Nobody looked at it.
The patch was rectangular and smaller than the club insignia above it. Years of sunlight had faded the black cloth almost charcoal. The red edging had gone pale around the corners.
One corner looked wrong.
It had been repaired using blue thread.
Not matching black thread.
Not the heavy red used around the edge.
Blue.
The stitches were crooked.
Some were half an inch long.
Others barely caught the cloth.
They looked like they had been made by someone who had never held a sewing needle correctly in their life.
Lucy pushed the scissors under the final thread.
Her mother finally found her voice.
“Lucy!”
The girl flinched.
The thread snapped.
She stumbled backward on the stool with the patch clenched in one small fist.
Hammer turned.
Lucy’s mother, Mara Hale, came around the end of the booth so fast her purse fell from her shoulder.
She caught Lucy around the waist before the girl could lose her balance.
“What are you doing?”
Lucy did not answer.
She held the patch against her chest.
Mara looked at it.
Her face changed.
I knew Mara well enough to recognize anger.
She had brought Lucy to the Copper Lantern dozens of times during the previous three years.
I had seen her frustrated because the pancakes arrived wrong.
Tired after a night shift.
Angry when a contractor overcharged her for a fence repair.
None of those expressions looked like this.
Her entire face emptied.
She slowly reached toward the patch.
“Let me see that.”
Lucy shook her head.
Mara stared at the faded red border.
Then the blue stitches.
Her lips parted.
“That’s Owen’s.”
Hammer said nothing.
Mara looked at him.
The shock lasted perhaps two seconds.
Then grief found anger and turned sharp.
“That belongs to my husband.”
The diner seemed to shrink.
A county deputy eating meatloaf near the window put down his fork.
Three customers raised their phones.
One man near the register whispered:
“So the biker did take something off the dead guy.”
Hammer heard him.
He did not turn.
Mara stepped closer.
“My husband was buried without that patch.”
Hammer remained silent.
“I asked where it was.”
Nothing.
“You told me you didn’t know.”
Hammer finally looked at her.
“I told you I couldn’t give it to you.”
“That is not the same thing?”
“No.”
Her voice rose.
“You wore my dead husband’s patch for three years.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Hammer looked toward Lucy.