JULIA STUMBLED DOWN the path toward the crime scene, barely able to focus on her original purpose.
Done?
Her mind seized on the words “for now,” clung to them, massaged them, inflated them to outsize importance. He was upset, as well he should be. She tried to imagine anyone attempting to take her son Calvin away from her, and even that farfetched scenario made her heart race, her breath come short.
If staying apart—for now—would foil Susan’s little revenge plot, then so be it.
Newly resolute, she turned her thoughts to the creekside death that had somehow been pinned on Ray. The walking path petered out toward the edge of town, the creek turning wilder there, running faster, its banks thick with brush. Duck Creek’s small year-round homeless population lived there, in everything from tarps strung between bushes to semipermanent structures banged together from construction pallets.
But only the hardiest exercise enthusiasts used the walking paths in the winter, and the camp’s denizens crept closer then, preferring to be near downtown with its abundance of bars, steam vents, and sheltered doorways. At night they built fires in oil drums along the creek, and as Julia walked home from the courthouse each evening, she saw their wavering light like hopeful beacons amid the darkness.
She knew better than to visit their hangouts at night. By then, many would have been drinking for hours and turned surly. Or, if they used, they might be coming down and looking for easy money for their next hit and not shy about what they had to do to get it. Even in the middle of the day, in the middle of town, the creek banks bore hints of desperate lives—a torn and stained sleeping bag stowed deep beneath a winter-bare bush, a crushed Styrofoam fast-food container, a scrap of toilet paper fluttering in the wind—just a few feet from the path.
The spot where Ray’s supposed victim had met his demise was easy enough to find, a large trampled patch in the snow a few yards from one of the blackened oil drums, in a thicket of willows. The curious had already been and gone. A supermarket bouquet lay frozen in the snow, along with a couple of hand-lettered signs on torn pieces of cardboard. We love you, Billy. RIP.
Duck Creek’s transient population swelled in the summer months, but in winters it shrank to a core group, one whose frequent squabbles led to the court appearances that crammed Julia’s schedule but who remained fiercely protective of their own when confronted by outsiders.
A bit of blood, preserved bright red rather than drying black as it would have in summer, splashed the snow—an irresistible image already displayed in the morning paper and used as B-roll in the television stories about the slaying.
Julia closed her eyes against Duck Creek’s cut-glass winter brilliance and tried to imagine the scene. The crackling fire, never quite warm enough. Mingled scents of woodsmoke and cheap booze and unwashed bodies. Booted feet shuffling in the snow, gloved hands pounded together, ungloved ones pulled up into sleeves. Laughter, maybe; curses, certainly. An argument—something stupid. An accidental jostling, booze spilled. An insult, a jeer. Somehow escalating into a beat-down that killed a man.
She couldn’t see it. She opened her eyes.
A deputy sheriff stood a few feet away.
Julia jumped. “Jesus. You scared the crap out of me. How’d you sneak up on me like that?”
“I stuck to the path.” The vehicle and foot traffic associated with the investigation had cleared the walking trail of snow, which squeaked underfoot in Duck Creek’s dry cold.
Julia crunched her way back across the trampled snow to the trail, yanked off a glove, and extended a hand.
“Julia Geary. I don’t think we’ve ever formally met.”
“Cheryl Hayes. I know who you are.”
Julia knew who she was too. She’d just seen her at the funeral, the department’s lone woman deputy, something trumpeted with great fanfare when she’d been hired a couple of years earlier. Her handshake was perfunctory, and Julia sized her up as another law enforcement official who considered public defenders an unnecessary speed bump on the road to justice.
Hayes pulled her own glove back on and nodded toward the signs. “Did you know Billy?”
Julia didn’t want to admit that she didn’t even remember Billy’s last name from the affidavit. She shook her head. “You?”
Hayes surprised her by saying yes. “Nice guy. Big guy. Takes a lot to kill someone that size. He must have died hard.”
“How’d you know him?”
