“See you tomorrow.”
He ended the call before I could ask what he had in mind, but I had no time to dwell. Armed with a loofah, I stepped into the shower and stood under the scalding water until the mixture of dirt, sawdust, and sweat crusting my throat and face was loose enough to scrub off without taking the topmost layer of my skin along for the ride. As I traced a line across my collarbones, I couldn’t help but recall the heavy drape of Cole’s arm and wish the remembered touch was as easy to cleanse away as the grime.
Rixton shoved an iced coffee and a bag of warm donuts into my hands the second my butt landed in the passenger seat of our cruiser. The entire car smelled like a bakery, and my mouth watered. Working second shift, two until ten, meant lunch was usually in my rear-view mirror when I clocked in. That hadn’t happened today. Neither had the cookies and milk. Dad had zonked out by the time I returned to the living room, and watching his fitful sleep had robbed me of my appetite.
“How’s your dad?” Rixton asked around a classic glazed. “I meant to ask earlier but… baby brain.”
“Still a zombie.” I hauled out my treat and picked at the sprinkles. “I hate seeing him like this.”
More than that, I hated knowing his condition was my fault. War and her coterie might have inflicted the damage, and I would make them pay for what they’d done, but I was the reason he’d been targeted. There was no tap dancing around that grim truth.
“Your dad is tough, and he’s got you.” He tugged a wet wipe from a packet tucked in the console and cleaned the sugar from his fingers. “He’s going to get through this.”
I shoved the donut into my mouth to avoid formulating an answer.
“Unit four-one-six,” the radio crackled. “We received a 911 call from Hensarling Farms out on Virlilia Road from an unidentified male. The caller was incoherent, but a second male voice was heard shouting ‘the fields are burning’ before the line disconnected. Arson suspected. The fire department is en route. Police backup has been requested.”
“On our way, dispatch.” Rixton powered up the light bar and flipped on the siren. “We’ll be there in twenty.” He stomped on the gas, and I tightened my seat belt. “Those cotton plants will be as dry as tinder. The whole farm will go up if the water fairies don’t get their asses there quick-like and in a hurry.”
“Don’t mock the whole department just because Captain Estes called you out that one time.”
Rixton cut his eyes toward me. “He called me Officer Krispy Kreme.”
The problem wasn’t the nickname. It was that he had answered to it on reflex in front of a half-dozen firefighters who now catcalled him every time we rolled up on a scene.
“You’re right. What was I thinking?” I deadpanned. “Clearly, they’re the enemy.”
“Damn straight.”
Fifteen minutes later, we bumped off the asphalt and hit a dirt road that T-boned up ahead. Straight took you to what appeared to be a cluster of barns. Right put you on a narrow lane already clogged with fire trucks that cut between two fields of ripe cotton and led up to the Hensarling homestead. We kept straight and parked between five pickups belonging either to the employees or neighbors come to lend a hand.
“Canton PD,” Rixton announced when no one came running. “We’re responding to a call for assistance.”
A young girl bolted from between two buildings to meet us. She ran straight up to me and took my hand, ignoring my flinch, and hauled me along after her. “Hurry. Please. It’s Mr. Rowland. He’s gone nuts. They can’t hold him much longer.”
Rixton and I exchanged glances then followed the girl down an alley between two massive buildings overflowing with hulking machines painted in trademark greens and yellows. A dirt lot crowded with rusted out equipment sprawled behind the tidy barns, and a small crowd had gathered in its center.
“Deena, you go on now.” A woman dressed in jeans and a tee covered in soot rushed toward us and turned the girl on her heels. “Sit in the bed of the truck and wait for me to come get you. Don’t move a muscle.” She pressed a phone into the girl’s hand. “Play a game or watch one of your shows. Just don’t come back here no matter what you see or hear.”
The girl’s voice wavered. “Momma?”
“It’s all right.” She gathered her daughter close. “Just do as I say, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The girl dragged her heels, but she didn’t look back, and that appeased her mother.
“I’m Detective Rixton, and this is my partner, Officer Boudreau.” Rixton took lead while I watched our backs. “We’re responding to an emergency call traced back to a landline phone associated with this address.”
“I’m Jessica Hensarling. This is my grandma Ruth’s farm.” Up close I saw a crimson smear across her left cheek that competed with the black smudges. The eye above it swelled with the start of what would become a wicked shiner. “Pete Rowland made the call on the barn phone before he lost his damn mind.” She indicated we should walk with her. “He’s right over here.”
A lump that might as well have been a charcoal briquette lay curled on the ground. Had I not recognized the diamond pattern charred into the section nearest me as roasted cowboy boots, I wouldn’t have thought I was looking at human remains. As easy as breathing, the cold place welled up in me, allowing me the distance to filter out the cooked meat smell that explained the fainter tang of vomit.
Careful not to disturb the scene, I walked a slow circle around the body. As I cataloged the location of each twisted limb, I noticed the metal nozzle grasped in one gnarled hand and the silvery canister he had contorted around while in his death throes.
This nutbar had set fire to the farm and then himself using a drip torch meant for controlled burns.
