But there was plenty that Mason didn’t understand about the human condition, and perhaps he never would.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a window breaking, and he turned to see Rengo standing frozen by the house’s front entryway, his head cocked, listening for an alarm.
No alarm sounded. That didn’t necessarily mean none had been triggered, but Mason followed behind Rengo regardless as the kid reached inside the broken glass at the doorway, unlocked the door, and let them both into the house.
If Bad Boyd’s barn had smelled of fear and death and human depravity, the man’s house was the opposite. The still air in the front hall was laced with the barest hints of scents exotic and moneyed, some familiar to Mason—the smell of Boyd’s cigars, for instance—and others completely foreign. Even with the glass broken behind them, the environment that greeted Mason and Rengo inside the house was largely silent, insulated from the wind in the trees and the water below, a tomb of empty space and luxury.
Beyond the hallway, the house opened vast and cavernous, more space than the feeble beams from their lights could penetrate. The night was dark outside the towering glass; the windows may as well have been walls, for all that Mason could see of the outdoors.
They found themselves in a sitting area dominated by a large fireplace and what Mason knew must have been very expensive furniture. Here and there were signs of the law: white fingerprint dust remained on armrests and lampshades, on a brass bucking-bronco sculpture sitting proud on an end table.
Mason couldn’t remember ever being in a house this big; four or five of his prison cells would fit into the great room alone. He wondered how Boyd had coped with the space when he returned home at last, whether the emptiness had unnerved him as it sometimes did Mason, the absolute freedom where once had been total structure.
Boyd’s bedroom had been similarly picked over by Sheriff Hart and his team; there were expensive-looking clothes in the closets, suits and shirts and ties, belts and cuff links and pristine rows of shoes. None of it would explain why Brock Boyd was dead.
Rengo had wandered away, no doubt already bored. Mason could see that Brock Boyd had been wealthy, and that he’d enjoyed the trappings of his success. But this house wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know or have cause to suspect about the man, and he wondered if there was a point to them being here at all, beyond simply hiding out from the elements and the inevitable, from Sheriff Hart and the state troopers who’d sooner or later catch up.
Then Mason heard Rengo shouting his name from somewhere deeper inside the house, and he pushed aside his worries and hurried out of Boyd’s bedroom to seek out the kid.
Rengo had found himself in what must have been Boyd’s recreation room, down a set of stairs from the kitchen, a basement level blasted out of the cliff face and boxed in by concrete, no windows but deep-pile carpeting and soft light, a pool table and another television, framed pictures of Boyd on the wall, trophies lined up on a shelf.
It was near the trophies that Rengo was standing, holding something in his hand as Mason entered the room.
“I think I maybe got something,” Rengo told him. He’d turned on the lights, and his excitement was plainly visible; his eyes darted down to what he held in his hand and then back to Mason. “Check this out.”
He held up what was in his hand, and from across the room, Mason saw it was a photograph, a hockey team’s group picture.
“‘Broomstick,’ you said,” Rengo said. “That’s what Jordan told you, right?”
Mason nodded. “That’s what he said.”
Rengo looked down at the photograph. Smiled, self-satisfied. “Well, that’s mighty good news, Burke,” he said. “I think I figured it out.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
The dog still wouldn’t leave her side.
Jess sat in the office at the back of the Deception Cove detachment, where Aaron Hart studied her intently from behind the desk as she told him how Burke had come to surprise her at the derelict freighter, how he’d saved Tyner Gillies’s life.
“Bealing had me pinned with the shotgun,” she told the sheriff. “As far as Gillies was out on that dock, there was no way I could reach him without that boomstick cutting me down.”
Lucy stood beside her, her snout resting in Jess’s lap, chestnut-brown eyes gazing up at her worriedly, as though she was not yet convinced her owner wouldn’t have another episode. The dog hated loud noises, generally spooked at the sound of gunfire, but the shoot-out at the shore didn’t seem to have bothered her, at least not nearly as much as did the sight of Jess in trouble.
