“You hungry?” I asked when he had hung up the phone, not knowing why I asked, even as I did. I’m not exactly the domestic type.
“No. Go ahead though.”
I leaned back against the counter and crossed my arms. “No, let’s just get this over with.”
“Why don’t we sit at the table?” He jerked his head toward it. “More comfortable.”
I hurriedly stacked the papers on the table and put the pile on the counter. Darren didn’t ask about the property records or the county map spread in front of him. He didn’t even ask about my list of last known sightings of Patrick Beale. He waited for me to sit down, then moved a chair closer to me and opened his laptop.
“Where’s Sophie?” he asked idly while the laptop booted up.
“At work. Roseann picked her up a couple of minutes after I called you.”
“Would she have gone down to the mart last night?”
“Maybe, but she doesn’t have keys.”
“Could she have taken yours?”
“No, I had them in my pocket all night.”
“And while you were running?”
“They were in my hand.”
Darren nodded and opened a new file, then typed in my name and the mart’s address. He turned toward me. “So. When did you last see the missing items?”
“Two, two thirty.”
Darren’s eyebrows jumped. “PM?”
I glared at him coldly. “AM.”
He shrugged. “Did you lock the doors?”
I nodded.
“And the laptop and the receiver were definitely there when you left?”
“Yeah. I went into the office to take care of something and they were definitely there.”
“Did you hear anything during the night?”
“Nothing. And I had the windows open.”
“Who do you think took your stuff?”
I shrugged. “No idea.”
“It couldn’t have been some kids who knew the laptop was there?”
“If it was just some kids, they would have broken the glass, taken the beer, something like that. They wouldn’t have picked the locks. They wouldn’t have bothered to go into the office.”
“Who knew the laptop was in there?”
“You, me, Rhonda. That’s probably it. Not that it would be hard to figure out. Lots of people have a computer.”
“And there’s no safe?”
I narrowed my eyes. “No.”
“Even if there was,” he said, then turned back to his keyboard, “nothing was taken from it, right?”
I glared at the side of his head while he typed. When he was done, he sat back, threw his arm over the back of the chair, turned toward me.
“So, what’s your theory?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure yet, wasn’t sure if it was my gut talking or the paranoia making me see things that weren’t really there. But if I was right, if it was real, only one thing made sense.
“I think it’s about the video. About Patrick Beale on that video.”
Darren cocked his head. “Why?”
“Did you watch all of it?” I asked.
He just stared at me, his eyes, his entire face, blank.
“Did you see him come in again? On Thursday afternoon?”
Nothing.
“That guy he was with, the one with the tat on his neck? I saw him last night.”
“Where?” Darren asked.
“At Hank’s, down in Chelan. You know, that ice cream place.”
“What were you doing there?”
I told him how Lyle had come by with a gift for Sophie and how he’d wanted to take her out afterward for her birthday. I told Darren what he already knew, that I didn’t trust Lyle. Not only because he was Oren’s brother—and a complete fuck-up—but because there was just something wrong with Lyle, something I couldn’t explain. And I told him how I intervened, how I took them both down there in the truck, and how Sophie had known half the kids in the place, but there was this one kid—this one man—she seemed to know well. Too well. I told Darren how Lyle convinced me to back off, to let her deal with her shit on her own. And I told him how I did because I thought maybe, for once in his life, Lyle was right, and like so many other times when it came to Sophie, I was wrong.
“Did Lyle know the guy?” Darren asked when I had stopped babbling.
I looked down at the table and saw that my fingernails were white, I was clenching my hands so tightly. “He said he didn’t.”
“Did Sophie tell you the guy’s name?”
I grimaced but didn’t look up. “Well, no, but—”
“What?”
“I think his name is Nick.”
“Why?”
I looked out the window. It wasn’t quite eight thirty, but the heat was already shimmering on the tarmac outside. I stood up and went to the window, leaned my back against the frame.
“After we got back,” I said quietly, “Sophie came up here and I went downstairs. I was … I don’t know—pissed off, worried. Furious, really. And I wanted to watch the rest of the security video. That’s what I had been planning to do before Lyle showed up.”
“Why did you want to watch the rest of the video?”
Astonished, I looked up. “Because I found him. I found Patrick in that barn. I want to know why.”
Darren swallowed, then nodded.
“I wanted to see if maybe Patrick came in here again,” I said. “If he did, then maybe we could get better information about when he disappeared or something.” I shook my head, and a lock of hair tumbled into my eyes. I brushed it away.
“And he did,” Darren said. “On Thursday night.”
“Yeah.”
I went back to the table and pulled my chair away from Darren, then turned it around and sat down. He still had his arm flung over the back of his chair, but now he shifted, faced me head on.
“On Thursday,” I said. “I saw that truck first—the one registered to that LLC—and then him and then that guy from Hank’s.”
“And you’re sure it’s the same person?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “It’s him.”
“How’d you get his name?”
