I must have said something like, “So what? The kid had a job.”
His jaw rigid, Darren shook his head.
* * *
Okanogan County isn’t big enough for a real morgue. It isn’t even big enough for a real coroner, only the visiting kind who are called out when needed. You just have to hope they’re nearby when you do. Doctor Marguerite Fleischman was one of those, an itinerant doctor who brought her tools to a vacant hospital suite near you.
The hospital in Omak—largest town in the county by far—was a slick, white, sprawling place built with federal funds and Colville casino dollars. I parked in the first spot I saw and practically ran to the building, suddenly afraid she’d been called out on another job. I was half-right and, thank God, only half-paranoid.
“Doctor Fleischman!” I shouted from across the parking lot.
“Ms. Waresch,” she said, shielding her eyes from the midday sun. “You almost missed me.”
“I’m glad I didn’t.”
She smiled. “Thanks again for your help the other day. It made the whole thing go much quicker.”
I nodded. “Sure. Is it done? The autopsy, I mean.”
“Just submitted my report. I’m heading out. There was a combine accident out on the Palouse. I have to be in Ritzville by five.”
“What happens if you’re late?”
She shrugged, smiled again. “He’ll get up and walk away.”
I laughed but stopped when she started for her car again. “Doctor Fleischman?”
She was a small woman, but I had to hustle to catch up with her. When I did, she said, “You know, I’m going to look you up the next time I’m here. I bet you’ve got some good stories from the field.”
“Yeah, sure. But—”
“The stuff that you all were trying out there six, eight years ago is just now starting to trickle into the journals. Did you know that? Ridiculous that it’s taken so long.”
“Yeah.”
“I just read about this material that expands in a wound to staunch it from the inside. Did you ever see that stuff?”
“Sure. But Doctor Fleischman,” I said loudly when she darted between a couple of cars.
She didn’t even turn her head, just said, “Yeah?”
“What about Patrick Beale?” I asked. “What did you find?”
She stopped, glanced around the parking lot, waited for me to catch up, then took off again, more slowly this time.
“You know what we saw at the barn.” She pushed a strand of hair off her forehead, turned her head, looked around the lot again. She was worried, but about what? “It was worse, much worse.”
She shuddered. I stopped in my tracks, my memory flashing like a television set: scrambled pixels, then for a moment, a millisecond, clear.
“Electrocution to the genitals and rectum,” I said automatically, the words appearing in my mind without introduction, without context, as though they were on a teleprompter. “Cigarette burns on the inner thigh.”
Doctor Fleischman stopped suddenly and turned, her eyes darting over my face, boring into mine. I looked away.
“I’ve seen it before,” I said, uncertain whether I ever had or whether my imagination was running wild. I stared past her, out over the cars to the weedy empty lot beside the hospital. “I’ve seen it before,” I said to myself, not sure if I believed it. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the black and white lines in my head to settle into a picture again. When I opened them, the doctor was squinting at me in a clinical way.
I brushed past her, pointed to a car at the end of the row. “Is that yours? The gray one?” She didn’t answer, but I went to it anyway. A moment later, she was at my side again.
“Where?” she demanded. “Where have you seen it?”
“Out there. In the field.”
Again, I looked away, out past the dirty apartment building at the end of the lot, past its scrubby yard behind a weathered chain link fence, to the desert and the ghosts in my head. Unless—
“Ms. Waresch? Camille?”
The doctor’s hand was on my arm, her brow creased.
“What else?” I said slowly. “What else was there?”
The doctor’s mouth twisted. “His jeans.”
“His jeans?”
“They were filthy: dirt, urine, feces.”
“He was wearing them when he was tortured.” Then, realization dawning, I said, “That was part of the torture.”
The doctor nodded. “And soot. All along the hem of his jeans and smeared on the knees.”
“A fire?”
“Yeah. One he tried to fight,” she said. “There was fire retardant on his hands.”
I frowned. Then the doctor dropped her bombshell.
“And chemicals. There were chemicals caked in the fibers.”
“From a fire extinguisher?”
The doctor shook her head, her graying curls bouncing. “No. Ephedrine. Toluene. Ammonia. All the major ingredients for—”
“Meth,” we said at the same time.
The doctor’s eyes pinned me. “You know.”
I shrugged.
“But you suspected.” Doctor Fleischman sighed. “I probably should have too. But I haven’t seen much lately. Ten years ago, yes—a couple cases every month. But none in the last year.”
“What about the torture?” I said. “Have you seen that before? With meth involved, I mean.”
She shook her head, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring hard off into the distance, her brow furrowed, one hand on the trunk of her beat-up sedan, the other clutching her keys so tightly she might have cut herself.
* * *
It was nearly three o’clock by the time I stopped the truck at the foot of the gravel drive of the property on the back side of Jeremy Leamon’s. I half-expected to see Lucky Phillips’s patrol car come rolling down the hill or hear him shouting, threatening to arrest me for trespassing. Because that’s what I was doing. I had the map of the property in my big black binder and I had my county ID, but I still had no official reason to be there. Not if they called my boss. It was a strange feeling, going somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. It had felt like that when I first started working for the Assessor’s Office, but it went away after a while; after all, I had the county behind me. But when I went up that gravel drive, I wouldn’t anymore.
