Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  NINE

  One day, officially, into the first murder investigation of Deputy Jess Winslow’s career—though so far it didn’t seem to Jess as though much had been accomplished. She and Tyner Gillies played it how Hart had instructed: let the sheriff handle the procedural stuff; concentrate on just listening to the vibe in Deception Cove, picking up on the rumors that traveled in whispers, blooming as fast as moss in the rainforest.

  Gillies wasn’t as green as Jess, but he wasn’t exactly a lifelong lawman yet either. He’d worked a couple of years with Sheriff Wheeler in Neah Bay, been moved over to Deception after Aaron Hart took over. Gillies was a few years older than Jess, late twenties, short and well muscled, clean-shaven and close-cropped, and always—always—by the book. She’d written him off as your typical law-enforcement meathead, at least until he’d opened his mouth.

  Gillies was smart, seemed passionate about his job, and he played well with others. He was competent at his work, and Jess had never heard him complain about anything; through two and a half tours in Afghanistan, she’d come to value both qualities more than just about anything else. She liked Gillies and was glad she’d been paired with him, even if they weren’t making much progress yet on the Boyd investigation.

  Some said it was an animal-rights activist who’d killed the former hockey player; some said an old lover, or the husband or boyfriend thereof. Bad Boyd had left more than a few broken hearts in his wake, and he’d broken his share of Makah County homes to boot.

  Jess still hadn’t told Hart about Burke. She hadn’t seen Burke the night before, after the autopsy; she’d made up some story about not feeling well and took to her bed early, lay awake all night. The way Burke had responded, Jess was pretty sure he knew she was telling a lie, but he hadn’t pressed the issue. They’d been cool to each other since the day he’d fought Boyd, and she could tell he was waiting on her, probably hoping if they gave it enough time that she might forget it had happened.

  Jess wasn’t sure what to make of Burke fighting Boyd, and what it meant for their relationship. Maybe Burke was like her: he couldn’t escape his violence, no matter how hard he tried or what good he meant to do. She wondered if that meant they would never find peace together, if she wouldn’t have to worry about doing something to lose Burke because he might up and lose himself first.

  Hart called Jess at the end of that first day, summoned her to meet him out on location down the road from Deception, east toward the county line. And so Jess left the town in Gillies’s hands, told him to radio her if anything got out of hand, and she saddled up in her cruiser and drove out to the highway, figuring she knew where Hart was leading her.

  Boyd’s house sat a couple of miles out of Deception, off a nondescript turnoff from the highway, with a mailbox and an old gate with a shiny new lock. A gravel road wound down through the trees toward the ocean; Jess had never driven down it before, but she’d seen pictures of the house that waited at the end.

  The place was probably worth more than every other house in Deception combined. Some kind of architectural marvel, old-growth timber and stone and steel, cantilevered out over the rock bluffs that bordered the ocean. The Post-Intelligencer had sent a reporter out from Seattle after Boyd had it built, some kind of Sunday supplement, human-interest piece, and though the PI wasn’t exactly in wide circulation this far out from the city, approximately every living soul in Makah County had read that particular article, even Jess.

  She knew people who’d cruised past it too, on the water side, though by all accounts the house was built to blend into the forest. It apparently didn’t look like much from thirty feet below the bluffs; inside, though, from the pictures, the place was a palace.

  Hart’s county Super Duty pickup was waiting at the bottom of the gravel, a wide, paved driveway leading to a three-car garage. The kennels and the barn where the dogs had been set to fighting were just up the gravel road, past the house, tucked into the trees and almost invisible if you didn’t know where to look. Jess figured that was probably the idea. The house had sat empty while Boyd was in prison, a property manager checking in now and then, a rent-a-cop security guy patrolling the grounds. Seemed a shame to let a place like this go unlived in, but Boyd hadn’t been married, and he’d earned his time away.

  The forecast had called for rain again, but it was holding off as Jess parked beside Hart and stepped out onto the concrete. The sky was gray, and the wind blew clouds fast and low over the treetops, whitecaps on the water just visible around the side of the house. From this angle, the house was all garage and bare, windowless concrete. Jess surmised that the real architectural stuff probably looked out over the water.

