Auburn had once been a place of noise and purpose. Now it whispered only of absence.
Kelly Peterson's car rattled over streets lined with shuttered storefronts as she drove toward the courthouse. The Riverside Manufacturing plant loomed on her left—a massive skeletal structure of rusted steel and broken windows, its parking lot a graveyard of oil stains and weeds. Three years ago, before the closure, that plant had employed over two thousand people. Now it employed ghosts.
She gripped the steering wheel tighter, her knuckles whitening. Marcus Webb had been one of those two thousand. He'd been inside when the accident happened—a machinery malfunction that killed two workers and left three others injured. The investigation had been rushed, the evidence sloppy, the convictions swift. Three men had gone to prison for a workplace failure that no one had adequately investigated. Marcus had gotten twelve years.
That was four years ago. Kelly had taken his case pro bono six months ago, after the civil rights coalition had forwarded his file to her sparse legal office with its temperamental coffee maker and stacks of case files that threatened to topple whenever the wind hit the old building.
The Auburn Courthouse appeared ahead, an ivory-colored structure that had once seemed imposing and permanent. Now its facade showed its age—cracks spider-webbing across the stone, patches of discoloration where water damage had settled in like a chronic illness. The building's grandeur had faded along with the city's prosperity, both monuments to a system that was quietly collapsing under its own weight.
Kelly parked in the courthouse lot and sat for a moment, breathing steadily. She had a meeting scheduled with Marcus in twenty minutes, a preliminary discussion about the new evidence her investigator had uncovered—inconsistencies in the original safety reports, maintenance records that didn't match the official timeline. Nothing definitive yet, but enough to justify another look.
She gathered her files and stepped out into the October cold, her breath misting in the air. The wind carried the metallic smell of rust and the ghost-scent of industrial smoke that lingered even though the factories had stopped burning long ago.
Kelly climbed the courthouse steps, unaware that prosecutor James Wagner was already inside, reviewing the same case file with very different intentions.