Rixton was modeling the stone-cold cop face I worked so hard to emulate. The laughing man who cracked jokes faster than old timers could shell pecans had blocked his heart behind a wall of ice too.
“His skin is still crackling.” He squatted next to Rowland’s head. “Based on the time dispatch pinged us and our distance from the farm, he must have turned the torch on himself within seconds of ending the call.”
“I tried to stop him,” Ms. Hensarling murmured, her voice gone weak. “He clocked me with the base of the drip torch.” Her fingers traveled up her face to press against the cut over her cheekbone. “He was sobbing, begging for help and then…” Her gaze dipped to his ruined corpse. “I’m going to be sick.”
We let her stumble to a nearby forklift where she emptied her stomach on its right front tire. We hesitated long enough for one of the others to break from the pack and comfort her. Rixton and I had retreated too deep into our heads to offer more than placations to the witnesses, and lip service wouldn’t solve the mystery of what had happened on this smoldering tract of farmland or why this man had taken his own life in such a brutal fashion. Wearing indifference as a shield, we started the evidence collection process.
Six hours after we arrived at Hensarling Farms, Rixton and I climbed back in the cruiser and pointed her toward the station. Gone was the bakery-fresh scent that had filled the car. Instead we smelled like death, sweat, and a sickly combination of diesel fuel and gasoline. Our clothes were filthy, our hands blackened, and we had yet to sink back into ourselves. Our bodies were running on autopilot and doing a damn fine job of keeping our minds insulated from the horrors left behind us.
Mr. Rowland hadn’t stopped with razing the fields. Our arsonist was also a murderer.
One of the mechanics, Mr. Aguilera, had checked his two sons out of school for orthodontist appointments and brought them back to the farm with him to play with the barn cat and her kittens. The boys had been racing up the rows in the field when the fire started, and their legs had been too short to outrun the blaze.
For as long as I live, I will never forget how the small teeth in those blackened skulls looked strung with fine, silver wire.
“I need a stiff drink and a hot shower,” Rixton announced. “I can’t
go home like this.”
“I don’t think I’m going back to the Trudeaus’.” I sounded far off, miles away from here. “Dad and I always drink a beer on the front porch together on the bad nights. We don’t talk. We just sit and listen to the frogs sing.” I rubbed the grit from my eyes. “I need that slice of calm after what we saw.”
“What we saw is why you don’t need to be alone tonight. You want some company?”
“I’ve got a friend I can call,” I said, thinking of Miller, “but you’re welcome to the downstairs shower.” I remembered the bare shelves in the fridge I had bleached earlier in the week. “I’ll have to hit the package store.”
“I’ll call Sherry and let her know we’re up to no good.” His fingers drummed the steering wheel. “She’ll understand I can’t face Nettie with this on my skin.”
Too bad the images wouldn’t wash out of our heads under hot water, but that was the job. We saw things that haunted us, learned secrets we could never tell, heard nightmares given voice, woke drenched in cold sweat with bile perched in our throats all so innocents might remain that way for just a while longer.
The station was quiet when we arrived. Most units were still out on patrol. The one officer we passed in the hall kept her eyes downcast and her strides long to spare us any obligation to exchange pleasantries.
Word traveled fast, and for once, I was grateful.
We split off and hit our respective bathrooms, scrubbing the grime from our hands and faces. The abrasive paper towels from the dispenser scoured off the top layer of skin, which worked for me. We each kept a spare set of clothes in our lockers, and we changed into those. Neither helped much. We still felt dirty, smelled scorched, but at least we looked cleaner.
Our shift might have started out with a bang, but the end was, thankfully, a snoozer. Rixton and I divided the mountain of paperwork looming over us and spent the last two hours bent over the desk we shared.
Liam Dawson, the arson investigator with the Canton Fire Department, called to request our notes since we beat him to the scene and had first crack at the witnesses. Already in this up to our soot-covered ears, Rixton offered to lend a hand. Eager to put this nightmare to bed, Dawson accepted.
And so the Hensarling case became ours.
We managed to sneak out while Uncle Harold was in his shift meeting, neither of us eager to rehash our day, and I sent Rixton ahead of me so he could get started with his shower. That left me to grab the beer, which entailed making the purchase while in uniform. Something about the knowing glint in the cashier’s eyes made me feel dirty, like I had taken a wrong step down a path that dead ended past the edge of a cliff. Shaking off the uneasy feeling, I took my six-pack and returned to my Bronco to find a small mountain waiting for me.
“I’m driving you home.” Cole extended his hand for my keys. “Don’t fight me on this.”
He had the wrong girl. There was no fight left in me. I passed over the keys, climbed into the passenger’s seat and strapped in. The vehicle rocked when Cole joined me, and his scent swept through my head, clearing away the burnt hair smell that made my stomach roil each time I caught an accidental whiff.
We drove home in blessed silence, and I used the time to text Uncle Harold and Aunt Nancy with my plans for the night. After Cole parked in my usual spot, he came around and opened the door for me. He had impeccable manners for a rock formation. When I made no move to get out, he resorted to his favorite pastime and loomed over me.
