“He knew too much.”
Those were the first words out of Christopher Reynolds’s mouth on January 3, when Hudson and Kole stood behind the two-way mirror in Wesson PD’s investigations bureau, listening to the events of December 19 finally unravel.
“When you say ‘he,’ are you referring to Officer Garrison, who you shot in cold blood on December nineteenth, or Gary Hernandez, whose skull you bashed in with a torque wrench circa July 2000?” asked Detective Kasper, who sat across from the old man. Christopher Reynolds was barely recognizable in an orange jumpsuit. He’d shed his high-falutin’ attire like an expensive snakeskin, and sat with his forearms on the stainless-steel table, wrists linked by handcuffs.
“It’s a fair question,” Kasper pressed when Christopher had the audacity to look annoyed. “For the record, Mr. Reynolds: Who knew too much?”
“Officer Garrison.” Christopher’s voice was rough. Hudson watched the blue veins in his neck pulse beneath the puckered scar. That mark told them what they needed to know: that Christopher Reynolds had gone to a place called The Ruins with the intention of having sex with an underage girl. Instead, he’d been met by a woman—his niece—who stuck him with a needle full of ketamine and branded him for the ruined piece of shit he was. Hudson and Kole had filled Wesson PD’s Detective Kasper in on the backstory. He would need it to put together an accurate portrait of Christopher’s motivations and offenses.
“Why that night?” Kasper asked, going back to the nineteenth. “What happened that you decided to leave the Christmas party, go to the Fast Mart, and shoot Garrison?”
“I saw Eleanor on the phone with him,” said Christopher.
“How did you know she was talking to him?”
Christopher raised a white, wiry brow. “It was the red rotary phone in the kitchen. She only ever spoke to him on it. Twenty years she’s sat at that damn desk, by that damn phone … delusional that he’ll call with different news than the year before. That Clive would be alive and well and coming home.” His bottom lip curled in distaste. “I knew who Morgan was the second I saw her at the party. She’s my brother’s daughter, for Christ’s sake. The one I’d tried for years to convince Eleanor existed.”
“Even going so far as to stalk her and photograph her. And give Eleanor a roll of film that she never developed … but Morgan did.”
Christopher looked up, his gaze sliced in half by the rims of his glasses. It was news to him that the pictures had been developed. Kasper laid each freshly printed four-by-five on the table like he was dealing a hand of cards.
The old man’s tongue peeked out between his cracked lips as he studied the photographs. Hudson knew them by heart. He’d picked them up from the lab earlier and watched as the processor lifted each one from the drying rack. The figures looked less ghastly in the actual photographs than they had on the strips of negatives in his basement. There was Ava with her dark hair holding a young Morgan to her chest as Clive leaned in for a kiss. There were the three of them on the canoe, the photo partially framed by cattails wherein Christopher had crouched, unseen. There was the picture of Clive holding Morgan up to talk on a telephone in the middle of the woods. Even through the film grain, he could read Loomis Police Department on the front of the call box and see the tiny aperture meant for a key.
It was how he’d known where to find her, after all. Like Bennett, he’d dived deep into his own research after seeing the picture, and found an historical map of Loomis that depicted all the locations of the police call boxes. There were only two in the whole town, and he’d chosen the one nearest the lake as his destination.
“So, walk me through that night,” said Kasper. “You show up at Eleanor’s house to do the whole Santa charade. You hand out presents. Ask kids what they want for Christmas, the whole shebang. In that time, you recognize Morgan as … your niece. The one who branded you at The Ruins.”
Christopher nodded.
“And you tell Eleanor, who, for the past, what, thirty years, has been ignoring your accusations of her husband having a secret family. I mean, she wouldn’t even look at the photographic evidence you captured. And now here was Clive’s secret daughter in her living room. It couldn’t have been easy.”
Christopher tilted his head and Hudson got a good look at the brand on his neck. The puckered skin, the white scars. If this was Kasper’s attempt to empathize with Christopher, he thought, it wasn’t working. And yet, the old man issued a gravelly question. “What’s that?”
“Hmm?” Kasper seemed almost disinterested.
“What wasn’t easy?” pressed Christopher, and Hudson realized that Christopher was as eager as they were to put all the pieces together. For Hudson, this mystery had lasted only a matter of weeks, but Christopher Reynolds had endured decades of unanswered questions. He’d had no better idea than the police on what had become of Clive, and seemed appropriately distressed at the news of Bennett’s guilt and death. And relief. There would be no more blackmail, no one watching his every move and snooping on his computer. Not that Christopher would have access to any of that. He was going to prison for the rest of his life. Which might not be all that long. Hudson knew all too well what they did to baby touchers in the clink.
