Walsh spoke first with Sarah in a quiet corner of the diner. He asked her to describe the events in her own sequence, beginning with what she saw before the riders entered. He did not suggest answers or hurry when she stopped to reconstruct the location of the unfamiliar wire. He asked her to distinguish certainty from suspicion, and she appreciated him more for it than she expected.
"You didn't open any panels?" he asked.
"No. The last time I found something that didn't belong in a machine, my father told me to walk away and call professionals."
"That was good advice."
"He had a lot of that. He also had a talent for charging people for it after they ignored him."
Walsh almost smiled. Then he asked about the visiting SUV, the conversation she had overheard among the riders, and the circumstances under which Billy had named Graham Henderson. Sarah answered everything she could remember, including her uncertainty about which parts of Billy's confession had been overheard by Evan.
When Sarah finished, Walsh looked toward Wyatt, who was standing in the workshop doorway. His face showed professional recognition but not admiration. "I need to speak with Mr. Henderson," he said.
"He knows."
"And I need you to understand that we're not asking you to solve this case. You've already done a great deal by keeping everybody safe and preserving what you saw."
Sarah looked at the damage to her screen door, the CLOSED sign, and the empty parking spaces where customers should have been. "I would be happy to stop participating," she said. "Tell the people sending strangers to my counter."
Walsh regarded her for a moment. "That's exactly what we're trying to do."
He interviewed Wyatt for nearly an hour. Sarah remained in the diner while they spoke near the office, but she saw Wyatt's shoulders grow rigid when Walsh mentioned the proposed shipment. Wyatt asked for an attorney before answering questions that might expose his own conduct, and Walsh accepted the request without protest. The investigator left a card with a number to call through counsel and made it clear the interview could resume under appropriate circumstances.
Wyatt stood outside afterward with the card in his hand. Sarah joined him near the water cooler, waiting until he decided whether he wanted to speak. He kept turning the card over until the paper began to soften at the edges.
"He knows a lot," Wyatt said.
"Isn't that his job?"
"He knows about things I thought nobody outside the table had seen. Transfers. Missing inventory. Men who changed sides and never explained why."
Sarah leaned against the doorframe. "Maybe somebody got tired of being afraid."
"Maybe."
"What are you afraid he'll find?"
Wyatt looked at her for a long time. "That I did more damage than I can fix."
Sarah had no answer that would satisfy either of them. She did not tell him his intentions had been good or that he could become a different man overnight. She simply said that when Martin discovered a structural problem beneath a vehicle, he did not call it repaired because the engine sounded better. He put the whole machine on the lift and looked at what had actually been damaged.