CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Hey, I got a weird one for you,” Starr said into the landline at the marshal’s office. It was late afternoon and she still felt like she was at the starting line of this investigation.

After she and Minkey left the morgue, they’d grabbed drive-through burgers, and then she’d sent him to canvass the rez. He probably wouldn’t get anywhere, but she figured word had already started to spread about the death by the creek. No one had been reported missing, but that didn’t mean the body didn’t belong to someone who lived on the reservation. Starr was learning that, in many ways, the reservation operated like an extended family with young adults who weren’t always tied to one home. She had picked up her phone and dialed a Chicago number by memory.

“Send over the file.” The voice that answered at the other end of the line was brisk and cool.

“Earlie? It’s me, Starr. Good to know you’re still a phone call away.”

“Girl, what you up to?” Earlie’s tone changed immediately. “Been a minute. Been a hot minute…been a lotta minutes…thought you might have disappeared on me.”

Hearing Earlie—the name was short for Earlene—was both a balm and a sting to Starr. She felt a sudden longing for her old life, for her friend. It was painful, the way a once-broken bone aches before a storm.

“Yeah, I’m here,” Starr said, “and you won’t believe where.”

After she’d filled Earlie in about escaping to the reservation, for reasons she planned never to divulge fully, Starr moved to the purpose for her call.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Starr said, leaning back in the office chair at her desk and twisting her neck toward the door, even though she’d sent Winnie home an hour earlier. She wanted to keep this conversation private. “Remember that case you told me about last year, the one where they grabbed DNA from a board and it ended up being the reason they could charge the perp?”

“Oh yeah,” Earlie said, slowly. Then she sped up as it came back to her. “Yes, yes. A forensic team presented that at that conference I went to in Detroit…two, maybe three years ago. Fascinating. So, what have you gotten yourself into?”

Starr could feel Earlie’s mind working as she let the silence drag on a beat too long. She could picture Earlie in her lab coat and Doc Martens, safety glasses propped up in the mass of dark curls she wore cropped close to her head. Listening intently for whatever Starr had to say next.

“Well, here’s the thing,” Starr said. “I’ve got a body, and I’ve got a piece of campfire wood—a cut log, really—with what looks like some blood on one end. Maybe, if we’re lucky, there are some fibers, maybe hair follicles that didn’t belong to the vic. Victim was struck in the head with something, maybe this log we put in evidence, and I’d like to see what we can get off of it,” Starr said, then added, “If you’re up for it.”

It was a favor, after all, one that she wasn’t owed. Especially after leaving the detective ranks in Chicago under questionable circumstances. Not that many people knew the whole story.

“Shit, girl,” Earlene said immediately. “Bag it and FedEx it. As long as you lock down the chain of custody, I have no problem seeing where it leads.”

Starr laughed a little, despite herself. Same ol’ Earlie, she thought, grateful for her friend. Maybe the only one she still had left after…

“I’ll let you know what I find out, but I have to warn you: Don’t get your hopes up. It’s a long shot. I’ll need to track down some specialized equipment, and then talk that department into lending it so we can give this a try. Like I’m saying, if this were a horse race, the odds aren’t great.”

“Hey, Earlie, thank you,” said Starr, and she meant it. “Really. I know it might not go anywhere, but I think I may have someone going around bashing skulls. First a dog’s, now a female vic’s, pretty young.”

“Yikes,” said Earlie. “So, how are you, really? You know, after your daughter…”

Starr was quiet for so long, Earlie finally asked if they’d been disconnected.

“I’m doing okay. Getting by.”

It wasn’t the first lie she’d told since taking this job, but it was the first one she regretted. Earlie could probably handle the truth, but now didn’t feel like the time to come clean. Something was shifting.

Lucy Cloud might explain it differently, but to Starr it felt like the old rush, the salve of an open investigation that brought relief by requiring laser focus. Work allowed her to set down everything else. Starr wanted to cling to the feeling as long as she could. It was the only reason she’d gotten out of bed that morning.

“Uh-huh,” Earlie said, sounding doubtful. Starr could tell Earlie’s bullshit meter was ranging into the red but she said nothing more, and Starr was grateful when the conversation moved on.

“It’ll take a while,” Earlie said.

For a second Starr thought Earlie was talking about her; then she realized she meant the forensic examination.

“It’s our busy season,” Earlie added before they hung up, “but I’ll do my darndest to work it in.”

Satisfied that if anything of value could be extracted it would be, Starr shuffled some of the mess of papers on her desk into stacks, and eyed Minkey as he came into the office.

“Anything?”

“Couldn’t get anyone to come to the door,” he said, “but I can go back out, keep trying.”

Starr pulled from her desk drawer the evidence bag containing the firewood. When she’d gathered it from the scene by the creek in Crawl Canyon, she didn’t know how—or if—it might factor into the investigation. Now she planned to overnight it to Earlie as soon as she got to town. When she looked up, Minkey was standing next to an old metal filing cabinet, trying to make sense of the coffee situation.

“Got too many pieces to be just one coffee machine,” he said, holding up a mesh cylinder that looked to be part of a percolator from circa 1965.

Starr shrugged, dug the heels of her boots into the floor, and pushed. She grabbed the Bronco keys as her chair careened back from the desk.

Too bad, Starr thought. The hope that he’d be able to do some useful legwork for her was fading.

In the morning she would straighten out this officer-on-loan situation with the Dexter Springs mayor, find out just what the hell the mayor was thinking. But before that, as soon as the sun came up, she planned to do some fishing.

“Leave the coffee,” she said. “Let’s go see if we can get anyone to talk.”