SIX

By the time Clark and Abbie got back to the station, it was nearly noon. Henderson wanted a full run-down. Abbie let Clarke do the talking.

Henderson rubbed his temples. In a few hours, everyone in Utah, southern Idaho, and most of Nevada would know that the First Counselor to the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had been murdered.

“Go through the evidence again. Check the car. Check the scene. Everyone is on this until I’m confident we haven’t missed even one hair.”

For a moment Abbie wondered if she should mention her dad’s lunch conversation with Heber or the notebook about the dropouts, but she didn’t. She wasn’t sure herself whether any of it was relevant. And the mood Henderson was in, she knew she’d be on the receiving end of a barrage of questions to which she had no answers.

Clarke and Abbie camped out in the conference room. Abbie had given detailed instructions to the other officers to go back to the scene and look at every rock that fell within the broad parameters of the ones Eriksen had in his office. That pretty much meant every single rock. No one was happy about the task, but no one complained. The resident IT specialist was sitting with Hazel, listening for some detail in that call they had missed before.

Clarke had taken over the search of license plate numbers, even though he shared some of Henderson’s misgivings about the word of a person who smoked marijuana. Abbie had insisted they include in their search cars described as white, white metallic, cream, ivory, light brown, gold, silver, and tan. Pretty much any color that could be mistaken for white.

So far, no hits.

Abbie knew she needed to make some progress on the car quickly. Henderson had every reason to focus on the easiest solution, and the mystery car was not it. She wanted to speak to their eyewitness again. Maybe there was something he hadn’t mentioned, something she hadn’t asked him.

Abbie called the number Bryce Strong had given her. It went straight to voicemail. She called again. Same thing.

“I want to give Bryce Strong a visit,” she said, hanging up. “Care to come along?”

“Sure.” Clarke’s knee had been bouncing up and down while he was sitting at the computer scrolling through pages from the Division of Motor Vehicles. He needed to get out and stretch his legs.

Clarke climbed into the passenger seat of Abbie’s Rover. He loved old cars and there weren’t many like Abbie’s left. She would drive this car until it completely gave up the ghost, which, she had to admit to herself, was probably not too far off into the future.

Clarke navigated. Bryce Strong’s apartment was just off the campus of Weber State. It wasn’t exactly a high-rent neighborhood, but Abbie had seen worse. The housing complex was made up of three red brick buildings, each four stories high. There was a central staircase, exposed to the elements, giving each apartment its own exit to the outside.

Abbie and Clarke climbed to the third floor of the center building. Before they even rang the doorbell, they heard barking from the other side of the door.

“It’s okay, Sir Robin.” Footsteps approached. “Sit.”

When the door opened, Abbie and Clarke were greeted by a Newfoundland puppy, thumping its tail against the thick tan carpet. The dog, despite its obvious youth, was enormous. The young man who opened the door was scratching Sir Robin’s ears while the dog crunched on a dog treat.

“His bark is much worse than his bite,” the man said. “He’s really a coward.” Abbie stifled a smile. Brave Sir Robin. Great name.

“Hello, I’m Detective Abish Taylor of the Pleasant View City Police Department. This is Officer Jim Clarke.” They showed their badges, but Sir Robin’s owner didn’t seem much interested.

“How can I help?” he asked.

“We’re looking for Bryce Strong,” Abbie said.

“He should be back from work any second now. You can come in and wait, if you want.”

“Thank you.” Abbie and Clarke made their way down a very narrow hallway that opened up into a kitchen/living/dining room. The scent of beer, fried food, and marijuana was impossible to escape. An open pizza box with half a pepperoni pizza lay on the Formica counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the space.

The young man closed the box. “Just finished lunch.”

Sir Robin nuzzled Abbie’s leg.

“Sit!” The dog obeyed. Another treat. “He’s a puppy. We’re working on his manners.” The young man patted the dog. “Oh, I guess I forgot mine. Please, sit down. Can I get you something to drink? Eat?”

“No, thank you,” Clarke said, with a little more force than necessary. Abbie understood his response. She had a soft spot in her heart for dog lovers, and while this young man had at least that undeniably redeeming quality, housekeeping was not among his others.

Abbie sat down on a sagging brown couch. Clarke took the faux leather recliner. The seating was arranged around a large flat-screen TV and video console. Controllers were scattered around the room. At least four that Abbie could see.

The young man stood with Sir Robin. “Uh, so, you want to talk to Bryce?”

“Yes,” Clarke said.

The awkward silence was broken when they heard the sound of a key in the lock. Sir Robin bounded to the door. A few seconds later, Bryce Strong walked into the room, followed by the puppy wagging his tail so hard Abbie was convinced Sir Robin might injure himself.