“Go on.” His hand lifted of its own accord, like cupping my cheek was its idea, and Cole snarled a warning – to himself? – under his breath. He clenched his fist an inch from making contact and backed away until the darkness swallowed him. “I won’t be far.”
“Cole?” I stumbled when my feet hit the ground, my knees stiff and unbending. “Thanks.”
A pair of crimson eyes set in the leonine face of his inner dragon peered out at me from the forest in answer. The pearlescent tip of his whiplike tail cracked against the earth, the scales catching the moonlight, before vanishing.
“I thought I heard your Bronco.” Rixton shoved through the screen door, his hair spiky and wet from the shower. A hint of warmth had returned to his eyes, proof he had spoken to Sherry, and she had pulled him back from the precipice. He noticed the six-pack in my hand and frowned. “Where’s the rest?”
“You have to drive home after this,” I reminded him. “You get one beer. That’s it.”
Grumbling the whole time, he dropped into a blue rocker and held out his hand until I slapped a single beer across his palm. I sat opposite him, popped mine open, and drank. It went down cold and smooth and a little bitter. Or maybe that was just me. We sat together until my eyes grew too heavy to prop open, thanks to the four other beers I swilled, and Rixton stood to leave.
“Are you sure you want to stay out here by yourself?” He toyed with the tab on his can until it popped off in his hand. “We’ve got a spare bedroom with your name on it if you don’t want to be alone.”
“Nah.” I yawned wide. “I want to sleep in my own bed. The upstairs is secure. It’s just hot with only the ceiling fan running.”
“Keep your phone on you.” He flicked the tab at my head and hit me between the blurry eyes. “Call me or Sherry in the morning. Let us know that you’re okay.”
“Morning,” I groaned. “I forgot the installers are coming out first thing before it gets hot.”
“Poor Bou-Bou.” His chuckle thawed him even further. “I’ll text you my hangover cure.”
Having been the recipient of his sage advice once before, I already knew it. Don’t get drunk in the first place.
Smartass.
“Get out of here,” I grumbled, cleaning up my mess. “Some of us need our beauty sleep.”
“Damn, girl. You really are buzzed.” He preened like a parakeet in front of a mirror. “You just implied that I don’t need beauty sleep, which, incidentally, is one hundred percent true. I’m as devastatingly handsome with two hours of sleep as I am with eight. I’m just stunned you finally admitted it out loud.”
“Rixton, stop, please. I already feel the beginnings of the headache I’m going to wake up with.”
“Rude.” He walked to the edge of the porch and balanced on the top step. “I’m out.”
Through bleary eyes, I watched him pour more than three-quarters of his drink on the grass and felt like a total heel. He had sat there and watched while I got progressively wasted – I was a total lightweight – and let me anesthetize myself while he kept his wits sharp enough for the both of us.
Part of me was embarrassed I hadn’t caught his subtle redirections. He and Sherry were a rock-solid unit, and the fact Team Rixton now had three players changed nothing. He kept no secrets from his wife. When he got home, they would talk it out, because he thought best while his mouth was moving, and Sherry would cry the tears he couldn’t afford to let fall. She would make what he had seen and done okay. And Nettie? She would remind him there were still vestiges of wholesome goodness in this world, that there was hope for a brighter future, and it would be enough. It had to be.
All I could think while I sat there was how this was ending, we were ending, and he didn’t even know it yet. I didn’t have the courage to tell him I was quitting the force, that I was moving on. I didn’t know what to say, what kind of lie would break his heart the cleanest, without the jagged edges that would cut us both. How did I admit to the man who was my professional other half that I was splitting up with him? He had already lost one partner. How would he deal with losing another? And would he ever forgive me?
I had to drop the news before the christening. Had to. He and Sherry deserved the option of going with their second choice, probably a local, maybe another cop. Someone who was normal, human, safe. Someone whose siblings weren’t out to end the world my goddaughter was meant to inherit.
“I love you,” I called to his retreating back. “I really, really do.”
“Aww. You’re a sentimen
tal drunk.” Rixton chuckled. “How did I not know this about you?”
“Tell no one.” With a grunt, I shoved out of my rocker and collected the empties. “Or I will end you.”
“Even your threats are cuter when you’re tipsy.” He pointed a warning finger at me. “Remember to call. Don’t make me drive out here and perform a pulse-check on you.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I lined up the cans and started stomping them flat. “I’ll call the second my eyes open.”
“You do that.” He patted the roof of the cruiser. “Night, Bou-Bou.”
God grant me patience. “Night.”
Rixton ducked out before my heel slapped the porch as the last can was crushed. That might have ended okay for me had I not then leaned forward to gather the discs for the recycling bin. The forward motion intensified the sloshing in my head until I tipped forward and landed on all fours.
I must have been picking at my French braid while in my rocker, because a curtain of hair slid forward and carried with it the rancid smells from the crime scene. I didn’t reach the edge of the porch before the first heave brought sour mash into my mouth. As I christened the new planks with the contents of my stomach, I caught motion out of the corner of my watering eyes.
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