4338.215 · August 3, 2018 AD
The Machinery Seizes
Every tool has a situation it was built for and a situation where it breaks. Tom Jeffries has spent his adult life in the first category — boardrooms, negotiations, institutional corridors where the right word from the right person rearranges outcomes before they've finished forming. Now he stands on his own forecourt deploying every instrument in the arsenal, one after another, against a man in an off-the-rack suit who receives each one the same way stone receives rain. And behind a closed door, his wife is asking the question he cannot afford to answer.
Three encounters. Three escalations. Three walls.
On the entrance steps, Tom meets the detective who's replaced Charlie Claiborne — a man whose vocal register appears to have a single setting and whose posture yields nothing to proprietary fury. Tom's declaration that this is his property meets Stout's declaration that it's a crime scene, and the distance between those two positions is the distance neither man will cross.
Behind a closed sitting room door, Tom instructs Louise to dismiss the solicitor, to say nothing, to let him handle things the way he's always handled them. She tells him what the investigation has found — the structural anomalies, the hollow floor, the forensically impossible shed. He asks who knows about the fireplace. Not what's under it. Who knows. And something in the marriage that has survived twenty-three years on the understanding that some questions don't get asked reaches a thread it can't recover.
At the garden's edge, Tom deploys the full weight: warrant law, proportionality arguments, then the architecture of influence itself — the calls that will be made, the questions that will be reframed, the institutional pressure that won't mention his name because it won't need to. Stout listens to every word. Cites the obstruction provisions. Tells Tom the investigation continues. And Tom Jeffries, standing in his own garden surrounded by evidence markers driven into his own lawn, encounters something his two centuries of accumulated leverage never prepared him for.
