Chapter 5 - The Cost of Finding Him
Marco's lawyer said his client had legitimate business at the repair yard and denied using Eli's identity. Reed sought records rather than a public argument. The yard provided service schedules, gate logs, and invoices. Several entries placed Marco in the area near the time of the signed receipt, though none showed him signing it. A forensic handwriting comparison remained pending.
Ray's supervisor, worried about lawsuits, proposed a settlement requiring Ray to state he had mistaken the locket for something else. Ray refused. His supervisor warned him the company couldn't afford extended litigation with a wealthy customer. Ray understood the fear. He also knew signing a false statement would end the only honest part of his involvement.
"You can tell them I touched the bundle," Ray said. "You can tell them I made an accusation before I knew what else was inside. I won't say I didn't know my brother's locket."
He was taken off shifts again. This time he accepted temporary work at an independent garage, helping replace brakes and tow lights in exchange for hourly wages. The pay was lower. He sold his fishing boat to cover rent and his mother's medical bills, feeling the old family losses collecting around a new one.
Mara called to say her father had finally admitted something in a recorded interview: after the argument, Eli had been injured in the warehouse's loading area. Tomas said he believed Eli slipped while checking a lift, but he panicked about the investigation and moved equipment before calling for help. He claimed Eli left the building under his own power afterward. There were no records of an ambulance. Mara had not seen an injury; she suspected her father was still withholding something.
Ray wanted to rush to Tomas's house. Instead he went to the riverfront lot and stood behind the chain-link fence, watching birds circle the abandoned building. He called Reed, who told him she had received the account and was checking old medical records, payroll data, and the location of the equipment. A late confession of negligence could coexist with a further lie. It wasn't enough to declare either murder or innocence.
At home Ray opened Eli's old toolbox. Beneath a tray of sockets he found a notebook page wrapped in wax paper. Eli had written the serial number of the defective lift and an entry about a replacement safety part billed twice. The second billing carried initials that matched Marco's company. Ray took the paper to Reed without adding his own conclusions.
The documents suggested a financial incentive to certify that a repair had been completed when the parts hadn't arrived. But the link between a false invoice and Eli's disappearance required witnesses, equipment records, and a timeline. Ray had learned that even overwhelming fear didn't make evidence stronger.
The next morning his mother insisted on visiting the riverfront with him. He told her the police would not permit entry into the old warehouse and that the ground might be unsafe. She said she didn't need to go inside. She wanted to see the place where Eli had last worked and bring flowers to a fence that had been part of his life.
They stood together as trucks rumbled down the road. She asked if Ray remembered what he'd said to Eli the night he disappeared. Ray looked at the bent fence wire. "I told him he was always making trouble. I told him he should quit complaining about people who paid him."
"You were frightened for him."
"I was angry he wouldn't give up."
"Those can both be true."
Ray took her hand. His mother didn't offer absolution. They watched the river turn under the gray sky, then walked back to the truck in silence.
That afternoon Reed called with a search result from a drainage contractor's old records. Workers had found a sealed metal compartment beneath the loading ramp years earlier and reported it as an abandoned equipment cavity. Its interior had never been inspected.
The compartment was less than thirty feet from the place where Eli was last seen.
Before the next search Ray visited the man who had once taught Eli to operate a lift, retired mechanic Walter Dunn. Walter lived above a laundromat and kept a notebook of training dates because the company had refused to pay him for two classes. He recognized Eli in the old crew picture and remembered a conversation about a damaged guard rail.
"Your brother didn't come to me asking how to get even," Walter said. "He asked how to make an unsafe machine stop without putting the night crew out of work. That's a harder question than being angry."
Walter handed Ray a photocopy of the manufacturer's maintenance advisory, a document widely circulated before Eli vanished. It described a testing procedure that the company's invoices claimed had been completed. Walter could not tell whether the procedure had actually occurred. He said a competent inspector would compare the machine's physical condition, the dated work orders, and the parts inventory.
Ray put the paper in a folder without writing accusations across it. For years he had treated every person who remembered Eli as either an ally or an enemy, depending on whether the memory supported what Ray believed. Walter's cautious explanation reminded him that a skilled worker could be honest about not knowing an answer.
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They drank coffee from mismatched mugs while Walter described Eli teaching an apprentice to check a chain twice before lifting a load. It was such an ordinary picture of his brother that Ray almost couldn't bear it. He'd spent so long imagining Eli's last hour that he had forgotten all the hours when Eli did his work well and went home tired, hungry, and alive.
That night Ray wrote those memories into a letter for his mother. He did not give it to her yet. He wanted to make certain the letter was about the brother he'd known, not a memorial speech assembled from the evidence he hoped investigators would find.
