The town had changed. David could see it in the eyes watching him as he cruised along the street. Even the locals eyed him uncertainly, warily. They didn’t trust him. Not anymore. The town’s newspaper ran a front-page story about the killings, saying that David was involved in the investigation but wouldn’t comment. It didn’t say it outright, but the suggestion was clear—he was hiding things from the people he’d sworn to protect.
There had been a run on groceries. At one store, two customers had gotten into a fistfight over a bag of rice. They were hoarding, stocking up, hiding from the world and the danger lurking through the streets.
He’d also heard that the couple of gun shops in town had been selling through inventory faster than they could bring it in. The tension hummed just below the audible range.
It had stayed bitter cold, and he told himself that the cold always did this. Hardened the people, just as it hardened the soil. As far as stories went, it was a good one. It seemed like only the cultists went outside in Old Town, most days. Morning and night, they marched out to worship and then back into the theater.
David drove to the old courthouse as he always had, though now he had to park beyond a perimeter of orange road barriers. He looked up, where the window to Jason’s office was boarded over. Erickson waited at the door. He opened it without offering a greeting. David followed him inside.
In the weeks since Jason’s death, already the building had taken on a musty scent. Dust swirled in their wake. For all of David’s life, this had been a happy place. A place where his family worked, where he and Jason, Ben Junior, and Spady would run around and play till they were shooed out by one of the clerks. Now he had to force himself to take each step up the stairs, across the hallway, through the doorway marked with Jason’s name.
The room had been cleaned, thankfully, the floor scrubbed free of blood. In the light, he could almost keep from seeing the image of his dead cousin. Almost. David swallowed hard. The broken lamp remained, and the chairs and desk were out of place, as they’d been on that night. On the wall, a loose pattern of black dots remained from the impact of the buckshot from Jason’s gun.
Erickson had moved to the desk, but David stayed in place, staring up at the wall.
“That’s weird,” he said to himself.
“What?” Erickson asked, overhearing.
“The shotgun hit up there,” David said, pointing. Then he pointed toward the boarded-over window. “And a second one hit there. The window blew out when I was underneath it. I remember the glass falling down around me.”
“Right. Two shots.”
David shook his head. “I heard three shots. The window. Then two while I was running up the stairs. But there’s no other sign of impact.”
Erickson looked around.
“Forensics found two spent shells,” Erickson said. “Your adrenaline was going. You knew your cousin was in danger. We see it all the time. Witnesses remember things totally different from how they happened.”
David eyed the gun rack above Jason’s desk.
“You recovered the shotgun, right? How many shells were left?”
Erickson looked off, thinking.
“One,” he answered.
“Right. The gun holds four shells. Jason always left it fully loaded, no matter how many times I told him it was too dangerous. One shell left means he fired three times.”
Erickson didn’t seem to buy this. David turned from him and surveyed the room. Where? He paced along the floor. Then he turned toward Jason’s desk and squatted down, using his flashlight to illuminate the darkness. A tangle of wires ran down into a messy coil thick with dust bunnies. David reached his hand into the mess, searching. There.
He drew out his hand, holding a spent shotgun shell, the plastic end blown open, the buckshot and gunpowder gone.
“Three shots,” he said again.
“Son of a bitch,” Erickson muttered.
They both scanned the room again, floor and walls and ceiling. No dots.
“What does that mean?” David asked, to himself as much as to the old agent. He was thinking about all the times he went out hunting birds with Jason. How rarely his cousin missed. “Maybe he hit the killer.”
Erickson thought hard on it before answering.
“You could survive getting shot with a shotgun easy enough, but there’d be blood. And forensics didn’t find any that wasn’t Jason’s.”
“Maybe he was wearing an armored vest?” David mused.
“Maybe,” Erickson said.
The agent snapped himself from the reverie and went to Jason’s desk.
“I’m going to have a team come and take the computer, copy everything, and go through all the emails, all the files.”
David cringed, thinking of these unknown people wandering through Jason’s life.
“Then there are all the paper files,” Erickson continued. “I’ll have copies made of all of these and taken to Building Seventeen.”
The agent opened a drawer and fished out a document at random. Then pulled another. And another. He whistled.
“Each of these deals is for millions of dollars. Must be hundreds of millions, all of it going through this office. Jason was the assessor, the head of the village council, and worked at the bank, right?”
“Right. So?”
“Your cousin was the most powerful person in the whole county. He had corporations, developers, government agencies, all coming to him needing a sign off.”
The implication was clear enough.
“Jason wasn’t crooked,” he said, willing himself to believe it.
Erickson raised his hands.
“Just thinking aloud, kid. It’s what I have to do. I’ve been at this shit a long damn time, and what I’ve learned is it almost always comes back to three things: sex, revenge, or money. When I’m hunting for a motive, that’s where I look first.”
David exhaled slowly.
“You’re right. We look at everything.”
“We need his bank records, too,” Erickson said. “I’ll get a warrant.”
“No need,” David said. “I’ll go see my uncle.”
In the lobby of the Little Springs Federal Bank, a glass case displayed items from the building’s history. The first key from when it was founded in the early 1900s. The first dollar deposited in its vault. The first check it issued. Photos of the building as it was constructed. And photos of the Blunt family through the years. Samuel and his three sons. A portrait of Dale from before his hair went white, when he took over running the bank. Then, on a small wooden stand, stood a .38 special revolver.
