Each time, they said: You know. You know.
And each time, I screamed at them: I don’t! I can’t.
And I didn’t. I didn’t know. And I couldn’t help them.
But I couldn’t stop. Wouldn’t stop.
No.
The boys just stared.
I woke in a pool of sweat.
14
Before that Saturday, I had been to only two funerals.
The first, my mother’s, was surreal. I was twenty hours off two straight days of flights from Baghdad. I still had Iraqi dust under my fingernails, could still smell the spicy sweat, the cordite, the dog piss. But the wool fabric of my dress uniform scratched against clean skin, skin scrubbed so hard in the shower at my parents’ place that it was raw.
I remember standing at the edge of everything, standing right up next to a tree in the cemetery out on the bluff above Okanogan. And I remember the looks that people gave me: awe turned to curiosity, turned to cautious fascination when I wouldn’t budge from the tree, when I couldn’t stop scanning the crowd. Turned to fear when I acknowledged them with a pointed glance at their hands, their pockets, their faces. When I barely said a word.
And I remember watching a little girl in a white dress reach up and put a lily as big as her head on the coffin. Briefly, I wondered whose kid she was. Then she reached up and took my dad’s hand, and I realized she was mine, that she was Sophie. I hadn’t been home for over a year, had requested that my deployment be extended, had made the case over and over again that I was indispensable to the command, to the mission. And the commander had believed me, taken me at my word. Despite what Major Brittan told him. Despite my first sergeant’s growing wariness. The commander had been more sympathetic. My phone calls to my folks, to Sophie, grew shorter and less frequent. Because the desert was home. Home was where the rockets flew and the blood ran and my best friend was my M16. Where I had a purpose. A mission.
But mostly, I remember standing in the cemetery and fearing the silence.
Dad’s funeral was different. It had been just that May. Sophie was there, but not there for me. I had moved into Dad’s house after his heart attack the week before. I wasn’t much of a mother then—hell, I never have been—but I knew enough that a fourteen-year-old girl had no business being in a house by herself. I hadn’t told her yet that we were both going to live above the mart, that, yes, I was going to rip her out of the bedroom that had always been hers, that had once been mine. I couldn’t admit to her that nothing in that house was right anymore, that, for me, too many ghosts walked the halls, too many of them crouched beside my bed and gnashed their teeth at night. But the funeral was nice.
Patrick Beale’s funeral was another thing altogether.
It was on the football field of the high school down in Omak, the aluminum stands ablaze in the morning sun, friends and family and hangers-on perched up there in their Sunday best and sunglasses that reflected the dark casket overflowing with flowers. The preacher from the faded church in Little Falls gave the eulogy, his voice creaky on the loudspeaker, the crowd wincing every time the microphone screamed when his hearing aid got too close.
After the service, after the sighing and the crying and the kind words about a life lived too quickly, the mourners and the merely curious trickled off the stands like sweat, pooling onto the field below. To one side were the church people and their profane neighbors, all of them slowly pressing forward to shake Ed’s hand, to hold Christine while she cried. And to the other side were the kids, Sophie and her friend Tracy and a lot of others I didn’t know, ebbing and flowing, hugging each other and parting, their hands held loosely together until their bodies were too far away to maintain the bond.
But still sitting on the stands was Todd Beale, alone, his dust-colored head resolutely facing his brother, facing the box. Or maybe the other side.
“You going to say hello?” someone said, his breath hot on my ear.
I turned fast, swinging, and Darren caught my elbow.
“Hey,” he said before letting go. He settled back in the row behind me, the last in the bleachers.
I turned back to the field, my face burning. “Didn’t know you’d started a conversation.”
“Thought I’d let you ruminate.” He stood up, stepped down to my row, and sat beside me, much closer than the woman who had vacated the seat at the end of the service.
“Big word.”
I was sorry the moment I said it, but Darren just laughed. And when he did, he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his thigh so close I could feel the heat of him through the thin fabric of the only dress I owned, the one I’d worn to my father’s funeral.
“Well?” Darren said and turned his head toward me. He was wearing his uniform and the same aviator sunglasses he’d had on when he stepped out of the county’s helicopter the week before. My tongue traced the edge of my lips.
“Well, what?”
“You got it figured out?”
“Thought you didn’t want me investigating.”
Darren’s smile didn’t break. I looked away.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Did the bastard show his face here?”
I shrugged.
He nodded and looked out at the field. Then he touched my leg, one fingertip quickly brushing against my bare skin. He pointed his chin out at the parking lot. I pressed my knees together.
“You seen that truck before?” Darren asked.
I scanned the mostly empty parking lot. “Which one?” I said, then took a guess. “That brown Chevy?”
“No. In the far corner, under the trees. The Suburban. Black with red stripes.”
I scanned again and saw what he meant, crouched in the shade beneath a giant cedar, its windows tinted and windshield pointed away from the field. I had seen it that day, and I had seen it before too. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Darren watching me, and I knew he knew I had. But did he recognize the long black sedan next to it? The one with its windows rolled down and its side panels dull with dust; the one with no one in it. I did. He didn’t.