Kasper had completed a slow circle around the table. “I was gonna say, getting that evidence, all those years ago when you spied on Clive taking Morgan and Ava up to the lake house. Pretty impressive, I gotta admit. You got pretty close.”
Christopher shrugged.
Kasper paused, his hip level with Christopher’s shoulder. “But maybe it was seeing Morgan that wasn’t easy. On your family’s turf. Your two worlds crashing into each other. Would she tell them that you’d gone to a place called The Ruins with the intent of torturing her? Of course, she’d have to explain what she, herself, had been doing there. And would she even recognize you?” The detective took a step, and then another until he was across the table from Christopher Reynolds. “You couldn’t help yourself, could you? Once a perv, always a perv, right? You called her onto your lap. And when you realized she had no idea that you were her father’s jealous brother, or that you’d paid her a visit at The Ruins, you gave her your business card. To keep her close, I’m sure. To get her to trust you. You knew she had nothing; could tell just by looking at her that she would take any job that came her way. What did you have planned for her, Christopher? Or were you just enjoying watching Bennett toy with her? You know, it was his little game of cat and mouse that led Morgan—and the police—to you.”
Suddenly, Hudson had a flashback to Morgan sitting on the back of his couch, eating pizza and swinging her stockinged feet moments before she showed them the footage from The Ruins. How he missed her now that she was no longer in his orbit. Her disappearance felt like another death.
“Let’s dial this back, huh,” said Kasper after a beat. “So, when Morgan Mori showed up to photograph the Christmas party, did you believe that Bennett hired her on purpose?”
“One hundred percent,” said Christopher. It was the most direct answer he’d given since entering the interview room.
“To fuck with you, or what?”
Christopher cracked open the water bottle on the table and took a drink. “Everything Bennett did was by design. He always had the ability to think light-years ahead.” The words came easier now. It was as though each one he spoke was a weight lifted from his chest.
“Good quality for a private equity guy,” noted Kasper. “And once you recognized Morgan, you told Eleanor. Who got on the phone with Officer Garrison.”
Christopher nodded.
“You said earlier that Garrison knew too much. What do you mean, exactly?”
“Everything,” said Christopher. “The Porsche, how it got in the lake…”
“How did Clive Reynolds’s Porsche end up in the lake?” asked Kasper.
Hudson listened, then, as Christopher Reynolds confirmed Muntz’s story—omitting the detail of the young girl’s underwear. It began with insurance fraud. Clive needed money to pay off his mistress, Ava, but he didn’t want to leave a paper trail and he’d already embezzled enough from his own business. So, he turned to his brother, Christopher, for help.
Christopher, who despised him.
Christopher, who wanted everything Clive had: wealth, status, Eleanor.
“He asked me to make it disappear,” said Christopher, “while he went up north with Eleanor and the kids for the Fourth of July weekend.” He dragged a nail at the label that had been softened by condensation, and began to peel it off the water bottle.
They all knew what happened afterward. “You could have burned it,” said Kasper. “All your DNA and fingerprints would have been scorched off by the time anyone showed up to investigate.”
A light smile tugged at Christopher’s mouth. His whiskers bristled. “I could have.”
“But you got greedy.”
Christopher shrugged, but as Kasper went on to give details about Christopher’s escapade in the Porsche, his face reddened. Hudson watched the old man’s pulse beat in his ruined neck. “You took the Porsche for a ride,” said Kasper. “Enticed some young female to ride shotgun, according to her story, anyway.” When a pair of vertical creases appeared between Christopher’s brows, Kasper added: “The victim’s come forward. She saw on the news that you were in custody and she came down to the station. She was fifteen at the time. Fifteen when some dude pulled up to the curb in a black Porsche and offered her fifty dollars for a hand job and to sniff her panties.”
Christopher didn’t look up. He kept picking at the label until it was shredded on the tabletop.
“Then you drove it to a chop shop to sell it for parts. Be honest, Christopher. Did you go there looking for a fight? Chop shop in this area—did you honestly think they’d be able to afford a car like that?”
Christopher said nothing, and Hudson feared he was done talking.
Kasper switched gears. “How old were you when Clive asked you to get rid of his car? Mid-forties?” He slid a photo out from underneath the pile and dragged it in front of Christopher. Hudson squinted to see a photo he recognized from Eleanor’s stash—they’d gone through the entire thing in the time that had transpired, piecing together a mosaic of Clive Reynolds’s life and death.
It was the photo of Clive and Christopher grilling burgers, where Christopher wore a “Kiss the Cook” apron and was undeniably in peak physical condition.