  “Hell of a place, isn’t it?” Hart said, his hands in his pockets, studying the building as if he were her realtor, poised to explain about the three and a half baths. “Figured we ought to take a look around, seeing as how we don’t have much else to work with.”

  Jess thought of Burke. Chased the thought from her mind as Hart unlocked the door that sat like an afterthought beside the three wide garage bays.

  “Hold up a sec,” he told her, digging in his pocket, and he came out with two pairs of blue latex gloves. Handed her a pair and slipped on the other. “Media will have our asses if we contaminate a crime scene.”

  The house smelled faintly of that pervasive dampness even the finest houses in the county weren’t completely immune to. The scent of cigar smoke lingered in the air too, sickly sweet and obnoxious, and Jess pictured Boyd here, king of his castle, a thousand years removed from the prison cell that had housed him before this.

  He’d kept this house, even after the trial, the scandal. He must have felt untouchable here.

  The house began with a mudroom, a narrow hallway, and then it opened into something spectacular. Jess had seen the pictures, but the view still took her breath away. An open-concept living area spanned the width of the house. Double-height ceilings, the walls to the north made entirely of glass, a panoramic view of the water. A massive fireplace built from river rock, a pristine kitchen that may well have been bigger than Jess’s old one-bedroom home. Great slabs of granite and huge beams of timber, lavish, butter-soft leather furniture. Hunting trophies on the walls that weren’t windows, hockey trophies too.

  Hart looked around, whistled. “Guess I should have been a hockey player.”

  At first glance, the house looked as perfect and unlived-in as it had in those newspaper photos, as though everything within view had been meticulously staged to a state of impossible perfection.

  Jess and Hart stepped cautiously through the living room. Made note of the small signs that Boyd had in fact lived here: an off-kilter rug; the remains of that pungent cigar, lying dead in an ashtray; the charred wood in the fireplace. Looked in on Boyd’s bedroom—palatial, a king bed, made up, if sloppily—and saw nothing, necessarily, that rang any alarms.

  “What are you thinking happened?” Jess asked. “I mean, it’s obvious that Boyd didn’t die on that beach, right?”

  Hart nodded. Forensic technicians from Clallam County had been called up to Shipwreck Point just as soon as Jess had reported the gunshot wound in the middle of Boyd’s forehead. Prevailing wisdom at the scene—and Boyd’s position below the high-tide mark—said he’d been shot elsewhere, dumped into the sea. Said it was Cable Proudfoot’s misfortune that the body had happened to wash up at Shipwreck, just in time to ruin the day at the beach with his grandson.

  Jess knew there was no reason not to believe the forensics people. But their thinking prompted the question: If Bad Boyd wasn’t shot where he’d been found, then where had it happened?

  “Hell,” Hart said, scratching his head. “I was really kind of hoping we’d come in here and find brass and bloodstains, maybe a note.”

  They returned to the living room. Late afternoon now, the light starting to fade, a gradual, inexorable dimming of the gray into black. The view through the north windows remained spectacular, ocean framed by rock and trees, but it
was a cold kind of beauty, and Jess felt a sudden urge to relight the fire, bring some warmth and light to this stark, lonely house.

  Instead, she went over to the kitchen, which appeared, by and large, to have never been used. She adjusted her gloves and peeked into the refrigerator, found beer and milk and a bottle of wine, nothing else.

  No dishes in the drying rack or the dishwasher. Where did Boyd eat? Some sundries in the cupboards, canned soup and crackers, an impressive collection of hard liquor. A bachelor, Jess thought. Through and through.

  She’d about given up on finding anything useful, was about to walk back out to Hart and hope he’d suggest they go back to town soon, maybe grab a bite or at least find someplace with a heater, when impulse moved her back to the sink and the little door underneath it.

  There she found what she expected: Boyd may have been a millionaire, and an ex-con besides, but he still kept his trash in the predictable spot, and from the state of the bin, he hadn’t hit the dump in a while.

