Lee and Ty Edwards’s home bore the marks of the family life of a couple who had been together for a long time. Brown busied himself looking at the photographs on the mantel and let Chief Sangster take the woman’s statement. They already had Madison’s statement on record and there was, of course, the issue of a police officer discharging her weapon—which, in Seattle, would mean a review of the situation leading to said discharge, and for the officer to be on administrative leave. In Ludlow, it meant that a cop had been shot at by a sniper and now she just needed to get on with her job, thank you very much.
Brown was ready to jump in, if necessary; however, for the moment he preferred listening to Sangster, who, in spite of his lack of experience interviewing victims’ family members, seemed to be doing well enough. It came from knowing the person, Brown considered, and treating them like an individual and not like a form to be filled in.
Lee Edwards sat on her sofa with her poodle curled up next to her. The dog’s head was in her lap and her hand rested against it, as if to make sure it was there.
A friend had come to stay with the widow and had made coffee for the police officers and lemon tea for Mrs. Edwards before retiring to the kitchen to give them privacy.
Brown had stood over the body of Lee Edwards’s husband and had drawn the same conclusions as Madison: the man had been targeted. And whether the reason was personal, entirely random, or because the sniper had believed Ty Edwards was the reincarnation of a demon who was about to destroy humanity and civilization as they knew it—and Kevin Brown had had a few of those, courtesy of the cuts in mental health provision—the key was how the target had been chosen.
You understand the victim, you understand the killer.
Chief Sangster shifted on the chair and it creaked under his weight. “Lee,” he said, “tell me a little about Ty’s work at the store. It seems weird, I know, but I’m trying to get a picture of how things stand, to make sense of something that doesn’t seem to make sense.”
The woman wiped her eyes and nodded. “The store is doing all right,” she said, and to Brown she added, “We own the hardware store on Main Street.”
Brown met her shiny, red-rimmed eyes.
“We’re never going to be millionaires,” she continued. “But that was never the point. A town needs a hardware store, and we kept on with it. It wasn’t going too badly, you know. We even had the March specials out already, made a promo for the radio only last week, and it went out county-wide on Monday.”
Brown thought of the radio commercial from the tiny town like a pebble thrown into a huge black lake.
“I know I’ve never had a problem with anything Ty sold me,” Sangster said. “I know you sell quality, not dime-store, but did Ty have words with anybody? An unhappy customer perhaps? Someone who wanted to make trouble?”
What a world it would be if the right to bear arms meant the opportunity to address customer service matters with such finality, Brown thought—and immediately realized that, yes, that was exactly the world he seemed to be living in from time to time.
Lee Edwards had not replied. She was frowning and thinking in a manner that seemed almost painful, as if the question had produced an answer too distressing to conceive.
“Jeb Tanner,” she said after a moment. “Two weeks ago, Jeb Tanner came to the shop to exchange something—what was it?—and Ty told him he couldn’t, because he had broken the thing after he’d bought it and there had been nothing wrong with it in the store. And Tanner was very nice about it and he kind of smiled and told Ty he’d cancel his account with us if Ty didn’t.”
“What did Ty say?”
“Ty didn’t want to cancel the account. Tanner is a farmer—we know how hard life is for farmers around here. Tanner’s not like most people: he can be real charming one minute and he can be . . .” Lee couldn’t find a word that would work in polite company. “Well, the way it ended he told my husband that he should have known better than that. He was courteous, you know, and very civil. But he canceled the account and left. There was something about him . . . I don’t care how well mannered he is.”
“He paid what he owed?”
“No, and we didn’t expect him to. We thought he’d come back in a few weeks, pretend it had never happened, pay a little toward the account, and buy something else. He runs his farm like it’s the 1920s, you know. It’s his family we felt sorry for. You don’t think he could have . . . ?”
Jeb Tanner. Brown turned the name around in his mind. A farmer certainly has the opportunity, sometimes even the reason, to become a very good shot. And Ty Edwards’s killer had been a very good shot indeed.
The woman stroked the dog’s head. “I can’t even remember what it was that he wanted to exchange. I told you last night, didn’t I, Chief? This town is not what it used to be.”