“Sure,” said Christopher.
“In pretty good shape, yeah?” Kasper paused for a beat. “People say you have anger issues.”
Christopher’s head jerked in the detective’s direction. “Who says?”
“That’s unimportant.”
“Who says?” Christopher’s voice grew louder.
But Kasper pushed through. “So, you’re in good shape. You’ve got some anger issues. Now you’re forced to do your brother’s dirty work and you can’t even get a decent price for the Porsche he wants you to dump. And on top of all that, there’s the whole blackmail thing, right? Gary Hernandez saw the underwear and threatened to tell police you were soliciting sex from underage girls. Lucky guess, or had you earned a reputation, Christopher?”
Silence. In the observation room, Hudson stole a glance at both Kole and Riley who both held their breath, listening.
“I mean, you had no choice but to bash the guy’s face in with a torque wrench, right?” pressed Kasper.
When Christopher said nothing, Kasper asked: “What did Clive say, when you eventually told him? When he realized that his little scheme cost a man his life. Maybe two. You didn’t know Muntz would make it out alive, after you made him dump the car in the lake, did you?”
Christopher’s side-eye told Hudson that he knew he did. “I watched from the pier.”
“And you didn’t finish him off?”
“Some people are worth more alive than dead. I’d already put fear in him. He was mine.”
The last three words sent a chill down Hudson’s back. He was mine. Ronald Muntz had been Christopher’s puppet, just as Christopher had become Bennett’s.
“You thought a lowlife like Ronald Muntz could come in handy,” said Kasper. “Like when you needed him to dump the gun at Tobias Shannon’s place. Interesting that you chose Shannon, of all the criminals in this city. How did you know he was related to a cop?”
Christopher leaned back in his chair. His shackles scraped across the floor. “It’s a small town. Detective Hudson was the common denominator, with his connection to Officer Garrison, the stolen Porsche, and to Morgan. I watched her go up to his house once. I knew there was something going on. So, I asked around. All information has a price. It’s just that sometimes only the rich can afford it. I found out that we had something in common, too. You see, I, too, know what it’s like to have a brother you hate, and yet, for whom you’d do anything.”
Hudson felt the weight of the words settle on his shoulders. Christopher had him pegged, and he despised the fact that they indeed shared this similarity. He waited for Kasper to throw a glance at the two-way mirror, but he didn’t. “So, you gave Muntz the gun to plant, and then you killed him when he was no longer of use to you.”
“He said too much,” replied Christopher, and Hudson was reminded of the decoy suicide note in Muntz’s blood-spattered room. I have seen and said too much.
“Take me back to that night,” said Kasper. “December nineteenth. What happened between you leaving Eleanor’s Christmas party and showing up at Muntz’s place with a gun?”
Christopher sat forward, laced his fingers. He looked up at Kasper and took a breath, as though he was finally ready to reveal the crux of why he was there. He licked his lips, but he didn’t speak. Moments of the same stinging silence passed by.
“Tell me what happened.”
To his credit, Christopher divulged every damning detail of that night. How he’d hurried from Eleanor’s to take care of Garrison before he could connect with Morgan and tell her who she was—and what was rightfully hers. “Who knew what the girl was entitled to,” he said. “What she could take. It was a concern of Bennett’s. He obsessed over it, always thinking about that strange key and the money it had to lead to.”
He’d been right about that, at least, Hudson thought as he remembered the stacks of bills that had been in the call box one moment and gone the next.
Christopher had changed out of his Santa Claus getup only to realize he hadn’t brought a change of shoes. In a hasty effort to disguise his rather conspicuous red boots, he went to the garage, where he knew David would have a collection of spray paint. His account aligned with the order of events that police had assembled upon unearthing Morgan’s car buried in the local salvage yard.
The owner called in a complaint after noticing his gate had been busted while he was out of town for the holidays. Surveillance video showed Christopher depositing the Civic and being chased down by the junkyard mutt. He lost a boot in the skirmish: red suede, spray-painted black. The contour matched the outline Kole had photographed in Eleanor’s garage, and Hudson’s lucky, educated guess at the code granted the police entrance: 1978, the year of Clive’s Widowmaker.
A good year, as Garrison would have said.
“The Fast Mart is, what, four miles from the estate?”
Christopher shrugged. “Give or take.”
“But Garrison wasn’t in his vehicle like you expected him to be?”
“No.”
“He was inside the store. Getting a coffee.”
“Yes.”
