Silas Took My Badge Before He Asked About The Body

Silas Crowe put my work badge in his desk drawer beside a bag of peppermints.

"Until we find Mr. Price," he said, "you need to stay home."

I still had a cedar sprig between my fingers. I carried fresh ones in my coat after hard calls. Rubbing the flat green needles helped me leave a hospital room without carrying all of it home.

I was a thirty-one-year-old white man with pale skin, a narrow face, gray eyes, and brown hair cut short above my ears.

My job was funeral transport. I drove nights around Winchester, Virginia, carrying people whose families were still learning to use the past tense.

I checked ankle tags. I counted the handles on transfer sheets. I kept clean cot straps rolled beside spare gloves. Most nights, being careful was the whole job.

That morning, being careful had made me useful to the wrong man.

"Missing how?" I asked.

Silas leaned forward.

Silas was a broad, fifty-eight-year-old white man with silver hair, pink cheeks, and soft brown eyes behind thin gold glasses.

He looked like someone who would help you fix a porch step. He had once bought me snow tires, then taken $40 from each check until I had paid back $680.

"The receiving home never got Daniel Price," he said. "You collected him. Your initials are on the removal sheet."

"And Tessa took the keys at the depot. One twenty-three."

"Our system says you finished at three eighteen."

He turned his screen toward me. My name sat above a green line marked DELIVERY COMPLETE.

"I didn't enter that."

"Nobody said you did anything on purpose, son."

He said son the way another man might set down a weight.

Daniel Price had died in a hospital bed. His daughter had tucked his socks into the property bag herself. She had asked whether he would be cold.

I had told her our care room was kept cool. It had been the honest answer, and a poor one.

"Check the relay sheet," I said.

"There isn't one."

"There was when I left."

Silas shut the drawer.

"A family is grieving. Don't make them hear excuses."

Then he slid over a statement. It said I had left the vehicle unattended during an unscheduled stop. Beneath that came a promise to cover losses up to $42,000.

"Insurance language," he said. "Sign it, and I can help you."

"I'd like a copy."

His smile stayed warm.

"Of course you would."

I took a photograph instead. He watched my hands as if he had just noticed I had them.

Outside, the November air smelled of wet leaves and diesel. Trucks moved along the road toward Route 11. I sat in my old car and pressed the cedar until the scent rose.

I had $914 in checking. Rent was $850. Being suspended was not the same as being fired, but neither word bought groceries.

My phone rang before I turned the key.

"Mr. Wren? Leena Varghese. I'm a state investigator. I'd like to ask about your overnight route."

"Am I a suspect?"

"Your employer named you. That isn't the same thing."

She let the quiet sit there. She did not hurry to fill it for me.

I told her about the depot, the relay keys, and Tessa Pike at the dispatch window.

"Would there be a record outside their system?" she asked.

For two years, Silas had fought my mileage claims. Four miles here. Seven there. Once he had cut $63 from my pay because he said I had driven home in the removal hearse.

After that, I had started keeping the vehicle's telematics exports. The unit recorded times, locations, ignition events, and miles. My own paid archive pulled each export while my shift account was active.

I had asked permission in writing. Silas had replied, Keep whatever mileage receipts you need. Stop bothering payroll.

I kept that email, too.

"Maybe," I said.

"Don't change anything. Don't send it around. Can we meet?"

We met in a public library room off the main floor. Leena was thirty-three, an Indian American woman with a dark braid and a coat still damp at the shoulders.

She put a plain notebook on the table.

"Start with the last thing you know yourself."

I signed into my archive. A stored export had arrived at four that morning, before Silas suspended me.

There was my hospital pickup. There was the depot at 1:21. There was a new ignition event at 2:04, after I had gone home.

The hearse had driven west, away from the receiving funeral home, and stayed at an address outside town for forty-six minutes.

Leena stopped writing.

"Do you know that property?" she asked.

I shook my head.

She turned her notebook around. On it was the same address, written before I opened my account.

Underneath, she had written: MARA PRICE — WITNESS THREATENED.