Hart regarded them both from across the desk. He’d closed the office door, and locked it, and though out in the main room of the detachment was bustle and commotion, none of it disturbed their conversation.
And none of what she told Hart in here, Jess knew, would be accidentally overheard by the lawmen out there.
“Burke told me to cover him,” she told the sheriff. “I laid down fire toward the ship while Burke dragged Gillies to safety. While he was exposed, I saw Bealing swing around with the shotgun, and I put him down.”
She wouldn’t lie to the sheriff. Gillies had seen Burke and he might yet survive, and Jess hoped like hell that he would. But even if her partner didn’t one day betray Burke’s presence at the shoot-out, Jess couldn’t see how lying about it was going to do her or Burke any good.
Hart chewed his lip, and he thought for a while. “What the hell was Burke doing there?” he asked her. “Did you have any inkling he was following you?”
Jess shook her head. “No, sir,” she said. “As best I could tell, he was there to see the men on the ship same as I was. He made sure I had Gillies in hand, and then he went back to the wreck.”
Hart rubbed his eyes and stared down at his notepad, where he’d been transcribing Jess’s account of the night’s events.
“And you couldn’t apprehend him,” he said, his voice weary. “On account of how you were trying to keep Gillies alive.”
Jess nodded. “Yes, sir,” she said. She wondered if Hart had any update on her colleague, who’d been taken to Port Angeles, the major trauma center, wondered if he would make it through the night.
“By the time backup showed, Burke was gone,” Jess told Hart. “I—honestly, Sheriff, it didn’t cross my mind to arrest him. Not until afterward.”
Hart mulled this over some more. Then he let out a long breath, and he shuffled the papers on his desk. Lucy shifted beside Jess, licked her lips. Looked up at Jess, sad and worried and ready to go.
“I gotta take your badge and your gun,” Hart said at last. “Officer-involved shooting, it’s standard procedure. I’m not saying you did anything wrong, mind, just that we have to be damn sure we play this by the book. The county’s under enough scrutiny as it is, the Boyd thing and all.”
She had her badge and her gun on the desk before he’d finished the thought, slid them across to the edge of the paperwork and leaned back again and let him study her and the dog where they sat across from him. He looked sorry too.
“You’ll be okay,” he said. “As best I can tell, you handled this thing fine. And maybe when morning comes, we’ll hear Tyner’s going to pull through and we all can breathe easy. It’s just now I’m down two deputies, Jess, and that’s the last thing I need in the world.”
“Yes, sir,” Jess said. She hesitated. “And Burke?”
Hart exhaled again. Glanced past her to the door, beyond which the state patrol waited. “I can’t see as it would do any of us any good to let Shipps and his men know Burke was there tonight,” he said. “Do you?”
Jess said, “No, sir.”
“Fine,” the sheriff said. “Then go home, Jess, and get some sleep. Hell, get some sleep for the rest of us too. God knows we’re running on fumes.”
The detachment was packed with the law, state troopers and crime scene technicians and any spare deputy Hart could call up. The troopers watched Jess, and Mitch Derry and Paul Monk
watched too, eyes hollow and their shoulders slumped, as Sheriff Hart walked her to the detachment’s front door, his hand on her arm at the bend in her elbow, as if he was escorting her down the aisle at a funeral.
Jess kept her eyes low and didn’t look at anybody. Knew Derry and Monk must be hurting, looking for news about Gillies, but she had none to share, and she was too exhausted to pretend. She kept a grip on Lucy’s lead and walked with the sheriff, and when they reached the front door, he leaned ahead and pushed it open for her and followed her and Lucy out into the empty street.
Hart told her, “Listen, you see Burke again, you tell him to turn himself in. We don’t need more bodies around here, understand?”
Jess nodded and turned to go, but Hart laid his hand on her arm again. Firm, but not unfriendly.