“Man.” Bryce Strong exhaled the word. “Is there a problem?”

“No, we’d just like to go over everything again.”

“Sure.” Bryce opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle. “Kombucha?”

“No, thank you.” Clarke answered.

Bryce twisted open the cap and took a drink. “If you don’t mind, I’ll stand. Been sitting all morning.”

“We need to make sure we didn’t miss anything, even something that doesn’t seem related or relevant,” Abbie said. “You told me that by the time you got down to the creek, the man driving the white car was near the crash site. Is that right?”

“Yup.” Another swallow of fermented tea.

“This man told you the driver was fine and that he had already called 911?”

“Yup.”

Abbie nodded. Now to get to the new information she’d gathered from the crime scene pictures. “Did you see the driver of the white car open the door of the crashed car?”

Bryce Strong set down the bottle of kombucha. “Hmm. I’m not sure. I mean, he must’ve, right? How else would he know the driver was okay?” He stopped, then asked, “The driver’s okay, right?”

“No, he’s not. He died.”

“Damn! I mean, I know he swerved off the road, but I wouldn’t have thought he was going fast enough to really get hurt, you know? That’s really awful.” The young man leaned against the counter. He looked a shade paler than a few minutes earlier.

“It doesn’t look like he died because of the accident,” Abbie said. “That’s why it’s so important that we know everything there is to know, and why we need to talk to the driver of the white car. Is there any detail you can think that would help us track him down?”

Bryce picked up the bottle, as though it would give him strength, and took a swallow. He scratched behind Sir Robin’s ears; the dog had stopped thumping his tail. “Well, the guy was big and built, you know? He was strong, had a thick neck. He looked like someone who could’ve played football in college. His hair was short, really short, buzz cut. He wasn’t old. I mean, when I saw that white Mercedes, I was expecting to see someone older—more, I don’t know, corporate looking.”

“A Mercedes.” Abbie repeated the word. Clarke raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t mention that when we spoke before. Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. It could’ve been a Lexus. It wasn’t a BMW. I think it was a Mercedes, though.”

“Okay,” Abbie continued, knowing this new memory would make her partner more skeptical of Bryce Strong than he already was.

“What do you mean that he didn’t look like what you expected?” Clarke interjected. “What do you mean by ‘corporate looking’?”

Abbie could tell that Bryce Strong didn’t think “corporate looking” was a compliment, and Clarke—well, Clarke did.

“I don’t know. I guess I mean I expected whoever drove a car like that would be, you know, soft. Someone who couldn’t handle himself in a fight. But this guy looked tough.”

“Do you think you could pick him out if you saw him again?” Abbie asked.

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Do you think you could work with a sketch artist and come up with a drawing?” Abbie asked.

“Sure.”

That was great news. Now Abbie shifted gears. “You mentioned that the Mercedes, the white car, was in the wrong lane. Do you mind going over that again?”

“Nope.” Bryce bent down to scratch Sir Robin’s ears, more for his own sake than for the dog’s. “It’s not like much happened. The dark car came driving up, and it looked like the Mercedes was parked in the wrong lane on purpose. I mean, like it was there to force the other driver off the road and down into the creek.”

Clarke coughed, then asked, “You told Detective Taylor you remembered three letters from the license plate. That’s pretty hard to believe, given that you didn’t write anything down and you couldn’t even identify the make of the car until today.” Clarke’s tone was a touch harsh. Bryce and Clarke would not have been friends in high school, Abbie thought wryly.

A broad grin spread across Bryce Strong’s face. “Let me tell you, when your initials spell BS, you pay attention. Kids can be mean, so in school I learned to be vigilant and make sure that I always used my middle name, Leonard. Everything was BLS. I never leave the L out.”

No, Abbie thought. You wouldn’t.

Clarke’s expression softened. “No idea of the numbers?”

Bryce Leonard Strong shook his head.

“Anything else you can think of?” Clarke asked.

BLS shook his head.

Abbie and Clarke each handed the climber a card. “Please call us if you think of anything. We’ll want you to come down to the station to help with a sketch. A woman named Hazel will call you and set it up.”

They said their good-byes.

Clarke and Abbie drove back to the station. Clarke admitted, a little begrudgingly at first, that the climber seemed to be pretty observant and had likely given them a pretty accurate description of what he saw, even with the whole I-now-think-it-was-probably-a-Mercedes memory lapse.

That left them with tracking down a tough guy driving a whitish probably Mercedes with a license plate that started with B. Having Clarke at least neutral when it came to Bryce Strong’s interview made Abbie feel comfortable handing that search over to him completely. She could focus on other things.