  Upon cursory examination, Jess saw that most of the bin was filled with old takeout containers, thus answering the question of how Boyd nourished himself. Rosemary’s diner, Spinnaker’s, that Chinese joint in Clallam Bay: all well represented. But it wasn’t the takeout trash that caught Jess’s attention. It was the broken wineglass on top.

  She’d had a good set of wineglasses, once. A wedding gift from Ty’s cousins, they might have been the blue-light special at the Super K, but they were nicer than anything Jess had ever owned before. Over the years, though, they’d all broken, victims of carelessness and attrition, though by the time she’d thrown out the last one, she’d come home from Afghanistan, Ty was dead, and her tastes had started to turn toward the harder stuff—bourbon, most of the time, but she hadn’t been picky.

  This wineglass in Boyd’s garbage was far nicer than her ill-fated wedding collection. It was broken all the same, sheared off at the stem, the base probably somewhere deeper amid the remains of Boyd’s last order of chow mein. It lay there, discarded, hardly more noteworthy than the soggy cardboard and damp paper on which it rested—except for the telltale stain on its rim.

  Jess shifted the garbage bin. Knelt closer and saw the imprint, unmistakable, a faded rose color.

  Lipstick.

  TEN

  Elsewhere in Makah County, a cell phone was ringing. It was a burner phone, prepaid, purchased with cash in Port Angeles. It hadn’t been purchased for this call, necessarily, but the phone’s owner didn’t mind. The phone was for making money, and this call fit that description.

  The owner did not introduce himself when he answered. Anyone who had this number knew who he was. He cleared his throat, and someone reached for the remote control, muted the television, signaled to the other men to be quiet. The room around him went silent, and the man who owned the burner phone answered it.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m scared.” The woman on the other end of the line had met the man only a handful of times, most of them decades before. “I don’t know what to do with myself, I’m so scared.”

  The woman’s voice was hushed, barely more than a whisper. The man could hear the fear in her voice and the urgency, and the knowledge that something had been set in motion that could never be undone.

  “They found his body,” she said. “I saw it on the news. I thought you said it would never turn up.”

  With his free hand, the man lit a cigarette and inhaled a long drag. “I said it mightn’t,” he said. “I never promised.”

  The woman said, “I just don’t know what to do.”

  “You do nothing,” the man told her. “You do how we talked about. Go about your business and forget it ever happened. Let us handle the rest.”

  “You’ll make sure they don’t find me?” she said.

  “You keep your mouth shut, you’re going to be fine,” the man said. “We have as much to lose as you do if this goes south, remember?”

  The woman seemed to contemplate this. She was silent a long time, and the man, restless, walked to the window and looked out at the road, watched dusk sap the last light of day, hiding the houses opposite, and the forest beyond, in deep shadow. Finally, he heard the woman’s breath hitch.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “We’ll get it handled,” the man told her. “Don’t worry.”

  He waited until he heard the click so he knew the woman had ended the call. Then he set down the phone, aware that the other men were watching him intently from the couches and chairs arrayed around the little room.

  The man ignored them. He studied the phone for a long while, thinking.

  ELEVEN

  Three days now since the autopsy. Sheriff Hart and Jess and Tyner Gillies were turning the county over, looking for the person whose lipstick they’d found on that discarded wineglass. Asking everyone they could whether Brock Boyd had a girlfriend, someone who might know something.

  “Could be we’re barking up the wrong tree,” Gillies suggested. “Could be Boyd was just a guy who liked wearing lipstick.”

  They’d considered the possibility, however unlikely. But Boyd’s master bedroom betrayed no such predilection. Nor did a deep dive into the rest of his belongings. He owned no women’s beauty products, no women’s clothes. A search of his laptop revealed his tastes aligned pretty close with those of your average heterosexual American man. In truth, the only signs whatsoever of a woman’s presence in the home were the lipstick stain on the wineglass and a smudged, partial fingerprint that didn’t belong to Brock Boyd or anyone else in the database.

