by CJ Birch
The more she thought about it, the more everything seemed interconnected. It stemmed from that one moment. That fight was the first of many. The tighter the leash, the harder she struggled against it. By her sophomore year, Bailey’d pulled her into his office a dozen more times. Each time they’d stare across at each other, waiting for her father to show up. And each time it was the same thing, only by then Elle had found her voice and learned to scream back.
She’d chosen criminology to piss her dad off. She knew it would cause the most arguments. Why couldn’t she do something productive, what would a degree in criminology do? Make her a better criminal?
While most of the kids from her graduating class were finding jobs at gas stations and grocery stores, she had a partial scholarship to college. But nothing was ever good enough, everything was cause for an argument.
Even now, she felt the connection to that night. If they hadn’t gotten caught would she still be sitting behind this desk?
And if she hadn’t helped Jessie, would he still be dead?
Neil burst into her office, his chest heaving against the buttons of his uniform. Sweat had pooled at the edge of his thinning hairline, ready for the slalom down his face. “Fight. Down the street,” he called as he raced back out. Elle was close behind. “Six boys, from the high school most likely. It’s getting dirty.” He punctuated each line by an intake of breath.
Neil was out the door first, but Elle, fit from a daily routine of morning runs, outpaced him, reaching the fray first.
A few stores up from the sheriff’s office, a crowd had gathered. Some cheering, others quietly enjoying the entertainment. Elle knew by the size of the crowd how much time had passed. She pushed through the throng, pulled short as she spotted EJ discarded on the asphalt. His ball cap was knocked to the side, revealing his red curly hair. A gash along the side of his face was caked in dirt. The soft rise of his chest told her he was still breathing. She pushed through toward the fight, leaving him until later.
Robin, having stepped out of the mayor’s office, saw a streak of red dart into the middle of the clash. She joined a couple of late stragglers.
“Enough,” Elle yelled. It came out muffled as she pressed herself between Randy and Dan. She thrust both arms against their chests, trying to act as a crowbar and pry them apart. Before Elle could separate them, someone knocked her from behind. She stumbled face-first toward one of Randy’s powerhouse fists. The mob seemed to pause, waiting for the crack of bone on bone, but she managed to duck out of the way and miss the full force. It struck the edge of her jaw, sending her back. Robin squeezed herself between two spectators to get a front-row seat when Elle slammed backward into the crowd. She caught Elle under her shoulders. Elle felt warm beneath the thin cotton of her uniform. When she turned back, her eyes caught hold of Robin’s, then her muscles flexed and she pulled away. It had only been an instant, but Robin could still feel the heat on her hands.
Robin watched from the edge of the ring as Elle dove back in, reckless, oblivious. She kicked the back of Dan’s left knee, forcing him down. Reaching around, she put him into a choke hold and shoved him face first into the ground. As she did this, Neil came up behind Randy with the same move, only he used his baton to add some height to his reach around Randy’s thick neck.
As the brawl came to an end, the crowd surged forth like a wave trying to mount a levee. As she was jostled, Elle felt something sharp bite into her lower back near her right side. But she kept her hands and attention firmly on Dan’s arms as she subdued him.
After the calm of the hazy afternoon returned, and as Neil escorted the boys toward the station, Elle knelt to examine EJ. She brushed the mop of hair away from his face. He was still out cold. His lip was cut and he had the beginnings of a bruise on his jawbone. The blood from the cut on his cheek was beginning to congeal. She rolled him onto his back and lifted his shirt to check for any stab marks. As she ran her hands along his ribs to see if any were broken, he jerked awake. They stared at each other for a long moment, their fight momentarily forgotten as the concern in Elle’s eyes registered the fear in EJ’s.
There was a soft whimper behind Elle. Lisa had tucked herself into the crowd like a rabbit in a cave. As the crowd dispersed, she was left out in the open.
Chapter Ten
Elle paced the row of chairs opposite the reception desk where Randy, Dan, and EJ sat. A mar of browning blood, dried spit, and seeping sweat covered each.
A scuffed Randy shot out of his chair toward Dan. Elle wedged herself between the two, shoving Randy back into his seat.
“Enough. Dan, in my office. Now.” She nodded to Neil sitting behind Heather’s desk to keep watch on Randy and EJ.
Once she shut the door and sat behind her desk, she switched tactics. “I think it’s sweet, Dan, the way you stick up for Lisa. But you can’t use that as an excuse to pick a fight on a past grudge.” Elle uprooted scattered pages and folders, searching for a hair elastic.
The smirk on Dan’s face had spread to include his eyes as he watched Elle try to tame her hair behind her head. “Family’s important.” The way he was staring at her made Elle feel exposed like she had taken off more than an elastic band. She shifted. That spot in her shoulders tightened into a knot that would only get worse by the end of the day.
“This is something that, unfortunately, Lisa will have to deal with for the rest of her life. On some level. And when you react the way you do, it scares her.” Elle leaned forward. “It also doesn’t help her deal with her issues herself.”
“Issues? She has Down syndrome. That’s not issues. That’s life. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes I got to stick up for her.” Dan leaned back in the stiff wingback. “Sometimes the things we do aren’t so pretty. But over time, when you approach it from a different angle, you can see it’s the right thing.”