She spent what was left of the afternoon reviewing every single bit of evidence neatly arranged in the conference room. She assigned every one of Pleasant View’s six police officers to a specific task and headed home. Again, not a single one complained, even though they were being asked to do tedious and time-consuming work.

The sky was a shade of dusky lavender when Abbie turned off Route 39 onto the long dirt road leading to her cabin. She still sometimes debated her move back to Utah, but she had no second thoughts about the house. An early Swedish convert had built the traditional sommarstuga on the property in the early 1900s, deep red with white trimmed windows and doors. Inside it was bright and airy. There was a sauna, a plunge pool, and enough bedrooms to sleep sixteen. When Abbie bought the place, she’d planned to host weekend get-togethers for her family and friends like she and her late husband Phillip had done at their place in upstate New York. So far, though, the guest rooms had remained empty. Abbie was the only person who had used the sauna.

She opened her front door, turned off the alarm, and headed straight upstairs to wash her face and change into pajamas. Then she walked back downstairs and poured a glass of Domaines Ott. It was, after all, officially rosé season. Abbie liked her pink wines the same way she liked her whites: dry and crisp. Any hint of fruit had to finish off clean. Phillip used to tease her that her definition of citrus was what most people called astringent. He might have been right. As she sipped the pale-peach liquid from her glass, she tried to relax, but her mind wouldn’t let go of the swirl of strange facts—the disappearing driver of an expensive white car, his mysterious 911 call, and her dad’s conversation with Heber about missing BYU students.

The sound of crunching gravel interrupted her thoughts. For a moment, she felt panic rise in her throat. Clarke had updated her security system. She was safe. Still, her level of anxiety had been a little higher ever since the Smith case when she’d watched Elder Bowen, the General Authority and frequent Church spokesman, and his partner in crime rifling through her house. She had her suspicions about what they’d been looking for, but the boxes of her father’s notes were still safely hidden in her attic.

The crunching stopped. Abbie took a long swallow of wine and walked to the window.

She opened the door. “John?”

Her big brother reached down and gave his sister a bear hug. “I hope you don’t mind me dropping by unannounced. I was in Ogden all day, but we finished early. Couldn’t pass up the opportunity.”

John walked past her into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and grabbed a seltzer. “Are you eating? I’m starved. We could head up to Huntsville. I could be talked into the Ogden Valley Smokehouse.” He twisted open the cap on his bottle of water and took a swallow. He looked at his sister, slumped on a kitchen stool, and added, “Or, if you’re exhausted from the day, we can make something here.”

He then turned back into the kitchen and started opening cabinets. He knew Abbie well enough to know she loved cooking, but large stretches of time could pass between visits to a grocery store. Beyond coffee and popcorn, it was unclear what food could be found in the house. This was as close to the opposite of John’s house as could be. With four kids at home, two of those being teenagers, it was considered famine if the fridge was not stuffed to the gills. John bought milk and ice cream by the gallon.

“Here we go!” There was optimism in his voice.

Abbie took a swallow from her glass. John didn’t bat an eye. No judgment on the wine, no judgment on the state of her pantry, no judgment on the coffeemaker. She was lucky to have a brother like him. Her other brothers had fallen in line with her sisters. They were cordial, but not warm. They had taken her leaving the Church as a personal affront. John hadn’t. He knew she had struggled and had made the only decision she could make. It shouldn’t have mattered to anyone else, but, Abbie was learning, it did.

John found some bread and cheese. He sliced both and arranged them on a plate, with a handful of dates and raw almonds. He pushed the food toward Abbie. “I heard about Heber. Are you okay?”

Abbie took a bite of cheese, then said, “I’m okay. It was awful. It caught me completely off guard. When I got the call, we thought it was a drunk driver.”

“Are you going to be okay working on the case? I mean, is there any way you could step aside?” John was trying to sound casual, but he wasn’t entirely successful in disguising the level of his concern about her well-being.

“I love you for worrying about me, but this is my job. This will sound corny, I know, but I feel like I owe it to Heber. He was always so good to us, to me. I’ll never be able to repay him for being there with Mom. You know?” Abbie chewed on the crust of a piece of bread.

“Yeah, I know. Heber was a great man and a good man. I feel the kind of hole in my stomach I did when Mom passed away. I know that they were ready, but I wasn’t. I still am not.”

John believed in the elaborate Mormon afterlife. Abbie had asked him once if he’d ever had doubts. His answer had been cryptic, but Abbie would never forget that he said: “Yes, the doubts remind me that we each must walk our own path.” She wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but had felt ever since that he understood her in a way no one else in the family did.

“You mind if I use up what’s left in the fridge?” John asked.