He put his hands on his knees and sat up straight. His shoulder brushed against mine, strands of my blond hair snagging on his brown uniform when I turned my head to look at him.
“What do you think of the brother?” I said suddenly, instinct, or maybe obsession, moving faster than my brain. I had nothing on the kid, just a feeling. A weird feeling.
Darren frowned and glanced at the field. “Todd?”
I followed his gaze and saw what he saw, a teenager standing near his parents, hugging a woman with curly hair the color of yellowed teeth. Just a normal teenager, his hair burnished in the sun, his face drawn and pale, the edge of the collar of his pressed blue shirt dark with sweat. A slight girl in a little black dress and church-mouse brown hair stood at his elbow. She took his hand in her thin fingers when he let the old woman’s shoulders go.
I nodded.
“Nice kid,” Darren said.
“Yeah?”
“You don’t think so?”
“Doesn’t seem to like his brother much.”
Darren shrugged. “Boys will be boys.”
I nodded again and doubted myself.
“You want to grab some lunch?” Darren said. “I know a place. It’s good and it’s close. Sophie can come too, if she wants.”
“She’s going to lunch with some friends.”
Darren stood and held out his hand for me, but I ignored it and started down the stairs.
He had his cruiser, so I followed him out past Okanogan, then down a road to the other side of the river, until he pulled into the driveway of a little brown house shaded by the wide branches of an oak tree. His house. The engine still running, I leaned out the window of my truck.
“What’s this? Making a house call?” I said, playing dumb.
He slammed the door of the car and started walking. “The line’s shorter here.”
He unlocked the door and disappeared inside, the screen door
slamming behind him, the front door wide open.
Tapping my fingers on the steering wheel, I glanced back at the road in my rearview, at the road in front of me, and then at the house. Sighing, I threw the truck into first gear, rolled it into the drive, and parked.
Inside, the house was dark, the front hall lit only by the afternoon sun sneaking in through the cracks of the curtains in the living room.
“How’s your wife?” I asked.
Somewhere beyond the living room, a refrigerator door opened. Glass jars clinked and something slapped onto a counter. As my pupils dilated, I took inventory. In front of me, the living room was all but bare: I could see the arm of a leather couch—a light-colored T-shirt thrown over it—a squat coffee table in front of it, and a TV balanced on a cardboard box directly opposite. Doors to the right, closed. And on the wall at my elbow, a shoe stand—unoccupied—and above it, hanging askew, a kitschy wooden sign that read “Welcome to the Moses home.”
“You mean Meredith?” Darren said eventually.
“Yeah.” In the hallway, I stepped back, frowned, tilted the welcome sign to the right.
“She’s gone.”
“Out doing a trial?” I tilted the sign a little to the left.
“No. Gone. Moved to Oklahoma a year ago.”
I stopped, my fingers still touching the not-quite-perfect sign. No wonder it was crooked.
“You want a beer?” he said when I got to the kitchen, then handed me an open bottle before I could say no. I set it on the counter and stepped away.
“Divorce was final in December,” he said while slicing a tomato. He looked up and flashed me a wide smile. “She took a job with one of the tribes down there. It was good for her.”
“What about you?” I asked warily.
He shrugged. “It’s good for me too.”
There was nothing more to say, so I offered to spread the mayo while he washed the lettuce. A few minutes later, we were sitting on the steps of his back porch, balancing our plates on our knees and listening to the water slowly glug through what was left of the creek.
After a while, I asked him again about the day before. About the trailer.
After another while he told me: “Nothing. There was nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“We were just too late. The place had been sprayed down by the time we got there. The bleach was so strong, we had to air it out before anyone could even go in.”
“But what about the chair, the—the leads, the battery? What about the bloody pliers, the bloody tarp?”
He was looking out across the yard to the stream, frowning, his fingers restless, peeling the label off his beer bottle. He shook his head. “They weren’t there.”
“But you saw the photos I took,” I said, setting my plate aside, getting up to retrieve my phone from the house. “You saw them, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” Darren nodded, his head bobbing like it was no big deal. “Yeah, I saw them.”
“Well, they didn’t just disappear. It was thirty minutes—no more than thirty minutes—before your boys drove by.”
Darren frowned briefly, doubtfully, then nodded.
“I thought Lucky was going to handle it,” I pressed, staring down at him. “When did he get there, Darren? Who was first on the scene?”
He didn’t respond.
“Fine.” I crossed my arms. “There must have been tracks. You got a tire imprint, or something.”
“Sure, Moreno took some.”
“So you can find him that way.”
He snorted and looked up at me with a disgusted, or maybe just exhausted, smirk. “What do you think we are—CSI? NYPD Blue?”
My anxiety and my heart rate were rising at a furious pace. The truck. I hadn’t told Darren about the truck the day before. How could I have forgotten? What else had I forgotten? I sank to my knees.
“Did it match Patrick’s truck? There was someone in it yesterday. He forced me off the road.”
Darren shifted, his brow creased.
“There was a truck, a black one, just like Patrick was driving in that video. It forced me off the road yesterday while I was driving out to that address.” I pressed the palm of my hand against my forehead. “He was totally out of control, driving like a demon.”
“There was no truck.”
