Page 23 of So Dark

“I wouldn’t say that. And neither would Garrett. He might be angry with them, but he wouldn’t kill them over twenty thousand dollars. He has enough money that it’s not the end of the world to lose that judgment. That’s why he settled.”

“He’s still the same person who broke a man’s jaw and both of his arms twenty years ago.”

“No, he isn’t,” Quint said firmly. “He spends most of his time teaching children wilderness skills. He’s donated twenty times what he paid to Holloway in that lawsuit to help improve our community’s infrastructure and save people who were underwater on their homes. He does handyman work for free, and he travels to Juneau twice a year to speak to the state government about getting electricity, gas and water utilities to every community in Alaska. Not just here, but up north as well. You can verify everything I’ve just told you.”

Faith and Michael looked at each other again. Faith sighed and said, "I'll accept that he has some good qualities, Quint, but look at it from my perspective. I have two people murdered in remote cabins both killed with improvised traps that suggest a high level of knowledge and experience as a hunter and more importantly, a high level of knowledge about each victim. And both victims happen to have been recently involved in legal action against Garrett. Then I show up, and you two act like thugs when we try to talk to him. Maybe he's a good person, but he was once violent, and what I've seen so far doesn't suggest to me that his violent streak has disappeared. And he had a reason to want them dead whether you think the money was a big deal or not."

Quint nodded. “I can understand where you’re coming from. Please try to look at it from my perspective and from Garrett’s. He made a very big mistake many years ago, a mistake that nearly ruined his life. He did his time, and let me tell you, time in Alaska is cold and lonely. He got out of prison and fought hard to change himself. He became a respectable business owner. He dedicated himself to his community. He went out of his way to be kind to others. He asked for nothing in return. He fought for twenty years and over time managed to become the kind of person he always wanted to be instead of the pariah he once was.

"Then someone buys a tool from him and doesn't use it properly. You can pick at the interaction all you want, but the fact is that it was Holloway's choice to use the wrong tool when ten seconds of research would have shown him what he really needed. Holloway puts his own life in danger, and instead of being grateful that he's still alive and learning his lesson, he wants to attack and blame Garrett for his own mistake. And his lawyers… I'm sure you have experience. They tore Garrett apart. They aired all of his dirty laundry. All of it. In front of his friends and neighbors, people who respect him. They risked the life he worked so hard to build for himself because their idiot client didn't bother reading a warning label."

“Who reads warning labels, though?” Michael interrupted. “Garrett could have taken ten seconds to say, ‘Hey, use this pick, not that one.’”

“I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if Garrett was given the information he needed to give proper advice.”

“In any case,” Faith replied, “what you’ve just described is called motive.”

Quint sighed. “I was trying to explain why we were upset when you showed up. I wish I could think of something to say to convince you other than to promise you that the man who’steaching those children up there is the real Garrett, not the man who went to prison for assault a quarter of a lifetime ago.”

“That’s the thing,” Faith said. “Both of them are the real Garrett.”

Quint pressed his lips together and looked down.

Faith and Michael looked at each other again. “We’ll let Garrett finish his class undisturbed. But we’re going to keep an eye on him. On both of you. I know we’re outsiders and we don’t know him as well as you do, but we’re looking out for two people who can’t look out for themselves anymore.”

“I understand,” Quint said softly.

“If you want to help your friend,” Michael offered, “Make sure he doesn’t try to leave the area. Make sure he doesn’t go out into the wilderness alone. I would follow the same advice as well if I were you.”

“Okay,” Quint agreed. “I’ll do that.”

“And stay in town,” Faith added. “For the moment, you’re both persons of interest in the case.”

Quint didn’t look happy about that, but he didn’t protest the decision. “All right. We’re just trying our best, you know. Both of us.”

“I sympathize with you,” Faith said. “I sympathize with the two dead people a lot more.”

Quint didn’t try to argue with that. “We’ll stay in town.”

CHAPTER TEN

The three agents made their way back to their vehicle. Faith was torn. On one hand, her experiences with Garrett hadn’t been encouraging. On the other hand, Quint’s statement made a lot of sense too.

When they were on the road back to the highway, Michael asked, “What do you think about what Quint said?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t buy that Garrett’s a saint now.”

“I don’t either, but I kind of get the disdain for outside interference. We’ve been dealing with that since the beginning.”

“We haven’t though. Not really. Wyatt might not agree with us, but if we need him to do something, he does it. And he wasn’t an asshole to us.”

“Well, we didn’t accuse him of murder.”

“We didn’t accuse Garrett of murder. We said we wanted to question him.”

“And he reacted the way a lot of innocent people we’ve questioned have reacted,” Michael pointed out. “Aggressive at first and increasingly defensive and nervous when it became clear that he couldn’t intimidate us.”

“So you think he’s innocent.”

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