I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling. “When I came upstairs, the light in the bedroom was still on. I went in to say goodnight, but Sophie was already asleep. So I went over to her bed to turn off the light. She was still holding her phone, so I took it to put it on her nightstand. She woke up and yelled at me. Then someone called Nick texted her while the phone was in my hand. He said something like ‘Where you at, baby?’ And … I don’t know. I got this feeling. So, I asked who the guy in Chelan was, but she just grabbed the phone and started texting.”
“Did she tell you Nick was the guy in Chelan?”
“No, it’s—” I tilted the chair back, then let it drop to the floor with a thud. “It’s just a feeling.”
“Did you see his last name? His phone number?”
I shook my head, but he knew I was holding back. He was right, but I wasn’t ready to confess to him that later that night, after she’d stopped howling and before I’d gone to sleep, I’d rifled through Sophie’s phone, looked through her entire contact list, her Facebook feed, and everything else that would open without a password. And then I’d sifted through her photos, the boring ones of sunsets and random junk, the innocuous ones of her and various girlfriends, and the ones I knew I’d find in there somewhere, the photos of her and older kids, their eyes always glazed over, their faces always a little slack; and in the background, always a plastic cup or a bottle of booze. I found the photo of her and Patrick Beale, the one on the background of her phone. And then I found another of them with a third man, the one from Hank’s. He was shirtless, his arm around Sophie, his hair barely hiding the snake tattooed on his neck.
“Camille?”
I glanced at Darren, then told him to wait. A moment later, I was downstairs, my key turning in the door to the mart, not worrying about the fingerpri
nts this time. In the office, I moved the carpet and the sheet of plywood beneath it and opened the safe. Inside was the cash I had put in there just before Lyle showed up the night before. And beside it was Sophie’s phone, exactly where I had put it at two thirty that morning, just after I had confirmed my fears.
* * *
That afternoon I just drove: north over the hills to the Canadian border, down through the valley on the highway before turning east, then south toward the Colville Reservation. I told myself I’d go out, do a couple of inspections, then come back to meet the insurance agent later. But really, I just drove.
I had this itch, this feeling about Patrick Beale. About Nick, whoever he was. Darren had taken the phone number and the name and said thank you very much, leaving me with as little information as I had had when he walked in that morning. Moreno showed up not long afterward. He smiled and shrugged when I asked him how the investigation was going, whether they had any suspects. Then he was silent as he carefully dusted for prints and pressed film into the debris.
The office had been wiped. There were no fibers anywhere. Not even a partial print showed up on the door handle, the desk, the cable that was supposed to be plugged into the receiver. Still, he smiled when he left, said they’d let me know if there was anything else there.
But I didn’t need Moreno to tell me; I already knew there was something else there. Something more than just some kids making a little meth. Something big enough to need a helicopter, that made it worthwhile to break into my place, to try to make me, a bystander, afraid.
But I know fear.
Fear comes after. It’s after the rip of the adrenaline, the numbness of the shock. That’s when fear settles in, deep and strong. Tidal.
I had felt it already. It fueled my growing obsession with this kid who had stood arm in arm, locked at the hip, with my daughter. Who had been dragging her into the maw of that man with the tattoos. I felt it when I realized that the kid had been put down like a dog.
But fear blooms. Into paranoia. Pain. Then—if you’re lucky—anger. Anger that rages like a forest fire.
I had to accelerate the process.
So I drove.
I drove until I hit the national forest and passed into the trees. Then I pulled over and shut off the engine. While the hawks screamed in the updraft, I paced the white line on the side of the road, turning the options over in my mind and rejecting them all. Then I turned the truck around and faced my fear.
* * *
On the way out, there had been a truck pulled over on the side of the road. Maybe it sounds strange that I remembered it, but out in the county, you might drive ten miles without seeing anyone. So, yeah, I recognized it when I saw it again, coming from the other direction; I recognized its dirty cream paint job and faded wood panels and orange rust streaking around the wheel wells. I slowed down, idled in the middle of the road, because that’s what you do when you see someone who might be in trouble.
“Hey,” I shouted. “You need some help?”
“Yeah,” the driver said from behind a set of enormous binoculars. “You can get the hell out of my line of sight.”
I looked right, but there wasn’t much: just grass and rocks marching up the hillside to a blue doublewide, then on to a smattering of raggedy trees on the ridge of the valley wall. I turned back. The driver balanced the binos on the window frame, his gnarled knuckles clenched around them, and glared at me from under a roughed-up Stetson. That’s when I saw the rifle in the cab with him, its barrel pointing skyward. I glanced back to the trailer, saw a woman come out from around the corner with a laundry basket in her arms. Shit.
“What are you looking for?” I said, my voice friendly and upbeat while reaching down, grabbing the binoculars I always had in the door pocket, and taking the opportunity to also slide the Glock out from under the seat and into my lap. “Maybe I can help.”
He grunted, then pointed to a spot behind me. “See that truck up there?”
I turned around in my seat, followed his arm to the ridge, and sure enough, there was a white pickup sitting there. Looking through the binoculars, I saw lumber piled up in the bed and coils of wire sitting on top.