They sat in the cruiser with the heating on full blast, still parked in front of the Edwards residence. The chief’s hands rested on the steering wheel and his thoughts were elsewhere. Brown was jotting down some notes in his pad: he preferred doing it right after the interview, when the memories were fresh, without interrupting the flow of words at the time. They had a name, they had a potential suspect. He looked up after a couple of minutes and Sangster was staring into the middle distance; his eyes were on something only he could see, and his face was set hard.
“Jeb Tanner . . . ,” Brown began to say, and he stopped when the chief turned toward him.
“There’s something I need to tell you. I didn’t mention it before. I didn’t want to . . .”
Brown sat back and shut up. He was good at that, good at letting people talk when they needed to, and he certainly had no idea where the conversation was heading, only that the chief looked stricken.
“The day before Robert Dennen was killed he called me on my cell, he left a message on the voice mail. He said there was something important he needed to talk to me about. I never got back to him, because it was a busy day and I thought I’d catch him in the clinic on Thursday. Robert had never called my personal cell phone before. Never. I didn’t call him back, and he was dead by the morning.”
Will Sangster looked Brown in the eye and waited for the cutting remark, for the jibe and the criticism that never came. His face was flushed in shame and regret and he was rigid on the seat, expecting a verbal blow of some kind, of any kind.
“You couldn’t have known,” Brown said. “You could not possibly have known what was going to happen or the nature of what the doctor wanted to talk to you about. You still don’t. We still don’t. It means only that there was something on Robert Dennen’s mind, and he was serious enough about it to call you on your cell.”
Sangster blinked and the big man sort of wilted against his seat.
“You couldn’t have known,” Brown repeated.
“What if it was something that could have saved his life?”
“You can’t work on what-ifs,” Brown replied. “How many calls a day do you get about something-or-other that someone wants to talk to you about?”
“It’s not the same.”
“How many? Not just calls for assistance but anything from the state, the county, the sheriff’s department, locals, and anybody who’s passing by and needs something from the police department.”
Sangster sighed. “A few dozen calls.”
“Exactly. You couldn’t have known.” Brown gave him a second to absorb what he’d said, because he liked the chief and wanted—needed—to be able to work with him at his best. If he needed support about this, he’d give it to him. In his heart, though, born out of the experience of years on the force and mistakes that had cost the lives of innocent people, Brown knew that sometimes what-ifs are all that fate has left us. In the myriad of possibilities, of alternative worlds, there might be a world where the chief had acted on Dennen’s call and the doctor was still alive, perhaps even Ty Edwards was still alive, but the moment where the right path could be taken had passed. And Brown ached for the man who would have to live with it.
“Tell me about Tanner,” he said.
Earlier in the day, as soon as Brown had confirmed that the patch of wood that had hidden the sniper was deserted, the ponderous machine of law enforcement on the county and state level had swung into action and roadblocks had been established on Highway 395. They didn’t know what the shooter looked like, or whether he would be inclined to leave the town at all; however—in moments where not much else could be done—a roadblock was always a good idea. At least, that was how the troopers waiting on the side of the road looked at it.
They were cold, they had run out of coffee, and their shift was about to end. All they had to show for it were five stops, all very early in the day—all local residents who lived out of town and had not gone to the vigil because they had other engagements. All were driving to Sherman Falls without a clue that anything had happened.
The troopers had been in position fifteen minutes after receiving the call from dispatch—in plenty of time to meet anyone who was coming from the other direction—and yet, after those early stops, too early for the driver to have shot the victim and then driven onto the Interstate, no one had been through. The residents of Ludlow had gone back to their homes, or wherever they had decided to hunker down, and no one had driven past the troopers.
“How long should we stay out here for?” one trooper asked the other as he slapped his gloved hands against his thighs.
“Should have worn your tights.”
“It’s not my legs I’m worried about.”
“Like that would be such a loss for humanity,” his colleague replied. “Let me check with dispatch.”
They were parked in an open stretch of road that seemed to reach the end of the horizon on both sides. Behind them the glow from Sherman Falls was too distant to be visible, and ahead of them the blank road seemed to lose itself in the mountains. The beams from the cruiser were the only lights for miles, and they fought a losing battle against the approaching nightfall.