My head snapped up. “I saw it! He almost killed me!”
“Camille,” Darren’s voice was soft, calm. Patronizing. “The tracks. The tracks didn’t match Patrick’s truck.”
“It was black, like the one Patrick drove.”
Darren shook his head.
“But—” I hesitated, scraped my fingernails through my hair, over my scalp. “What about the other one? The one that blond guy was driving in the video. Or that Suburban.”
Again, Darren shook his head. “The tracks were from a standard American-made sedan, Ford or Chevy or something. Something easy to hide around here.”
“Like the car next to the Suburban?” I snarled.
The creases on Darren’s forehead deepened. “When?”
“At the funeral.”
“Tell me.”
“Standard American-made sedan, Ford or Chevy or something,” I said mockingly.
Darren’s face hardened. The wall that had been eroding sprang up between us again.
I sat down, breathed. Lowered my voice. “It was black.” I turned toward Darren. “It was beside the Suburban. And I’ve seen it before.”
“Where?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, anticipating the hell he’d give me for lurking outside that lawyer’s office. So when Darren opened his mouth, I added quickly, “But I saw one of the guys from the mart’s video get into it. When I saw it before, I mean.”
“Which one?”
“That blond one. Tall, buzz cut, sort of lanky. Former Army, I’d guess.”
“He wasn’t with Patrick in the video,” Darren said bluntly. “Where did you—”
“No,” I said sharply, not wanting to go there, not wanting to get into how—let alone how much—I knew about the lieutenant. “It was later. Day four of the feed. And you’re right. He wasn’t with Patrick. But he was with the guy who was. The one with the tats. They’re both involved. Somehow.”
Darren nodded, took a long pull from his bottle of beer, and stared out at the yard, his eyes hiding whatever he was thinking through.
“Did you hear me?” I said, my voice rising.
Darren glanced at me, his entire face blank, impassive. My pulse quickened: I was right.
“What’s his name?” I barked. “Who is he?”
Darren drained his beer and set the bottle on the wooden porch, green paint peeling from the weathered boards.
“Was it him on the recording?”
The skin of Darren’s forehead creased. “What recording?”
“Patrick’s recording.”
The frown on Darren’s face deepened. “You have a recording my victim made?” He cracked his jaw. “And you didn’t give it to me?”
“I left it for you,” I said, my anger, my exasperation, matching his. “At your office. I told the guy at the desk to give it to you.”
“When?”
“Yesterday afternoon. I told him to give it to you. I said your name. I wrote it down.”
His eyes narrowed. He shook his head.
“Who else would have taken it?” I said. “Moreno?”
“No,” Darren said quietly.
“Lucky?”
Darren glanced away, ground his teeth. He didn’t know. He didn’t know, but he suspected. Like I suspected. Lucky at the barn. Lucky at the trailer. Lucky at the Sheriff’s Office. Lucky everywhere.
His eyes on me again, Darren asked, “Where did you get it?”
“Patrick’s apartment. I was …” But I didn’t want to tell him why I went there in the first place. “I was helping Christine pack up his things. It was just there, a thumb drive taped to the bottom of his bed frame.”
“What was on the recording?”
“A phone conversation. Patrick was hiding somewhere—a bathroom, I think. He recorded a conversation someone was having on the phone, someone giving coordinates and asking for instructions.”
“Did you keep a copy?”
“No. I gave it to you. I did the right thing.”
Darren turned away from me then, so I couldn’t see what he was thinking. But I saw it anyway, the muscles of his jaw tightening as he ground his teeth, the blood pounding through the artery in his neck, saw him finger the safety strap of his service weapon as he adjusted his utility belt.
“Tell me his name, Darren!” I shouted. “For Christ’s sake, I can help. I am helping!”
“No,” Darren said, his voice low, forbidding, his face still turned away from me.
But I would not let it stop there; it couldn’t stop there. “Fine,” I said quietly, trying to hold back the rage. “What about the receipt? You’ve got him on the receipt, right? You can tie him to my photos, at least.”
Darren shook his head. “It’s not enough.”
“What do you mean?” I snapped. “It’s all there: the bleach, the rags. Time of day. Everything. It’s everything you need.”
He shook his head again. “Paid in cash, no video, and the clerk can’t describe who bought the stuff.”
My pulse spiked, pounded in my neck. Suddenly, I was standing over him, every muscle in my body tensed. “What about the landowner?” I shouted. “You got my message last night, didn’t you? Didn’t you find anything?”
“Nothing.” Slowly, he stood up. “It’s just a company. It was formed to buy the property about six months ago and hasn’t done anything since.”
A gust of wind swept through the yard. It might have come from the top of Mount Rainier, it chilled my skin that much. Or maybe—
“What if he saw me?” I whispered.
I backed away, glancing around the yard, the stairs, the porch—looking for safety, for a safe position out of the open, somewhere with something solid at my back. Darren squared off, his eyes dark, his brow creased. And I saw him do it: I saw his hand stray to where his gun rested on his hip.
“I’m not crazy!” I shouted. “Jesus Christ, this was supposed to be over. That was supposed to be everything you needed. That was supposed to end it.”
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