Julia expected Hayes to say that she knew Billy the same way Julia knew Ray—a series of arrests for petty crimes. But Hayes surprised her again.
“I know most of these guys—the locals, anyway. I make the rounds, bring them coffee, hang out a while.” A wry smile. “My own version of community policing. Last I checked, the community was more than the downtown and your neighborhood.”
So the woman knew where she lived. Or maybe she’d just made an educated guess. Julia’s clothes—the Sorels, the hooded down parka, the windproof mittens with the fleece glove liners, all combining to make Duck Creek’s arctic winters almost bearable—were nobody’s idea of stylish, but their total cost would have fed the camp’s denizens for weeks.
Something in the woman’s demeanor reminded Julia of her new intern. Maybe it was the implied judgment when Marie learned Julia had never handled a murder trial, and now this woman flaunting her knowledge about the victim.
Julia knew that no matter what kind of man Billy had been—simply a stumbling drunk, or a raging child molester—Claudette would confer a sort of sainthood upon him, the better to turn a jury’s head.
She’d have to do the same for Ray. And, conversely, demonize Billy, whoever the hell he was. Time for her to find out—and she was pretty sure Deputy Cheryl Hayes would be disinclined to help.
“Nice meeting you.” She edged away.
A few yards down the trail, she glanced back just in time to see Hayes drop to her knees beside the blotch of blood and place a hand gently on the snowbank beside it.
Hayes’s colleague Wayne Peterson fell in beside Julia as she pushed through the back door of the courthouse. The sheriff’s office was in the rear of the building, as was a coffee cart to which Julia sometimes resorted when she didn’t have time to make a run to Colombia.
The coffee wasn’t nearly as good as Colombia’s roasted-on-premises blends, but it was several steps above the pale brew concocted every morning by Deb, who resisted even the most tactful suggestions aimed at improvement.
“Hey, Wayne. Quad-shot vanilla cappuccino as usual? I’m buying.”
“Can’t turn that down. How is it out there?”
“Sun’s nice. If we’re lucky, we’ll get out of single digits today. But I’ll take the cold over the inversions any day.”
The hills surrounding Duck Creek had a way of trapping impenetrable warm layers of cloud above cold air, resulting in endless days of gray that saw irritability climb and in turn overloaded Julia’s schedule with people booked for domestic disputes, bar brawls, and all-around bad behavior.
“I’ll drink to that.”
He lounged against the counter, his dark-brown pants and khaki shirt freshly pressed, the gold threads in the seven-pointed star on his shirt sleeve patch glinting in the overhead fluorescent lights.
Julia ordered his syrupy concoction as well as her own oat-milk latte. “Not on patrol today?”
The territory under the sheriff’s office included the county’s far reaches, deep into the canyons that sheltered those who sought solitude for reasons both benign and scarily malignant. When it was Wayne’s turn to patrol there, he suited up as though for an arctic expedition in snowpack boots, a hooded parka that reached nearly to his knees, a fleece neck gaiter that could be pulled up beneath his eyes, and clumsy snowmobilers’ mittens. Even the sheriff’s department’s most rugged SUV—where he stowed snowshoes and an avalanche shovel—was no match for some of the places where the scattered residents managed to find enough of a cell signal to make the occasional 911 call. If the SUV broke down—or, more likely, slid off the road despite studded snow tires and sometimes even chains—in the middle of the night in the middle of winter, he was in for a long, cold wait before help arrived. People froze to death every winter in and around Duck Creek. Wayne wasn’t going to be one of them.
“Paperwork day,” he said. “Unless, God forbid, something happens.” He knocked the faux-wooden counter just in case.
Julia handed him his drink and waited until he’d taken an appreciative sip before launching.
“What the hell, Wayne? How’d this end up getting pinned on Ray? The guy’s a world-class screw-up, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
The foamed-milk mustache on Wayne’s upper lip undercut the intended effect of his glare. “Should’ve known you were bribing me with the coffee. You know I can’t talk about an ongoing case.”