“I’m talking about him too, Jess,” he said. “I don’t want to see that man killed, not before we’ve sorted this out. You tell him to turn himself in, and I swear I’ll do my damndest to see he gets a fair shot. Okay?”
He kept his eyes on hers, not blinking, and Jess knew he meant what he said, that he’d do what he could for Burke, though whether because of Gillies or something else, she couldn’t be sure.
She met Hart’s eyes. “You know I think Burke is innocent,” she said. “Of all of it, Sheriff, Bad Boyd and Charlene Todd. But if I see him again, I’ll tell him that I think he ought to turn himself in regardless. I don’t want to see him killed either.”
Hart held her gaze a moment longer, searching her face for something that she wasn’t sure she could give him. Finally, he nodded. Released her arm, wordless, and looked around, briefly, up and down Main Street—deserted at this hour—and then he squared his shoulders and bid her good night, and he turned and went back into the detachment again, where most of the law on the entire Olympic Peninsula waited for him.
Jess stood with Lucy outside the detachment. Her cruiser sat angled into a parking stall just a few feet away, but of course it wasn’t her cruiser now; she wasn’t the law anymore. The Blazer was still up at the motel, and there were no taxis in Deception Cove.
She was tired, bone tired, but there was no way to her bed but to walk. She tugged on Lucy’s lead and turned south on Main Street, began trudging up the hill toward home.
THIRTY-NINE
The boys were just teenagers in hockey gear. Fourteen, fifteen years old, sixteen at the most. Lined up in two rows—first seated, second standing—facing the camera. They wore bulky hockey equipment and sweaters with a logo on the front that Rengo told Mason was the symbol of the Makah Screaming Eagles, the top team in the county. Some of the boys had the first wispy hints of beards, mustaches; they glowered at the camera and tried to look tough. But they were boys, all the same, twenty of them, frozen in time.
Brock Boyd had similar pictures for every year he’d played hockey, displayed on a shelf in the corner of his man cave, beside framed newspaper articles and magazine covers, trophies he’d won and jerseys he’d worn.
Mason studied the picture that Rengo had handed him and wondered what he was supposed to be seeing. Boyd sat in the first row, dead center, the C on his chest denoting he was the team’s captain. His blond hair was long but unruly; he sneered out of the photograph as though he could see Mason looking at him, as though he was challenging Mason, even now, even then.
Mason recognized no one else in the photograph. He made to tell this to Rengo, ask him what the point was, but the kid had more pictures to show him.
More team pictures, younger boys now. Most of the faces the same, year by year, stretching back through early adolescence into childhood. In every picture, Brock Boyd was the centerpiece. In every picture, Boyd wore the captain’s C.
“Okay, so Boyd was real good,” Mason told Rengo when they’d worked their way back to about age six or seven. “What are you trying to tell me?”
Rengo shook his head. “It’s not about Boyd.”
He picked up the first photograph, the teenagers, and he handed it to Mason. Kept his finger on another face, in the back row: a tall boy, acne scarred and ungainly in his youth.
“You recognize this guy from the other pictures?” Rengo asked Mason.
Mason scanned through the older photos, looking for the boy. He had dark hair, almost black, a lock hanging over his forehead, nearly obscuring his eyes. He stared at the camera with a somber expression—no manufactured bravado, like most of his teammates, or cocky self-confidence, like Boyd. He looked serious, almost resigned.
He looked as though he’d rather have been anywhere else.
Mason couldn’t find him in the older photographs. He recognized most of the boys as they aged through the years, but not this one. “I don’t see him,” he told Rengo, shrugging.
Rengo smirked. Handed over another couple of photographs, team pictures from later years, the teenagers growing toward adulthood.
“Boyd only played a year or two more with the Eagles,” he told Mason. “But you get the idea.”
The faces, by and large, were the same. A little older. Slightly more facial hair. Not as many smiles; at this age, hockey wasn’t just a game anymore but a potential meal ticket. A free pass out of Makah County and into a life of which these boys could have only ever dreamed.
