I turned back around. "Darian. Where is he right now?"
Theo and Caden exchanged a look.
"What?" I said.
"He has been spending time at the Aldean compound," Caden said. "Regularly, for the past six months."
Of course he had.
Darian had not just helped frame me and then retreated back into ordinary life. He had stayed close to the people he had helped. Maybe for protection. Maybe for payment. Maybe because once you cross a line like that, you need the people on the other side to keep confirming it was worth it.
"So Darian is embedded with Marcus and Naomi," I said. "Which means when I walked off that bus today, Darian already knew. And those first text messages telling me not to come back were him trying to protect himself, not me."
"That is my read," Caden said.
"Which means Marcus knows I am back."
"Almost certainly."
I looked at Caden across the spread of documents on Theo's kitchen table. Eight months of his work laid out in careful rows. A year of quiet questions asked in the right places. A lighter that had been holding its breath in evidence storage, waiting for hands that could hear it.
"Why?" I said. "I need to ask you again, and I need an honest answer. Why did you spend eight months on this? You do not know me. You had no personal stake in my case. You left a whole career in New Mexico and moved two miles from the people who put me in prison. That is not professional curiosity. What is the actual reason?"
The kitchen was very quiet. Caden looked down at his coffee for a moment, then back up at me. And for the first time since the parking lot, the careful steadiness in his expression moved aside just enough to show something underneath it that was considerably less controlled.
"The man with the gloved hands," he said. "The one who went back to your apartment and upgraded the evidence. The one whose last emotional impression on that lighter was cold satisfaction." He paused. "I have touched other objects that held that same signature. The same emotional texture. The same particular brand of calculation without conscience."
I waited.
"Marcus Aldean destroyed my brother's life four years ago," he said. "Different method, same pattern. My brother could not prove it and eventually stopped trying."
Something moved through his jaw, brief, controlled back into stillness almost immediately.
"I am not here only for you, Elliot. I want to be transparent about that. I am here because the same man who framed you has done this before. And I intend to make sure he cannot do it again."
The kitchen held that for a moment.
Then I pulled out the chair across from him and sat back down.
"All right, Caden Reyes," I said. "You are not fully trusted yet. That is still true. But you are useful, and you are honest about your motives, which puts you several points ahead of most people in my current orbit." I looked at the documents. "We need to move on Darian first. He is the weakest point in their structure. If we can get him in a room and I can get my hands on something he has been carrying, something recent, I will know exactly what he knows and what he has told Marcus since this morning."
Caden nodded slowly. "And then?"
"And then we build the kind of case that does not get buried. Not a private one. A public one. The kind with documentation and witnesses and psychometric testimony from two independent ability holders that a defense attorney cannot easily dismantle."
I straightened the documents into a neat stack.
"Marcus wanted me silenced. He wanted me gone and discredited and locked away where I could not touch anything that would tell the truth." I set the stack down precisely. "He forgot something important."
"What?" Theo said softly from across the table.
I looked at him, then at Caden. "He forgot that I came back."
The words settled into the room and stayed there.
Caden looked at me with that careful steadiness that I was beginning to understand was not coldness, but the particular stillness of a person who had learned to hold a lot of weight without showing the strain of it. Theo looked at the table with the expression of someone processing a complete restructuring of his recent personal history.
I gave them both thirty seconds. Then I moved.
"Theo, I need Darian's current location. Not tomorrow. Tonight."
Theo looked up. "Elliot, it is almost nine."
"Yes. And Darian has known I was back in Colorado Springs since approximately five. Every hour I give him is an hour he spends deciding how much to tell Marcus and how to frame it." I stood and began stacking the documents back into the envelope with precise movements. "He is scared right now. Scared people make mistakes, or they run. I need to get to him before he does either."
Theo pulled out his phone with the resignation of a man who had accepted that his evening was no longer his own. "He mentioned something last week about Thursday poker nights at his place."
"His place," I said. "Not the compound?"
"He still has his own apartment on the south side. He goes to the compound, but he does not live there."
"Good. That is better. A poker night means other people, which means Darian will be performing normalcy, which means he will not be expecting me to walk through the door."
I looked at Caden. "Are you coming?"
He had already put his jacket back on. "Yes."
"Still not fully trusted," I reminded him.
"Noted," he said. And almost — just barely — the corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The architectural suggestion of one.
I picked up my bag. "Let us go have a conversation with my former best friend."