Kasper paused at the front of the table. “Let me take a wild guess. Disguising the homicide like a robbery wasn’t premeditated, either. Spur-of-the-moment logic, right? Because who would suspect a Reynolds of robbing a gas station? You people wipe your asses with hundred-dollar bills when the rest of us—” He stopped, perhaps startling himself with the volume to which his voice had risen. “You know, I guess the rest of us don’t have it so bad, either,” he said quietly. “At least when I go home, I don’t have to worry about a knife in the back.” He slapped the tabletop twice. “Just say it for the record, Christopher, and we can be done. Did you kill Brix Garrison on the night of December nineteenth?”
Christopher dragged his gaze toward the two-way mirror. He wasn’t stupid; he knew people were behind it. The unseeing look was the same one Hudson had become accustomed to in Sensitive Crimes, when his subjects stared through him, as though there was someone else in the room. This time, there was. Kole stood beside him, jaw clenched, as they both held their breath and listened for the confession all of Black Harbor had been anticipating.
“Yes,” said Christopher.
The word set Hudson free. He exhaled and felt the tension he’d held for the past two weeks uncoil inside him. Kole set his hand on his shoulder. They’d done it. Not only had they cracked Black Harbor’s most notorious cold case, they were about to lock away one of the city’s seediest characters for good. Black Harbor would never be Mayberry, but it was better off without Christopher Reynolds stalking its streets.
“Just one thing.” Kasper’s voice was less stern. Instead, there was an inflection that only accompanied genuine curiosity. He turned off the recording device. “Off the record. Why didn’t you lawyer up?”
Christopher sighed. His breath rattled deep in his chest. “Because I’m just so goddamn tired.” And Hudson thought it might be the truest thing anyone in an interview room had ever said. He sank to his knees and knew nothing, then, but the sound of himself weeping and Christopher Reynolds’s shackles dragging across the linoleum.
Now, Hudson stood in a place he’d never been before. Pebbles skittered down a steep slope before disappearing into a vast canyon. Evergreens grew out of the cliffside, their roots thick and rippled like muscular arms thrust into the rock and hanging on for dear life. The air was heavy and laced with fog. From his vantage point in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, he could see the verdant mountains that Garrison had never gotten to.
Garrison’s Harley-Davidson leaned against its kickstand, parked in front of a grove of trees. Hudson walked away from it, taking in the beauty of the forest and the rivers that wound through the foliage thousands of feet below. He understood, now, why Garrison had come out here. People didn’t go to Hart’s Pass to die on its precipitous roads over six thousand feet above sea level; they came here to live. To see nature and the wonders of the world unfold before them. To realize how small we all are in the story of the universe.
He’d driven for two straight days, spending a night each in Minnesota and Montana, and finally he was here in Washington at the state’s highest point reachable by car—or motorcycle. In that time, he’d thought a lot about what had happened in the past six months.
Almost immediately following Christopher’s arrest—being arraigned on three charges of first-degree intentional homicide, grand theft auto, and multiple charges of sexual assault dating back to July 2000—Tobias was cleared of homicide charges. He was still doing time for dealing cocaine, but as long as he behaved, he wouldn’t be in for more than a few years.
Hudson unbuckled the leather saddlebag by the bike’s back tire and withdrew a black box. He opened the lid and touched the fabric of Garrison’s eight-point cap. “Leave it to you to have unfinished business all the way out here,” he said. He knelt, then, laying the box at the base of a tree. “Rest in honor, old friend.”
A tear trailed down his cheek as he stood and returned to the bike. Reaching back into the saddlebag, he felt the familiar weight of his black memo pad and thought about Morgan running out of his house that day when she’d seen the faded red ticket tucked between its pages.
She was the reason he was still alive. The memories of that morning came back to him like images broken into shards of ice. He saw the light flare in Bennett Reynolds’s eyes again like a blown fuse, and then the tops of the evergreens getting smaller as he fell backward, crashing through the frozen pond. And then darkness, broken only by blades of moonlight. A rusted chain. Morgan’s bright red scarf floating like a gash in the water. He’d grabbed hold and pulled himself up into the freezing air. But where he’d expected Morgan to be, her heels dug into the dock as she strained to pull him up, was only a post, and a bloodstain quickly being overwritten by fresh-fallen snow.
Later, when Kole and Kasper came to collect him from the local hospital where he’d been stitched up, they informed him a snowmobile had been discovered abandoned at the Canadian border. Months passed without seeing hide nor hair of her while Hudson settled into his new position in White-Collar Crimes, until a few weeks ago, when her mother reopened her bakery, Lynette’s Linzers.
And then, something had arrived in his mailbox, just before he left for Hart’s Pass. Standing at the top of the world now, Hudson opened his memo pad to reveal a plane ticket, tucked inside like a bookmark.