Leonard kept staring at the brass key.
“Corporal Ames died thirty-seven years ago.”
Gravel nodded.
“I know.”
The jump instructor carried the damaged harness away from the aircraft while security locked down the equipment area.
Nobody was jumping now.
Leonard lowered himself onto a bench and held out his hand.
Gravel gave him the key.
It was small, old, and stamped with a faded number.
Ames had worn an identical key around his neck during deployment.
Leonard remembered because he once asked what it opened.
Ames had smiled.
“Something I hope nobody needs.”
Leonard never asked again.
The locked black equipment case sat beneath the airfield office.
The key fit.
Inside was not parachuting equipment.
There was a carbon-fiber prosthetic leg.
New.
Lightweight.
Far more advanced than the heavy model Leonard had worn for eleven years.
He touched it carefully.
“I can’t afford this.”
Gravel looked at him.
“You already did.”
Leonard frowned.
Inside the case was an envelope.
The handwriting belonged to Dr. Nathan Ames.
Corporal Ames’s younger brother.
Nathan had become a prosthetics engineer after his brother’s death.
Years earlier, Leonard applied for one of his experimental adaptive legs but was denied coverage.
Nathan saw the application.
He recognized the name.
Leonard Hayes.
The medic his brother had spoken about in letters home.
The man Ames had pulled from a burning transport while bleeding from his own wounds.
Nathan built the prosthesis privately.
Then disappeared before he could deliver it.
Gravel had been searching for the case ever since.
Leonard looked up.
“How did you know about it?”
Gravel removed another photograph from his vest.
Nathan Ames stood beside him in a workshop.
Between them was the prosthetic leg.
“Nathan rode with us.”
Nobody at the airfield had known.
Three years earlier, Nathan joined Gravel’s veterans’ motorcycle charity after leaving his engineering company.
He told Gravel the company had begun rejecting costly safety recalls on several prosthetic components.
One of those components was used in Leonard’s current leg.
Gravel looked toward the harness.
“That’s why I checked everything attached to you.”
The jump instructor returned carrying Leonard’s prosthesis.
He had removed its cosmetic shell.
A narrow fracture ran along the upper connector.
Another hard landing could have caused it to fail.
Leonard stared.
“You knew?”
“No.”
Gravel shook his head.
“Nathan did.”
The envelope contained test results Nathan had copied before leaving the company.
The defect affected hundreds of veterans.
Nathan planned to report it.
Then he died in a motorcycle collision eighteen months earlier.
Officially, wet pavement.
No evidence of foul play.
Gravel had accepted that.
Until two weeks ago.
Someone mailed him Leonard’s airfield registration.
No note.
Only a photograph of the damaged prosthetic connector circled in red.
That was why Gravel came to Tucson.
Leonard looked at the destroyed parachute harness.
“And the cut webbing?”
Gravel’s face hardened.
“That wasn’t in Nathan’s file.”
Security reviewed the airfield cameras.
At 6:12 that morning, a man wearing a contractor jacket entered the equipment room.
At 6:19, he handled Leonard’s harness.
At 6:23, he placed the black case beneath the office.
Leonard leaned toward the monitor.
“I know him.”
The man was Dr. Nathan Ames’s former business partner.
Richard Voss.
The executive who had signed the letter denying Leonard’s upgraded prosthesis.
Then Leonard opened Nathan’s envelope fully.
A second key fell out.
Attached to it was a storage-unit tag.
Gravel recognized the number.
“Nathan’s workshop.”
Leonard looked at him.
“What’s in there?”
Gravel had no answer.
But the final line of Nathan’s letter did.
If Richard ever comes near Leonard Hayes, open the workshop before he reaches it first.