THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-EIGHT

"SERGEANT JANOWSKI, IS IT?" Oliver Grafton raises a hand to Kyle.

"It's Kyle, Agent Grafton. Thanks for seeing me."

"Call me Ollie. Everyone always did. Never had much time for the formality myself. Everyone else at the Bureau, they — well, they sort of got off on it, if you know what I mean; the whole ‘special agent' crap. I always preferred plain old Ollie. Or Graf if not."

Grafton is more than ten years removed from the FBI now, retired at age sixty-nine and living alone in a house around fifty miles from Hemingway Grove in a town called Chatsworth. Kyle's great-uncle lived out here; Kyle tries out the name to Grafton, who says it rings a bell.

"You grew up here, then," says Kyle, sitting at the kitchen table across from Grafton.

Grafton nods. "Born and raised in this house. Never thought I'd come back. Joined up with the Bureau, the central district — y'know, Springfield — after law school and transferred to Chicago in the late nineties. After I retired and then my wife passed, and the house was just sitting here, I figured, why not? It's not a bad place to retire, actually." He looks at Kyle. "But you didn't come out here to hear about my life. You wanna hear about Mikey the Knife."

Kyle smiles at the nickname, one of many he's heard.

"Or Mickey Two Guns." Grafton chuckles. "Michael Cagnina. You probably heard he got out not long ago. Heard he's down in Tampa– St. Pete."

"You worked that case," says Kyle.

"Back in the day, yeah, I did. Don't remind me, the way everything went south. The bitch of it was, it wasn't the Bureau's fault, those witnesses getting killed. That was on the marshals' office. But we all knew when the case against him went in the sewer that it would be us front and center in the shitstorm." He waves a hand. "Well, we got him anyway, even if it was on a tax charge."

"I'm looking at something going on in my town," says Kyle. "One of the people in my town was a defense attorney for Silas Renfrow in that case."

Grafton purses his lips, nods for a long time, almost as if showing respect. "Silent Silas," he says. "He was a ghost. We looked for him for months until he surrendered to us. One of the most cold-blooded, ruthless killers ever born. As much as we hated to lose him as a witness against Cagnina, it seemed like there was some rough justice in seeing him get lit on fire and burned to a crisp."

"I understand." Kyle plays with his hands. "Some strange things are happening to this woman, Silas's former lawyer. People are messing with her. Broke into her home, moved things around, put a dead rat in her kid's Halloween bag —"

"A dead rat. Huh." That seems to get Grafton's attention. "But why would Cagnina have a beef with her? I mean, lawyers annoy all of us, but we don't — we don't blame them for what their clients do."

"That's what I can't figure," says Kyle. "It's just that all this weird stuff is happening to her all of a sudden, and Cagnina just got out of prison five months ago. Seems like it might be connected."

Grafton's eyes narrow. " Silas's lawyer," he mumbles. "Silas, of all people."

"Why do you say that?"

"Oh, well, it's probably nothing. Really just an old wives' tale."

"Tell me, please," says Kyle, feeling like he's getting some traction.

"Hell, it's not even an old wives' tale. Just something one of the agents said once. After the whole thing was over. After Cags was convicted on tax evasion and we had at least something to show for years of hard work."

"Yeah? What did this agent say?"

"And he was half in the bag, at that. Most of us were. A big blowout after the conviction. You know how cops can drink. Thing was, I was on some medication at the time, so I had to watch myself." He shakes his head. "Yeah, Frankie Blair, one of the lead agents. That boy could drink back in the day."

Kyle is about to come out of his skin. "What did Agent Blair say, Ollie?"

"He said, and I'm pretty sure this is a quote, it stuck with me so much. He said, ‘Are we really sure that Silas is dead?'"

Kyle draws back. "I'm not … I'm not following."

"Like he faked his own death," says Grafton. "Put another body in his place and escaped. Could you even imagine? And where would a guy like that even go?"

Kyle tries with all his might to maintain a poker face. Where, indeed, would a guy like that go?

Probably someplace nondescript. A small town where you could live anonymously. Until something thrusts you into the spotlight.

Something like a heroic rescue of a drowning man in a choppy river, all captured on a video that goes viral.

No, Kyle thinks. It can't be.

Did Silas Renfrow move to Hemingway Grove and marry his former lawyer?