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. How much was this worth to me? How badly did I want to know who killed Patrick Beale? Or, the real question: How badly did I want to put all the nightmares back into their box and shove them to the back of my mind? Pretty fucking badly.
I gunned the engine.
A little way up, the rutted gravel drive forked, but that was on the county map: take the right or the left and you’d end up in the same place. The top of the circle, the easternmost part, was about halfway up the property—the rest of it was just topographic lines, first wide, then narrower and narrower the closer they got to Jeremy Leamon’s land.
I went left.
Ten minutes later, I killed the engine at the top of the circle and slid out of the truck onto the gravel. It was quiet up there, peaceful, the wind whispering through the trees. I leaned down, took the Glock out of its lockbox, checked that the topo map was still in my pocket. Then I took off on foot.
A little way off the drive, the trees opened to a sort of meadow, a field of long, dry grass glowing in the sun, rippling between two stands of pines like a river of gold. I slid on my sunglasses and skirted the trees: there had to be a path up to that barn somewhere near the road. Thirty yards along, I found what I would have found faster if I had just stayed in the truck. A narrow track curved up from the main drive and kept going straight into the grass until it stopped abruptly at a circle of scorched earth, forty, maybe fifty feet across.
At the center, a clutch of pipes were melted, twisted like demonic fingers. The blackened timber sagging around them shimmered in the sun. And the grass at the fringe of the circle was singed, none of it yet re
grown. It was a fresh burn, so new I could almost feel the heat on my face.
Outside the circle, the plastic wrapper from a bottle of brake fluid—curled and charred, but still readable—had been blown into the brush. And a little farther along, there was a narrow paper receipt, curled up on itself. It was just like the receipts the register at the mart spat out. Blue-black ink, rough paper, no date, a few numbers: 1.19, 1.29, 5.99, plus tax. Just enough for two sodas and a pack of cigarettes. Two people, maybe three. And not long ago either: the receipt was barely dirty, definitely hadn’t been through a rain.
I turned back. On the property record, there was a house. Small. Built in the fifties. Flammable. But a house fire this far from town would have taken out the entire hillside, maybe more. This was neat. Tidy. Controlled. This was someone who knew what they were doing. Someone who knew to dig a firebreak, to bring fire extinguishers and a buddy to help him keep it under control. A buddy. A kid, maybe. A kid like Patrick Beale.
I never found a path to that barn from the burn site. But after some trial and error, I found a dilapidated horse fence and followed it up the hill. I went over my tracks from the Friday before, those that hadn’t been obliterated in the downwash from the helicopter. I even found the last bits of Jeremy Leamon’s lunch dried on a tree trunk at the edge of the clearing. But there weren’t any other tracks: not in the meadow, not in the trees, not on the dirt road. It was like Patrick Beale had been spirited into that barn and hung by a vengeful ghost.
* * *
Sophie came in late again that night.
She volunteered nothing about where she’d been, or why she smelled like vodka and gasoline, or who was driving the car that rumbled away just before I heard her boots hit the stairs. But I knew enough.
Still, I stayed in my seat at the table, mute, fists clenched on my thighs, nails biting into my palms. Words of rage and frustration and fear screamed through my mind, held back only by my grinding teeth. I had no protocol for this. I had no training.
So I did nothing.
I didn’t look up when she slammed the door, or when she stumbled past to the bathroom, or when I heard the vomit crash against the porcelain bowl.
Instead, I kept my eyes on the reports spread in front of me: county tax records listing three used trucks, a forklift, and a brown helicopter, a Sikorsky S-76. It was everything that CLA LLC owned, including the black Dodge truck that Patrick Beale had driven the morning of the fourth day, the truck he had parked below the window I was sitting beside.
6
The rotors roared; the wind tore at my uniform, tore at my hair. In the cockpit, the doc shouted into the radio, “No, we don’t need an OR—this one’s cold.”
I huddled in the corner, my eyes fixed on the cloudless sky. It was watery blue, that pale, pale blue you get on the hottest days in the desert.
“You all right?” the medic, a new guy, shouted from the seat next to me. I nodded a little, smiled a little, but I couldn’t look at him.
“This the guy?” the medic shouted.
The mountains leapt over the window frame when the pilot banked to the right, then fell away again when he straightened out the bird.
“Hey! Is this the guy?” the medic shouted again. His hand pushed against my shoulder, his head lurching into my line of sight. His eyes were black beneath the visor of his flight helmet, his chin bulged around the strap.
“What?” I said.
“Is this the guy you went out to retrieve?”
I nodded and hair flew into my eyes.
The medic pulled the mic closer to his mouth. “Yes, sir. She says it’s Beale, sir.”