“That’s not how it works.” Elle shook her head. “We don’t always get to choose how others see our actions.”
“Like you, for instance.” Dan picked at the webbing on his torn jeans. “The benevolent Sheriff Ashley. Acting for our benefit when you bust up a party. Or pull someone over for a busted taillight.”
Elle sighed. She struggled with this every time she came upon mischief and EJ in the middle of it. The first time she showed up to a noise complaint after becoming sheriff, she knocked on the door and there was EJ. He had a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a party full of underage drinkers behind him. It meant she had to pick a side. Too tough or too lenient, just to prove she wasn’t playing favorites. She resented him for it.
“I can’t be EJ’s sister when I sit here. I have a larger responsibility than to myself.” She stood, trying to dislodge the knot forming in her back. Her fingers found the key to the safe around her neck. She began sliding it along the tough chain in a practiced motion. “A sheriff doesn’t have a family. Or friends. Not on the job.”
Dan leaned back, a laugh in the back of his throat. “You know, if it becomes too much for you, no one would judge you for stepping down. It’s hard being put in the middle like this.” Dan had this way of making people feel small as if it were a game to see how tight a package he could wrap you in.
Underage drinking, the occasional brawl after the Beer and Berry festival, that was what she dealt with. Sometimes she’d bring in a good ole boy who’d had a few too many at Finnegan’s. She’d spend a couple of minutes swatting away wandering hands before sliding them into the back of her cruiser. More time the next morning fielding sheepish apologies. There was never any paperwork. There was no need to keep records. But ever since finding Jessie, things felt different. This felt different. Dangerous. As if Turlough had been covered in his blood and everything had become tainted.
“I, for one, have always thought you were more of a big-city girl.” His smirk shifted to a leer as his eyes met hers.
Elle rubbed the back of her neck, exhausted and dejected. She was sure Bailey never had to deal with this shit. There was something about Bailey
that had demanded instant respect. Perhaps it was because he’d spent so long playing the game people knew what they were getting. Elle was still an unknown. When it came down to it would she side with the good ole boys and maintain the status quo? Or would she become a liability? One of those liberals with too much education and not enough of the right kind of perspective.
When she opened her eyes, her stare hardened. “Dan, I want you to stay away from Randy Pritchard. I know my words won’t even make a dent in that thick fucking head of yours, but if you don’t, I swear to God I’ll make sure you regret that decision.”
The laugh in the back of Dan’s throat escaped, loud and dangerous. He leaned forward, gripping the edge of her desk and smiled. “Hard-ass suits you, Sheriff Ashley.”
* * *
After the dust had cleared and calm was restored to the sheriff’s office, Elle shut herself in the only bathroom. At first, she thought she’d come to have a good meltdown. But the anger and defiance in her reflection put it on hold. The last two days had carved frescos on her face, etching the corner of her mouth into hard lines and allowing shadowing to crop up under her eyes. The pall of her skin left the motif unfinished, almost like the painter had forgotten to color in the details.
And now at the corner of her mind, something flickered. A forgotten moment. Something she’d meant to come back to. She reached around and untucked her uniform shirt, feeling underneath. There was a sharp pain. When she pulled her hand around it was covered in blood. She unbuttoned her shirt and turned around to examine her back in the mirror. Along the lower edge was a deep gash. The neatness of the cut made her think knife. Which meant at some point near the end of the fight someone had taken a swipe into the foray. Had it hit its mark or missed? Was this the same knife that had cut up Jessie’s torso? A million more questions rushed into her head as she stared at her reflection in the cracked, moldy mirror.
Without warning, the door opened. Neil paused, his hand already on his fly. Elle froze, too shocked to be mad. It had finally hit her. For the first time, Elle realized that someone among them might have murdered Jessie. As much as she wanted to believe that it had something to do with his life in Chicago, what if it didn’t? She looked up at Neil more for comfort than denial, but he didn’t seem to understand what the worry in her eyes meant.
Instead, he said, “You need to go to the hospital.”
* * *
The closest hospital was in Rosiclare, about a twenty-five-minute drive from Turlough. Flat and unimaginative, Hardin County General Hospital had been set down in the middle of Shawnee National Forest like a flagstone dropped onto a lawn. To the right of the drive, some battered tarmac with a faded red cross indicated the helipad. Weeds had pressed through the cracks, announcing their determination to exist. Outside the emergency room, an old man with thick-framed glasses sat on his walker, coughing through a smoke. On any given day there would be five or six battered pickup trucks, in various stages of life, parked outside, the owners inside nursing wounds ranging in severity. Robin pulled up beside Elle’s cruiser and hoped out.
She’d been passing the sheriff’s office when she’d seen Neil wrestling Elle into her cruiser. Curious, she’d followed.
