ELEVEN

Three days now since the autopsy. Sheriff Hart and Jess and Tyner Gillies were turning the county over, looking for the person whose lipstick they’d found on that discarded wineglass. Asking everyone they could whether Brock Boyd had a girlfriend, someone who might know something.

“Could be we’re barking up the wrong tree,” Gillies suggested. “Could be Boyd was just a guy who liked wearing lipstick.”

They’d considered the possibility, however unlikely. But Boyd’s master bedroom betrayed no such predilection. Nor did a deep dive into the rest of his belongings. He owned no women’s beauty products, no women’s clothes. A search of his laptop revealed his tastes aligned pretty close with those of your average heterosexual American man. In truth, the only signs whatsoever of a woman’s presence in the home were the lipstick stain on the wineglass and a smudged, partial fingerprint that didn’t belong to Brock Boyd or anyone else in the database. 

To this point, however, the mystery woman hadn’t shown her face. And whoever she was, nobody was willing to talk to Jess or Gillies or Hart about her.

Then the call came in to Hart’s voicemail. The tip was anonymous. A gravel-rough voice, indistinct and unrecognizable. The sheriff played it for Jess in his office.

“Mason Burke killed Boyd.”

Four words. Nothing more.

For a short while, the sheriff and his deputies set aside Brock Boyd’s love life.

*  *  *

They had plans for dinner. At least Mason hoped they did, relations between him and Jess being somewhat strained since she’d found out about the fight, nearly a week ago. She’d straight-up blown him off the night after she’d found Boyd’s body, told him some line about not feeling so good, the lie as transparent as the beer Troy Phelps was pouring at the Cobalt these days.

Not that Mason supposed he could blame Jess. He hadn’t meant to fight with Boyd, and he knew he’d made a mistake. Knew he’d slipped up, just a little, back to the man he’d had to be in the Chippewa pen, where no matter how much you wanted to stay peaceful, sometimes you had to fight to survive.

He hadn’t needed to fight Bad Boyd. A part of him, though, had wanted to, and he was ashamed of it now. He could see how he’d fallen in Jess’s estimation. He hoped that tonight, their standing date night out at the Chinese place in neighboring Clallam Bay, he could start to rebuild her trust.

He finished up the workday at Jess’s new house, dropped Rengo in town, and drove Lucy and the Blazer up to Hank Moss’s motel, where he used Jess’s spare room key to let himself in and clean up. The Nootka had a makeshift showerhead mounted above the toilet, but it was weak, in a tiny little room, and it tended to drain the boat’s meager water supply. Mason tried to shower at the motel instead, as often as he could.

So he showered, shaved, and cleaned up in the bathroom filled with Jess’s fancy soaps and beauty supplies, dressed in a fresh pair of blue jeans and a button-down shirt, gave Lucy her dinner, and then turned on the TV and settled in to wait for Jess to come home.

He’d never been much of a sports fan but found himself watching hockey, the East Coast game ending and a game in Los Angeles getting underway, puck drop for the latter at 7 p.m., Jess already running behind. Mason watched the TV with Lucy sprawled out on the bed beside him, and he rubbed her belly and thought about Brock Boyd some more.

Jess wasn’t saying much about the investigation, though Mason could understand why, it being about the biggest crime Makah County had seen since, well, Kirby Harwood. The funny thing was, even Rengo was tight-lipped about it, and Rengo hardly ever shut up. Boyd’s murder had put a shock through Deception, from what Mason could tell. He wondered how Jess and the new sheriff were getting on.

The late hockey game was well into the second period by the time Jess showed up, the lights of her Makah County cruiser raking the window, painting beams on the wall opposite the bed. Mason listened to her car door slam, heard her fumble for her keys and unlock the room, watched the door swing open, and then there she was.

She saw him and stopped. Blinked. Beside Mason, Lucy’s tail thumped on the bed, and the dog stood and stretched and jumped down and went over to Jess, nuzzled at her hands where they hung down at her thighs.

“Everything all right?” Mason asked Jess. She hadn’t moved from the doorway. “Tonight’s our night, right? The Golden Palace?”

Jess blinked again. Nodded, slow. “Yeah,” she said. “Right.”

He watched her come into the room, set her bag down, and start to unbutton her coat. She stopped midway through, hesitated. Looked around the room like it was somewhere she’d never seen before.

Mason heard alarm bells in his head. Wondered if she was having a flashback, some kind of trigger sending her brain back to Afghanistan.

The episodes had gotten better since she’d returned to Dr. Wiebe in Port Angeles. But Mason knew those memories must still be lurking down there, under the surface, and he figured it was going to take more than a few months of talking to get Jess to the point where she wasn’t bothered anymore.