“Please. Half the courthouse is talking about this case.”
“Not as much as they’re talking about Leslie Harper.”
Fair enough.
Even though Harper’s death was largely considered an unfortunate accident, she had the benefit of social prominence and thus public fascination, especially after her sister’s broadside at the funeral. By comparison, a fatal fight between a couple of Duck Creek’s “gentlemen of leisure,” as Wayne referred to the denizens of the creek-side camps, hardly had the same sizzle.
“My guess on Ray’s case?” Wayne licked his lip and took another drink. A snowy new mustache appeared.
Julia looked away, fighting a smile.
“It’s just what it looks like. Both of them drunk. Maybe Ray hit our vic just right. Lucky—well, unlucky—accident.”
“Vic. You sound like my new intern. What’s the deal with her, anyway?”
Wayne took a sudden interest in the contents of his cup, removing the lid and peering into it. “Aw.” He shook the cup and addressed the dregs within. “She’s a sweet kid. Smart. She’d have made a great cop but for some reason decided on law school.” He hacked up a laugh.
Julia peered at him, but he refused to meet her gaze. A flush pinked his ears.
“Wayne? Oh no. Tell me you didn’t.”
Wayne, like a lot of guys on the force, had more than one divorce under his belt and grabbed overtime shifts whenever possible to keep up with his alimony and child-support payments. Julia imagined the ride-alongs with Marie, miles alone in his patrol car together, the impressionable young woman, the whole man-in-uniform thing.
“Jesus, Julia! Of course not. What do you think I am?”
Julia finished her own coffee, crumpled the cup, and aced a rim shot off a hallway trash can.
“I think you’re a normal testosterone-addled guy is what I think.” Maybe nothing had happened, but she’d bet her measly public defender salary that Wayne had entertained the notion.
“About Ray,” he said.
Under the circumstances, Julia granted him the change of subject.
“I know he’s been sort of a pet project of yours.”
Julia started to object, then stopped. He was right.
“Everybody’s got that client,” Claudette had warned her when they first started working together. “They look at you with the big goo-goo eyes and tell you they’re innocent, or they’ve been abused—which they probably were—and that they’re going to change, which they actually mean when they say it. We’re usually too smart to fall for it. Because let’s face it, most of our clients are guilty. Our job is to see them treated fairly by the courts, which is a lot tougher than it ought to be.
“But when you find yourself falling for someone’s bullshit, watch out. Time to kick the case over to someone else. Because when that happens, when you start turning yourself into a pretzel, going way overboard in terms of a defense, good prosecutors will tear you apart and smile while they’re doing it. You don’t do your clients any favors when you get too close to them. Don’t be that idiot.”
Julia had sworn she wouldn’t. But now here was Wayne, accusing her of being exactly that idiot. Her turn to change the subject.
“I met one of the new deputies down at the scene. Cheryl Hayes.”
Wayne’s affable demeanor vanished. Cops, Julia thought. They all had that ability. Your best buddy one minute and Just the facts, ma’am, and you have the right to remain silent the next. She supposed it was necessary in their line of work.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“What do you mean?”
His lips tightened. He shook his head. “Talk to her long?”
“Just a couple of minutes. Why?”
“No reason.” He started to walk away.
She grabbed his arm. He spun and faced her with a Don’t fuck with me look that she supposed was another of those second-nature skills.
“Whoa.” She let go and held up her hands. “Sorry. It’s just—you wouldn’t believe the crap that’s rained down on me in the last twenty-four hours. If there’s something I need to know about Hayes, tell me.”
“Can’t talk about the case.”
“Goddammit, Wayne.”
It was their familiar push-pull dynamic, her coming at him from various angles, trying to find out more about whatever case she was working, knowing from the start it was hopeless but trying anyway.
Usually he strung her along, feeding her useless tidbits before turning away with a Gotcha grin.
But this time, the grim lines in his face only deepened.
“If you’re on this case, you’ll find out soon enough. Just don’t say you weren’t warned.”