his time, and left.
She sat in her car in the station parking lot for a moment afterward, hands resting on the wheel, saying nothing, thinking nothing in particular. She had learned a long time ago not to expect much from rooms like that one. It still stung a little every time. Even so, she did not know, walking out of that station, that Cole had texted Tanner the second she was out the door. Heads up. The waitress from your class came in complaining. Nothing’s going to come of it. Just be smart for a while.
Tanner read the message with a smirk, sitting in his father’s office at the gym, feet up on the desk. She’s not going to be a problem, he typed back. He believed that completely. It was one of the worst assumptions he would ever make.
There was one more person who noticed something during those first two weeks, though he did not say a word to anyone about it yet. His name was Frank Doyle, seventy-eight years old. A retired martial arts instructor who had trained Tanner Priestley for nearly a decade before health problems forced him to close his own dojo six years earlier. Frank still came by Ironclad sometimes, mostly out of habit, sitting quietly in a folding chair near the back to watch the classes his former student now taught.
Frank had built his reputation the hard way over forty years through proper testing boards and sanctioned competition back before Gary Priestley bought the building and turned it into something shinier and more profitable. Frank had not wanted to sell. He had not had much choice, not with his heart the way it was and a wife who needed him home more than he needed to keep running a gym. He told himself when he handed the keys over that Gary would keep the standards up. For a while, he even believed it.