“Knock yourself out.” She knew she should help, but she was so exhausted that the pull of the chair, the cheese, and the wine required more strength to resist than she possessed. She watched her brother assemble something from the meager contents of her fridge.

“Great.” John seasoned the lone salmon fillet. It might be enough for both of them if John ate a lot of bread. The fish sizzled when he placed it facedown on the cast-iron skillet.

“My trip to Ogden isn’t the only reason I’m here.” He juiced a lemon and whisked in olive oil and Dijon mustard until the pale-yellow mixture emulsified.

“I suspected as much.” Abbie built herself another tiny sandwich of cheese and bread.

“I’m worried that this case is only going to make your sleep issues worse. I know how you get when you care about something. You won’t eat properly, you won’t work out like you normally do, and sleep will be relegated to ‘optional.’”

He was right. She did do all those things when a case was intense.

John sliced red onion and cucumbers into paper-thin rings.

“As it is,” he said, looking up from drizzling the lemon vinaigrette over arugula, shaved parmesan, and the circles of onion and cucumber, “you already are not sleeping.” He was sounding very big brother.

“It’s not a big deal.” Abbie shrugged. “I don’t always sleep through the night. It’s hardly life or death.”

“Abs, it’s been going on for far too long, and ‘not sleeping through the night’ is an understatement. You can make it sound as trivial as you like, but I want you to see someone.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out an ivory card with a name embossed in black letters, followed by the initials M.D., PH.D.

This was not the first time John had hinted that he was worried about her. He had a theory that she hadn’t been able to process losing both her mom and her husband in such a close time frame. John would always preface what he said with “I’m not a psychiatrist, but …”

Abbie took the card.

“She’s supposed to be the best in the state. She’s on faculty at the U.” John flipped the salmon. The crust was dark brown on the outside. He sliced it in half, revealing a deep-pink center. Then he slid each half onto a dinner plate.

The two of them sat at the counter, enjoying the results of John’s labor.

“You know,” Abbie said, “I actually went to a farmers’ market this weekend. That red onion you just sliced: organic. The cucumber? From a lady who lives just up the road in Eden. And”—she paused for dramatic effect—“I’m getting in about twenty-five miles a week.” He knew she was referring to the number of miles she ran. She was doing pretty well. She was trying to eat regularly, she ran at least four miles almost every morning, and she was back into weight training. “I even downloaded a book on mindfulness meditation,” she added, to demonstrate just how mentally healthy she was.

“You downloaded a book on mindfulness?” John put his fork down. “Have you read it?”

“It got a good review in the Times.”

“So, you haven’t read it.” John knew her too well. “Sometimes we all need a little help. You’ve had a rough few years. I know you think the move to Utah was the right choice for you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that I can jump in the car and see you whenever, but still, Abs, it was a move. Death of a loved one and moving are major triggers for depression. I’m not a doctor, but …”

“But you think I need to see one?” Abbie filled in.

John shrugged. “Yeah, I do.” He pointed to the business card Abbie had set down on the other side of her plate. “This woman is great.” He turned to face his baby sister. “Abs, we want you to be happy and healthy. Dad and I are here for you, but we’re not enough.”

Deep down, Abbie knew he was right. Still, she wasn’t sure she was suppressing anything. After all, she was well aware of every one of those changes, those losses. It wasn’t like she was suffering from some deep dark secret issues. She was just having trouble sleeping.

John stood up and cleared the dishes. He unloaded and loaded the dishwasher and wiped the counter. The kitchen looked better after he’d cooked dinner than it had before. Her big brother had driven all the way here and cooked her dinner and cleaned up afterward. Maybe she wasn’t managing as well as she thought.

“Thanks.” Abbie stood up from her perch at the counter. It was the time in the evening when a non-Mormon host would offer coffee or tea and dessert and retire to the living room. “Do you want some milk and a little something sweet before you leave?”

Abbie opened the drawer in her kitchen that she lovingly referred to as her “snack drawer.” Sometimes it was full of chips, popcorn, cookies, chocolates, and the occasional nut mix. Sometimes it was empty. Luck was on her side. A friend had sent her a box from Neuhaus a few weeks ago. She arranged the chocolate gems on a small silver dish. John popped a truffle in his mouth while Abbie poured each of them a glass of milk.

“Ooh. These are good.” He ate two more truffles and finished his milk.

He stood and Abbie did, too. She walked with him to the door, his arm draped across her shoulders.

“Will you at least think about it? No pressure.” He opened the door. “Well, maybe a little bit of pressure.” He gave Abbie a solid squeeze and then headed out.

“Drive safely,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Abs.”

John walked down the steps to his car. He didn’t turn around. If he had, he would have seen a single tear roll down his sister’s cheek. She wiped it away.