Silas Greer looked like exactly the man the county wanted to arrest.
That was why Mara distrusted it.
He was fifty-eight, broad-shouldered, with weathered hands and the hard eyes of someone who had spent decades outside in heat, ice, rain, and road salt. His house smelled of saw oil, coffee, and old grief. On the wall above the kitchen table hung a framed photo of a woman with red hair standing beside a lake.
His late wife, Lila.
Silas did not deny hating adulterers.
He said it plainly.
“Men like that destroy houses and call it weakness when the walls fall.”
Mara sat across from him while deputies searched the shed.
“Did you attack Martin Hale?”
“No.”
“Colin Webb?”
“No.”
“Peter Moss?”
“No.”
“Samuel Kerr?”
Silas smiled without humor. “If I had, he wouldn’t still be breathing.”
A deputy shifted near the doorway.
Mara did not.
“Where were you last night at 1:13 a.m.?”
“In that chair.”
“Witnesses?”
“My neighbor saw my kitchen light. My doctor can tell you I’m not running five miles on this leg.”
She glanced at the brace.
He tapped it with two fingers. “Knee replacement went bad. Can’t climb stairs without cursing.”
“Can you hold a chainsaw?”
“Yes.”
“Can you stand in a highway lane?”
“Probably.”
“Can you appear five miles ahead of a truck in four minutes?”
Silas leaned back.
“You know I can’t.”
His calm bothered her.
Not innocence.
Knowledge.
“You know about that detail,” she said.
He looked away for the first time.
“It’s already on the scanner.”
“No. It isn’t.”
Silence.
Mara let it stretch.
Then Silas said, “You’re looking for my brother.”
That was the first time the room changed.
“Brother?”
“Jonah.”
“Where is he?”
“If I knew, I’d be sleeping better.”
Mara’s pulse sharpened.
Silas explained only after she pressed him. Jonah Greer was his younger brother by eleven minutes, identical enough in youth that teachers mixed them up, different enough in adulthood that only people who knew them well could tell. Jonah had vanished after Lila Greer’s death three years earlier. No official missing report. Silas said Jonah left because grief made him dangerous.
“What happened to Lila?” Mara asked.
Silas looked at the photo.
“She died after a married man used her and threw her away.”
“Name?”
“I thought I knew.”
“You thought?”
Silas’s face hardened.
“Because Vivian Knox brought me photographs. She said Lila had been meeting a man from town. Said his lies broke her. Said men like that needed consequences.”
Mara felt the case tilt again.
Vivian had not merely photographed victims.
She had helped create the first motive.
Silas looked back at Mara.
“If Jonah is doing this, he isn’t alone.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Jonah was angry.”
Silas nodded toward the list on the table.
“But he was never organized.”