“You okay?” He hit the TV remote and swung his legs off the bed. Stood. “Listen, if tonight’s no good, we can stay here instead. I’ll rustle up some food from the diner.”

She still hadn’t moved, and he made to walk over to her, planning to hug her or hold her or at least help her with her coat. But when he stepped toward her, she flinched a little, like she didn’t know him.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Tell me about that fight you had with Boyd,” Jess said. “Down at Spinnaker’s.”

She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the floor about five feet away from her, toward the bathroom. There was something in her voice like she’d been carrying the question around with her the whole day.

“I guess I told you most of it already,” Mason said. “I come out the restaurant and he was petting the dog. I told him to stop, and he didn’t like it so much. We scrapped some but it was nothing big.”

“Tim Turpin called Gillies at the detachment about it,” Jess said slowly. “Must have looked pretty big from where he was standing.”

Mason shrugged. “Boyd’s a big guy—was a big guy. So’m I. Tim’s—well, you know.”

Tim Turpin was not a big man. Nor was he the kind of guy, Mason supposed, who’d seen many fights in his life.

“That the last time you saw Boyd?” Jess asked.

Mason stared at her. Wondered if he’d misheard her, if he was misreading the subtext behind her question. “Look, what’s going on here?” he replied. “Where’s all this coming from, anyway?”

“The night he disappeared: Where were you?” She still couldn’t look him in the eye. “You got someone can account for your whereabouts?”

“What is this, Jess, an interrogation? Are you thinking I had something to do with—”

“Where were you, Burke? That’s all I’m asking.”

He let out a long breath. Sat back down on the bed and studied her. He supposed he ought to have known this was coming, though he’d have expected it to be Sheriff Hart who asked the questions, not Jess.

“I was on the boat,” he told her. “You had the night shift. Me and Lucy ate dinner, and I guess we turned in early.”

Jess didn’t say anything. Didn’t react.

“Nobody to vouch for my whereabouts,” he said. “No alibi.”

Still nothing. Mason watched Jess and felt numb, the weight of what she was asking like a stone on his chest.

Finally Jess shifted. “Hart got an anonymous phone call,” she said. “Said you did it. Killed Boyd.”

Mason barked out a laugh, incredulous, and Jess’s eyes flashed with life as she spun to face him. “You fought him, Burke. The day he probably died. And as best I could tell, it looked like he kicked your ass.”

He felt it then, a cold kind of fear, the knowledge of just how alone he was out here in Deception, an outsider. How much more alone he would be without Jess. “You want to arrest me, Jess?” he asked, standing. “Are you seriously thinking I did this?”

“Burke, no.” She brought her hand up, rubbed her face. “I don’t know. It’s just—Hart wants answers.”

“He send you to bring me in?”

Jess shook her head. “I didn’t know you’d be here. Our plans—I forgot.”

Mason stared at her a beat. “So what do you want to do?” he asked finally. “I’ll go down and see Hart if you want, tell him—”

“No,” she said quickly. He could see she was scared too. “You stay away from the sheriff, Burke, if you don’t have an alibi. Keep your head down until this blows over.”

“I didn’t kill him, Jess,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Jess said nothing. She couldn’t quite look at him. Was she scared for his sake or her own? Could she really believe he’d have done something like this?

He waited, and Jess still didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t kill him,” he said again, but the words sounded weak and insignificant on his lips, a flimsy barrier against the storm he knew must be coming for him.

*  *  *

Jess lay awake long after Burke was gone. Beside her, Lucy stretched out and snored and chased imaginary squirrels. Jess stared up at the stain on the ceiling and listened to the odd car pass by on the highway outside, and wondered what in the hell she was thinking.

Dinner hadn’t happened, obviously. They’d agreed, half-heartedly, to take a rain check, and Burke had excused himself shortly thereafter, looking at Jess with a kind of urgency in his eyes that scared her, a plea for something she couldn’t quite bring herself to grant him.

Truth be told, Jess knew some shady anonymous phone call was no good reason to start measuring Burke for handcuffs and a prison jumpsuit. There were people in Deception who didn’t like Burke, saw him as a threat who’d come through and caused violence, who’d contributed to the deaths of three good Makah County boys and put a fourth in prison for the next two or three decades. Burke had enemies, and in a county as small as Makah, people talked. Rumors spread.

Still, though. Burke had fought with Brock Boyd on the day he’d been murdered. And it wasn’t like Burke was a stranger to violence. He’d killed for her before, on Dixie Island. Was it so impossible that he would kill for Lucy too?

Jess couldn’t wrap her head around it. But if she was even considering the question, Jess knew damn well and clear that the rest of Makah must be too.

Including Sheriff Hart.