What Robin had seen was only the end of the bout. There had been a row back at the sheriff’s office with Elle taking on both Neil and Stan. There was no way she needed to visit emergency. In the end, her own policy defeated her. Policy required all injured officers to seek medical attention no matter how small. Establish policy was one of the first things Elle had done when she took over as sheriff. Policy was a foreign word to Flynn County under the supervision of Sheriff Bailey. As much as she loved the man, he had been somewhat lax when it came to rules. Elle had discovered early on what sorts of things could handle policy and the types of things that couldn’t. Keeping track of how many sweat it off in the basement cell, for instance, could be left to the imagination. Her deputies and those under her supervision, however, would take on policy. The very first policy Elle put in place was to ensure there was a deputy on call in the county at all times.
Robin entered the emergency waiting room and plopped down next to Elle. “Why is it that police officers always hate hospitals?”
“What’re you doing here?”
“I thought you could use a little company.” Robin looked around the waiting room. The room itself was the size of a large cubicle, the admitting nurse behind a desk at one end and a clump of chairs at the other. Elle sat beside her in a hard and uncomfortable chair.
“There are a million other things I’d rather be doing with my time,” she said. She shifted the gauze the admitting nurse had given her to stanch the bleeding. She folded it one size smaller. The air smelled septic, ominous, as if the bleach was holding something at bay, stopping whatever would seep out of the walls from consuming her. Incongruous with the smell was a poster of Mickey Mouse with a message reminding hospital staff to always wash their hands after using the bathroom. “Filing taxes, having an appendectomy done by a first-year med student, awaiting trial, being interviewed by you…” Elle trailed off, too bored to continue. “Don’t you have anywhere else to be right now?”
“Nope.”
The fan above drowned out the cicadas from outside, licking at the crisped magazines piled on a side table next to Elle. She flipped through the top magazine, then tossed it back onto the vintage pile.
There were two other people in the waiting room ahead of them. One was a farmer who had accidentally severed his middle finger above the knuckle. He sat calmly, his eyes examining the cracked floor tiles at his feet, his detached digit neatly wrapped in a handkerchief with the corners folded over in his lap. It looked as if his wife had packed him a lunch. The other was an old man with a walker, who looked as if he was suffering from chronic gout. He’d rolled his left trouser leg up above his swollen ankle.
“So who’s your favorite front-runner for this murder?” Robin switched the position of her legs. Her charcoal skirt was still as crisp as it had been that morning.
Elle gave her a scathing look.
“I’m getting this vibe that you don’t want to talk to me right now.”
“Come up with that on your own, did you?”
Behind the front desk, the admitting nurse hooked a stack of folders under her arm and carried them to a giant filing cabinet in the corner. Each one had a name in bold black Sharpie across the flap. She flipped through them, expertly shuffling them into alphabetical order. Beyond her, the door to the main hospital wing stood closed, no sound, no sign of life.
“Why aren’t the state police involved in the investigation?”
Elle wondered if she was trying to goad her into becoming defensive, a dig at her small-town experience, or more likely she was trying to get her to reveal more than she wanted. She shrugged. “Haven’t you ever worked the crime beat?”
“I did. But this small-town stuff is a whole new beast.”
They sat for a few more moments listening to the hum of the lights above.
“Why won’t you just tell me? It’s not like I can’t google it later. Besides, I’m not asking anything specific about the investigation.” She searched around the room until her gaze landed on the poster of Mickey. “Okay, let’s say for instance that you went out to the Maverty house and found Mickey Mouse murdered. How would that investigation go?”
Elle shifted the gauze, folding it and replacing it on her back. She was stalling, trying to find a way to phrase it without revealing too much. “Well, if Mickey were murdered out at the Maverty house, if Turlough had a police force, they would investigate.”
“But they don’t have a police force.”
Elle shook her head. “I should have phrased that as, if Turlough could afford a police force. The county’s so small the sheriff’s office acts as the city’s force. However, even if it did have a force, as sheriff I would have been called in to consult. Technically speaking, sheriff has jurisdictional control within the county.”
&
nbsp; “So it’s just you?”
“Mostly, yes. But we don’t get a lot of murders in Flynn County. In this case—the case of Mickey being found murdered,” she added, almost forgetting not to talk about the case, “I would consult with the SPI for forensics and database help.”
“SPI?”
“Each state has its own bureau of investigation. They’re like the state version of the FBI. Back in the seventies, Illinois merged the bureau with the state police to form the State Police Operations Division, SPI. Am I boring you yet?”
“Not yet.” She smiled. “So you’d consult with them to see why someone would want to murder Mickey?”
“We don’t have the kind of resources they have, so I would send any forensic evidence as well as blood work, fingerprints, that sort of thing to get help with processing. The only problem is, we’re not much of a priority to them, so it takes a long time to get anything back. If this were a series of murders, then that would be a different story.”
“And if it does become a series, say someone killed Pluto too?”
“Mickey’s dog?” Elle almost laughed. “As bad as animal cruelty is, the most you’ll get in Illinois is a thirty-day jail sentence and a twenty-five-hundred-dollar fine.”
“We’re talking about a mouse and now you’re picky about a dog being considered human enough to be murdered?”
“Mickey could talk.”
“Fine. What if Goofy were murdered too?”
“Isn’t Goofy a dog too?”
Robin pointed a finger at her. “Ah, but he talks.” Winning by her logic.