  To this point, however, the mystery woman hadn’t shown her face. And whoever she was, nobody was willing to talk to Jess or Gillies or Hart about her.

  Then the call came in to Hart’s voicemail. The tip was anonymous. A gravel-rough voice, indistinct and unrecognizable. The sheriff played it for Jess in his office.

  “Mason Burke killed Boyd.”

  Four words. Nothing more.

  For a short while, the sheriff and his deputies set aside Brock Boyd’s love life.

  * * *

  They had plans for dinner. At least Mason hoped they did, relations between him and Jess being somewhat strained since she’d found out about the fight, nearly a week ago. She’d straight-up blown him off the night after she’d found Boyd’s body, told him some line about not feeling so good, the lie as transparent as the beer Troy Phelps was pouring at the Cobalt these days.

  Not that Mason supposed he could blame Jess. He hadn’t meant to fight with Boyd, and he knew he’d made a mistake. Knew he’d slipped up, just a little, back to the man he’d had to be in the Chippewa pen, where no matter how much you wanted to stay peaceful, sometimes you had to fight to survive.

  He hadn’t needed to fight Bad Boyd. A part of him, though, had wanted to, and he was ashamed of it now. He could see how he’d fallen in Jess’s estimation. He hoped that tonight, their standing date night out at the Chinese place in neighboring Clallam Bay, he could start to rebuild her trust.

  He finished up the workday at Jess’s new house, dropped Rengo in town, and drove Lucy and the Blazer up to Hank Moss’s motel, where he used Jess’s spare room key to let himself in and clean up. The Nootka had a makeshift showerhead mounted above the toilet, but it was weak, in a tiny little room, and it tended to drain the boat’s meager water supply. Mason tried to shower at the motel instead, as often as he could.

  So he showered, shaved, and cleaned up in the bathroom filled with Jess’s fancy soaps and beauty supplies, dressed in a fresh pair of blue jeans and a button-down shirt, gave Lucy her dinner, and then turned on the TV and settled in to wait for Jess to come home.

  He’d never been much of a sports fan but found himself watching hockey, the East Coast game ending and a game in Los Angeles getting underway, puck drop for the latter at 7 p.m., Jess already running behind. Mason watched the TV with Lucy sprawled out on the bed beside him, and he rubbed her belly and thought about Brock Boyd some more.

  Jess wasn’t
saying much about the investigation, though Mason could understand why, it being about the biggest crime Makah County had seen since, well, Kirby Harwood. The funny thing was, even Rengo was tight-lipped about it, and Rengo hardly ever shut up. Boyd’s murder had put a shock through Deception, from what Mason could tell. He wondered how Jess and the new sheriff were getting on.

  The late hockey game was well into the second period by the time Jess showed up, the lights of her Makah County cruiser raking the window, painting beams on the wall opposite the bed. Mason listened to her car door slam, heard her fumble for her keys and unlock the room, watched the door swing open, and then there she was.

  She saw him and stopped. Blinked. Beside Mason, Lucy’s tail thumped on the bed, and the dog stood and stretched and jumped down and went over to Jess, nuzzled at her hands where they hung down at her thighs.

  “Everything all right?” Mason asked Jess. She hadn’t moved from the doorway. “Tonight’s our night, right? The Golden Palace?”

  Jess blinked again. Nodded, slow. “Yeah,” she said. “Right.”

  He watched her come into the room, set her bag down, and start to unbutton her coat. She stopped midway through, hesitated. Looked around the room like it was somewhere she’d never seen before.

  Mason heard alarm bells in his head. Wondered if she was having a flashback, some kind of trigger sending her brain back to Afghanistan.

  The episodes had gotten better since she’d returned to Dr. Wiebe in Port Angeles. But Mason knew those memories must still be lurking down there, under the surface, and he figured it was going to take more than a few months of talking to get Jess to the point where she wasn’t bothered anymore.

  “You okay?” He hit the TV remote and swung his legs off the bed. Stood. “Listen, if tonight’s no good, we can stay here instead. I’ll rustle up some food from the diner.”