Everyone in the county knew the story by heart. It was 1985. A bank robber was on a spree through Nebraska, working his way west. His run would end in Little Springs. Dale had taken to wearing that .38 in a holster under his suit jacket.
The robber came in and demanded money. Dale stepped out of his office and drew his gun. In the crossfire, a clerk was hit and killed. The robber took a few bullets and bled out on the ground.
For decades, it was the only homicide in the county’s history.
David found his uncle sitting in his office, cowboy boots up on his desk, which was empty aside from three matching pens aligned perfectly and a dark ash tray with the remnants of stubbed out cigars. Dale was reading the Garden County Gazette, cigar smoke wafting up from behind it.
“I figured you read the paper before it goes to press, since you own it,” David said, taking off his hat.
His uncle lowered the newspaper.
“David. Good to see you.”
He folded the paper and set it down on the desk, so that the headline about the murders stared at David as he sat down.
“You ready to tell me what the hell is really happening?” Dale asked.
David still felt like a child around his uncle, as if he was forever saying something immature or foolish, and Dale was there to give him a needed course correction.
“I am helping with the investigation. With the FBI,” David started to explain. He talked slowly, feeling out words with a delicate care, in the way one walks across a frozen pond. “There are certain details. If people learn those details, then we wouldn’t be able to tell good tips from bad ones. I swear, I’m saying as much as I can.”
“Then what can I help you with?” Dale asked.
He didn’t change his expression or raise his voice, but the anger came through all the same. Dale’s son was dead. And David still hadn’t found the killer.
“I need all of Jason’s records. Work emails and his personal banking history. Every account. Any loans.”
“You think my boy was involved in something?”
“No. Of course not. I’m looking everywhere, though. No stone unturned.”
Dale drove the stub of his cigar down into the ash tray so hard it unraveled.
“Jason is your blood.”
“I know,” David answered.
“Fine. I’ll pull the files myself. I’ll call when they’re ready. Anything else?”
David stood and looked out through the door. Across the lobby, a door was marked with Jason’s name and title: Vice President.
“Has anyone touched Jason’s office?”
Dale shook his head as he pulled a key and slid it across the desk. “You’re welcome to take a look.”
As David walked across, he felt the eyes of the employees on him. They were wondering if he was there as family or as an investigator. One teller—a young woman—was crying. David didn’t know her name; she wasn’t a local. She looked up, saw him watching her, and quickly hid her face.
David approached, reading her name from a plate on the desk.
“Phoebe, right?”
She nodded, still sniffling.
“Will you help me out?”
He led her to Jason’s office and closed the door behind them. She was petite, dressed with the stylish edge of a punk teenager who’d grown up, found some degree of responsibility. She held a tissue, stained with the makeup she’d wiped from her eyes. On her nose and eyebrows were the faint scars of old piercings.
She sat on a corner of the desk, as if by habit.
“You were at the funeral,” David said. “I have a good memory for faces. Names, they just come in and go right back out. But you aren’t a local.”
She nodded. The corner of her mouth twitched.
“My husband is in the army. He was assigned here, right after. Then I got the job here.”
“You like it? Working here?”
He could feel her losing her balance, not following the train of questions.
“Um. Yeah. It’s just . . . It’s been hard, since . . .”
“Since you lost him,” David completed her thought.
She opened her mouth as if to protest, then closed it.
“How long?” David asked.
She stared at him for a moment, summoning words that failed to come. Then she collapsed all at once and started to sob, a full-body, shuddering cry. David made no move to comfort her. It was true, then. Jason had had an affair. And it was with one of them—an outsider.
“It was over,” Phoebe said, her voice barely audible. “About three months ago. His wife found out. She threatened me. She said she’d go to my husband.”
David leaned forward, tensing.
“Missy isn’t that kind of woman.”
Phoebe’s eyes hardened. “She’s evil. She doesn’t . . . She didn’t deserve him.”
David let the room go quiet as he thought. Missy didn’t kill Jason. She was at home with the girls. Besides, he had seen the killer. And it was a man. At least, he thought it was a man. He imagined Phoebe in a hooded coat. Could he mistake her for a man?
“Where were you the night he died?”
“Wait. You can’t think that I . . .”
“I don’t presume anything,” David cut her off. “Where were you?”
“I had a workout class,” she answered. Her face had gone white; her hands trembled. “I remember, because then I went home, and I heard . . .”
She’d started crying again.
“You have witnesses who can confirm you were there?”
She nodded.
“I loved him,” she said, still crying. “I think he loved me, too. He was just . . . I never met anyone like him.”
David allowed himself to glare at her.
“Your husband, you said he’s army?”
She nodded. “Security at Site One.”
“And where was he, that night?”
She startled, an unimagined possibility revealing itself. Then she shook free of the alarm.
“He was on duty. He works a lot of night shifts. I’m sure you can check.”
“I’m sure I can.”
Once he was back in his truck, David drove straight to the Countryman Building, then followed the protocols that took him onto the white van and off to Site One. A soldier led him to the room in Building Seventeen, and he passed through, not seeing Sunny, to his office. He looked up to nowhere in particular, then began to speak.
“Conover. We need to talk.”