No, I tried to say. I tried to shake my head, but it was stuck, locked, uncontrollable in the depths of the dream. The other medic was staring at the floor of the helicopter, and then the bird lurched, dropped, and he swore and grabbed the handrail. Something in the bag shifted and hit my foot, and I recoiled, kicked it away. A fly crawled out, crawled onto the outside of the bag. It rubbed its front legs together—quick, quick, slow, quick, quick, slow—before taking flight.
7
When I walked out of the bathroom Tuesday morning, Sophie was standing in the kitchen in pink underwear and a ratty yellow T-shirt. I stood in the threshold, my hair dripping onto my shirt, my fingers on the switch for the bathroom fan, and watched her pour a cup of coffee, take a sip of it black. She made a face, clutched her stomach. I smiled a little when she tilted the cup up for another mouthful, then shook my head when she rushed to the sink.
I turned off the fan and walked over to the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room.
“Sophie.”
Still leaning over the sink, her hair tangled at the base of her neck, she said, “Yeah.”
“From here on out, you’re to—”
When her head snapped toward me, I stopped, reassessed.
“Please call me,” I said hesitantly, then got my nerve back. “Call me if you’re going to be back later than eight.”
She didn’t say anything, just slumped over the sink again, the thin fabric of her T-shirt tented between her shoulder blades.
“Do you hear me?”
She spat into the sink, then turned back to the coffee. “Yeah.”
My fingernails dug into the particle board under the countertop. It was time I put on the brakes, or she never would.
“And if you’re going to be drinking,” I began. Her back stiffened. “If you’re going to be drinking, you aren’t getting your learner’s permit. Or your license.”
Sophie pulled her shoulders back and held her head high and rigid, then turned to the sink and poured out the coffee in a long black stream. She placed the cup delicately on the counter, and then turned and glared at me with a hatred, a viciousness, I hadn’t seen for years, hadn’t seen in anyone’s eyes except her father’s. I shrank back, even as my hands coiled into fists and acid seared my throat. Sophie walked away.
After pulling on my boots, I snatched my keys from the counter and almost ran down the stairs, then slammed the door of the truck shut behind me.
She was just a kid. A teenager with a filthy temper and a mouth to match. A punk. Not a threat. Someone to instruct, to command, to rein in. Just like a soldier. Easy. So, why was my adrenaline racing? What was that sharp terror I had felt upstairs? Why did I flee? She was just a kid. My kid. My responsibility.
I texted my neighbor, Roseann, made sure she was coming to pick up Sophie, to take her to work down at Crystal’s in Chelan. She was a couple of minutes away, no big deal. My temperature cooled, and the sweat on my hands dried while I waited.
Roseann’s green hatchback pulled into the spot on the side of the building. Thirty seconds later, the door at the bottom of the stairs burst open and Sophie bolted out, a blur of blue jeans and orange tank top and flying black hair. Just a kid. She climbed into the hatchback and the car backed up, then turned onto the side street. A moment later, I glimpsed it on the other side of the store, accelerating toward the highway and the morning sun hanging in the sky.
The breath I had been holding leaked out of my lungs.
Just a kid. My kid. And her father’s.
Sitting in the sun, I shivered, then grit my teeth and cracked my back. Not going there.
I flipped open my phone and called a friend at the State—Harry German, a buddy I knew only on the other end of the line, a guy with the answers when all my county resources had dried up. He promised to do some digging—confidentially—on the company that owned the truck Patrick Beale was driving before he was killed, and then he asked if I was okay.
“Yeah,” I said, but he knew I was lying. You get a feeling for it out there in the field, out in the dust and the sand. Harry had been there too. That’s why he broke the rules for me sometimes when I really needed it. Because we both knew.
“What’s going on, Waresch?” he said gruffly.
“Nothing.” But I could hear him waiting, so I told him something. It was mostly the truth anyway. “So
phie.”
“Yeah,” he drawled. “That was always gonna be rough, but I been telling you that for years.”
“I don’t know how you do it, man.”
Harry laughed loudly, a great barking belly laugh that always made me smile. He had five kids, all of them doing well, staying out of trouble. Unless he was lying.
“Well, it helps to start ’em young. Even when you’re deployed, Camille. You gotta come home and get back into it as quickly as you can.”
“Yeah, I know. I screwed up. Shoulda had her with me a long time ago.”
“What did she do?”
“I don’t know, but she’s been drinking. Came home puking last night.”
Harry whistled long and low. “Didn’t she just turn fifteen?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you do?”
“I talked to her this morning.”
“Did you lay down the law?”
“No. She already hates me; that would just make it worse.”
“She ain’t your friend, Waresch,” Harry growled. “She’s your kid. You gotta get that straight.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“So you gotta do something.”
“Like what?” I snapped. “Wash her mouth out with soap? Chain her up like a dog?”
Harry sighed. “Structure, soldier. Kids need structure. Just like you and me.”
He was right. That had been the hardest part of coming home from the Army: no cage to climb up. No cage to throw myself against. I got past it eventually, built the right walls inside my head. But building one for my kid … I didn’t even have a hammer.
“Think about it,” Harry said.
“Yeah.” I shook my head. “Just, uh … just call me when you find something, yeah?”
Little Falls Page 4