The solemn, dark-haired teenager was in none of the other pictures.
“That,” Rengo said, grinning with satisfaction, “is Broomstick.”
FORTY
The boy was scared. He’d been dreading this trip throughout most of the season and now it was here: Olympia, Washington, for the state regional tournament, twenty hockey players and three coaches and one bus driver, all of them crammed onto the second floor of an interstate motel, four players to a room, two to each bed.
He’d been afraid of this trip. A weekend alone, without family or even a place to escape to, imprisoned by the side of the highway with nineteen other boys, all of whom knew each other and had grown up together, all of whom seemed to hate him with a passion that sometimes stole his breath away.
There was no running away, not here, and the boy knew that this was where things would finally come to their head.
It was not about hockey. The team had won their first game in the tournament tonight, and he’d played well and hard, and afterward Coach Hughes had tapped him on the shoulder and told him, “Good game,” and, “Be ready for another tough one tomorrow.” And he’d felt good on the ice and somehow free and without worry, but the moment he’d stepped off the ice he remembered where he was and what was likely to happen, and he’d wished he’d pretended to be ill and not come on this trip, that he could be anywhere else in the world.
It wasn’t up to the coaches to save him, and they wouldn’t. Hughes and his staff believed in the old school, that rookies were hazed and it made the team stronger. The team had elected Bad Boyd as its captain, and even Hughes seemed to know that Boyd was the best goddamn hockey player the county would ever produce, and if Boyd wanted something, it was more or less done.
Boyd made the rules. The boy was a rookie and it was his lot to follow them.
But this wasn’t about hockey or team building anymore. This was about something else entirely, something deeper and darker and mean.
The team had returned to the motel after the game. They’d showered and dressed and dispersed in packs of three or four or more to scour the restaurants that lined the road from the interstate, searching for food and maybe someone to serve them liquor, and, if they got really lucky, for girls.
The boy’s roommates hadn’t invited him to go out and he hadn’t gone, ate dinner from the vending machines down the hall and sat and watched television and relished the silence, all the while listening for the sounds of his roommates’ return. His roommates weren’t bad guys and sometimes could even be friendly, one-on-one, but they, like the rest of the county, lived in thrall to Bad Boyd. If Boyd was around, they danced to his tune.
The boy knew he couldn’t rely on his roommates to save him, any more than the coaches
who’d long ago left in search of a bar. He entertained the notion, briefly, of simply walking away, leaving the motel and the team and finding the bus station and buying a ticket, but the only place he could go was back to Makah, and if he did that and word got out that he’d abandoned Bad Boyd’s team, that he was a quitter, then the boy knew Makah was no place he’d want to be either.
Anyway, he wasn’t a quitter, and he tried not to be afraid. He tried to believe he could stand up to whatever was coming, take it without flinching or letting Boyd beat him, look Boyd in the eye afterward and tell him he wasn’t really as good as he thought.
The boy tried to believe this, but he couldn’t quite get there. And he lay on his bed and strained his ears for the noise of his roommates down the hall; he knew sooner or later they’d come.
When they did, he’d been dozing, half asleep, and it wasn’t until he heard the key in the door that the boy recognized what was happening. They piled into the room, more of them than the three who belonged here. Their breath stank of liquor, and they laughed and jeered at the boy, crowding the small space and dragging him from the bed, forcing him to stand and be held in their midst.
Bad Boyd was the last to enter the room, and he held something in his hands, hidden, so the boy couldn’t see what it was.
FORTY-ONE
“Broomstick Cody,” Rengo told Mason. “First name was Levi, I think. I forgot all about him, until I saw that picture.”
Rengo had found his way behind Bad Boyd’s wet bar, was digging out a bottle of some no-doubt-expensive scotch with an unpronounceable name. Found a glass for himself and held up another for Mason, questioning. Mason shook his head.
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