Part Two: The Collection

Garrett didn't sleep that night.

He'd left the house at dusk, locking the door behind him with hands that still wouldn't stop trembling. The leather box stayed where he'd found it. He wasn't ready to take it, to pick it up, grip it to his chest, and lay it in his car like something that belonged to him. But he'd photographed every envelope, front and back, before he left. Forty-seven of them.

Back in his apartment in Midtown, he sat on the floor with his back against the radiator and scrolled through the images on his phone, the heat clanging and hissing behind him. Through the wall, his neighbor was already warming up for his nightly argument with Denise.

Forty-seven people had written confessions to his grandfather, trusting Harold Milligan with secrets bad enough to destroy them.

Why?

Garrett pulled up the photo of the mayor's letter and read it again. A man came to see me. He said he'd found her. He said he'd taken care of it. He said you'd sent him.

His grandfather had made it his business to make problems disappear, and in exchange, he'd asked for insurance. But insurance for what? Favors down the line? Or something else?

Had he spent decades quietly controlling Kansas City's elite, pulling on their leashes whenever he needed the tiniest favor, or had the letters simply sat in that drawer, a dragon's hoard of other people's sins?

Harold Milligan had never needed to blackmail anyone for money—the family had plenty. And he'd never sought political office, never angled for appointments or contracts or the kind of public power that required calling in favors.

So what had he wanted?