Hawkins smirks. Clicks his pen again. Closed, open, closed, open. “Bet you weren’t up there to go swimming. I don’t suppose I have to ask what you did up there.” Jessup can feel his face gone hot. “What time did you bring her home?”
“About quarter to two,” Jessup says.
Hawkins asks him a few more questions, glances over his shoulder to the end of the lane, where Cunningham still sits in the car.
“If there’s anything you’re not telling me, it’s important that—”
Jessup starts to speak, but Hawkins shoots out his hand, pissed. “I’m talking right now, not you. If there’s anything you’re not telling me, anything that needs to be kept quiet, you keep quiet about it. Keep your fucking mouth shut.” Hawkins takes a deep breath.
“It doesn’t matter what really happened. You need to understand that this is going to play like hell. After what happened with your brother and your dad”—Jessup glances at David John, and even in this exact moment he’s got enough self-awareness to realize that for once he doesn’t want to correct the misstatement—“this has some bad optics. You’ve got a good story there. Helps that there’s the photo and the texts, and if I need to follow up beyond this, assuming your girlfriend can tell the story the same way, it’ll turn out fine for you. But the medical examiner is in right now, doing an autopsy. If there’s anything—and I mean anything at all—that looks off, we’ll be back tomorrow with a search warrant and things will get ugly for you and your family.”
He stares hard at Jessup. It’s hard for him not to look away. There’s something flat about Hawkins’s eyes. Makes him think of a shark. He wonders if Hawkins is ex-military. He’s got the look. A tour in the Middle East and then back home and wearing blue.
“I’m on your side in this, Jessup, and if you say you didn’t do anything—”
“I didn’t do anything.” It’s reflexive. Just bursts out of his mouth. He’s not sure who he’s trying to convince: Hawkins, David John, or himself.
Hawkins shrugs. “I honestly don’t care, Jessup. I’m not going to cry myself to sleep over this. But what I’m saying is that there are people in the department and around the county who think that Ricky and David John got off too light with what happened. Nobody cares about the truth. They just care how it looks and how it plays in the news. I’m telling you this as a friend: if there’s anything that looks off in the autopsy, things are going to go in a bad way for you. There will be Black Lives terrorists protesting downtown and television trucks and the mayor and every politician in the country is going to be on this. Sorry,” he says, looking at David John. “You can’t outrun the family name.”
Jessup wants to scream. It’s not even his goddamned name. He didn’t do anything wrong. He says it: “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Hawkins clicks the pen closed, tucks it with his notebook into his pocket. “You’re not listening to me. I don’t care if you had a hand in that boy’s accident or not, Jessup, but there are a lot of people around here who will, who are just looking for an excuse to go after your family, to go after the church, so if there’s something floating around that contradicts your story, something that you might not want to get looked at in a lab, you take care of that right now. Make sure it doesn’t show up later. You understand me?”
He stares at Jessup until Jessup nods.
“Now,” Hawkins says, “I’m not going to shake your hand, David John, because that isn’t going to look right—we don’t know each other, right?—but you make sure Jessup does what I say. Keep your heads down and this storm will pass over.”
“Thanks,” David John says. “I expect you won’t be coming to church tomorrow, then?”
Hawkins grins, and now Jessup is sure that he’s reminded of a shark. Dark waters hiding things.
“Expect not,” Hawkins says. “As it is, risky for an officer of the law to come to services. Think I’ll lay low for a while.”