“See that wire?” he drawled. “See those boys up there, having a smoke?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re putting in a nice new fence,” he said, then added with a Nashville twang, “Electrified.”
Oh. That kind of crazy.
“How long they been at it?” I asked carefully.
“’Bout a week. I put it out that I’d be out of town today, that’s why they’re doing this part now.”
I swept the binos across the ridge line. A cluster of rough, stringy men stood in the shade under a couple of trees, smoking. To the east, a line of posts a half-mile long leaned drunkenly, waiting to be secured before electric wire could be strung between them.
“You been watching them for a week?”
“Since last Friday. I been out here in the truck, livin’ on crackers and coffee, pissin’ in the grass. Didn’t even stop on Sunday.”
“Dedicated,” I muttered. I put the binos down and rested my arm on the window frame. “So,” I said slowly, “what’s it to you anyway?”
“What’s it to me?” he roared. “That’s my land! Those bastards are fifty feet into my land.”
I whistled.
“And you know why?” he said, pointing his crooked finger at me like it was a gun. “Because there’s water on my property, and there ain’t none on theirs.”
I nodded appreciatively. “You talked to the county?”
“Yeah, a lot of good it did me too. I been callin’ and callin’ and nothin’. Nothin’. The damn county won’t even send anyone out to look at the place. They just tell me the documents say this, the documents say that. I don’t care what the damn documents say! That’s my land. It’s been my land since I bought it forty years ago, and it’ll be my land until the day the deed falls out of my cold, dead hand.”
“Yeah?” I tapped my fingers against the side of the truck door, looked over my shoulder at the hillside, the tiny humans working at the top. “What’s the best road to get up there?”
“County road, about five, six miles down that way.” He jerked his head in the direction I was going. “You go up a couple of miles and it swings around.”
“What’s the address?”
He shrugged, bony shoulders rising under a T-shirt with a collar so worn it was shredded. “No idea. It’s Randy Johnson’s old place. Little brown house by the road.”
I nodded, put the truck in gear.
“Hey!” he said, suddenly indignant, like I’d stolen his favorite toy. “What the hell are you gonna do?”
“You wanted the county,” I said, shifted my foot from the brake to the gas, then shouted out the window as I drove away, “You got the county now.”
Up in the hills, the road narrowed to one lane, then degraded into a packed gravel track. The wind sweeping across from the Palouse stripped all the moisture out of the air blowing in through my windows, but I was sweating so much my sunglasses were slipping down my nose. Eventually, I saw the house, only the third one in three miles. It squatted by the road like a rotting animal, chunks of brown paint missing and bald, weather-stained wood lurking beneath. Crouched in front, faded pink flowers dropped from a bush studded with parched leaves. I passed the house slowly, watching for movement around the place, but it looked like it had been abandoned since long before Randy Johnson—whoever he was—had sold it.
I steered the truck onto the packed dirt drive and took it as far back into the property as it went and then kept on going, following the tracks that a truck a lot bigger than mine had made. Rocks ricocheted in my wheel wells; the chassis creaked and whined over the ruts; dust rose and flew away in the steady wind.
I heard the drill first, the engine roaring, the bit clattering with every stone it hit. Then I saw the workers, six of them and a foreman, all of them with skin nut-brown from the sun, the
ir clothes yellow with dirt.
I let the truck roll to a stop and made a show of getting out slowly, my big steel document case with the county seal on it in my hand. Some of the workers stopped and stared, but only until the foreman shouted at them to keep at it, that they had a deadline to meet. Then he walked toward me.
“Can I help you?” he shouted from twenty feet away.
“Maybe,” I said. “I’m just curious what you boys are doing out here.”
The foreman reached up, swept a faded red ball cap off his head, wiped his brow with the thick blond hair on his forearm, then put the cap back. “How’s that any of your business?”
“I’m from the county.” I shifted the document case so the gold seal flashed in the sun. “Routine inspection.”
“Yeah?” The foreman cracked his knuckles, shifted his weight. Behind him, the team with the drill shifted to the next marker, a wooden stake with neon green tape that waved like a flag in the updraft from the valley. Two more men took their place, one with a bag of gravel, the other with a bucket of wet concrete. Even as they worked, they were watching. Waiting. Hungry.
The foreman looked over his shoulder, then turned back and, his eyes on me, spat a long stream of tobacco juice into the dirt. “What you inspecting, hon?”
“Your manners, apparently.”
A couple of the guys on the crew sniggered, but they all traded knowing looks. Then one holding a couple of metal posts—a tall kid, scrappy, with thick shoulders under his stained white T-shirt—dropped one and shifted his grip on the second, held it like he was on deck and ready to swing.
Awesome. A cowboy.
The foreman took a couple steps toward me, grinned, then shifted the chew in his lip and spat again. “Well, my manners don’t need any inspecting ’cause I’m a perfect gentleman.”
“Of course you are. But I’ve got to inspect the property all the same.” I opened the cover of my document case, unclipped the pen. “You got your permits handy?”
“Well, no I don’t, darlin’. See, I don’t own this place, just puttin’ the fence in like I been paid to do.”
Little Falls Page 8
