It was a harsh transition to drive down from the mountain a couple of hours later, back into the tumult of the town. By the time Jericho arrived at the sheriff’s station, Kayla had already had her meeting with the feds, and she shook her head when Jericho asked her about it.
“They listened,” she said. “They’re going to investigate.”
“But they’re not putting a rush on it,” he finished for her. “They’re not treating it as a priority.”
“They’re gathering information, they’re going to talk to some experts back East, look at the two cases, try to sort something out.”
“He knows we’re on to him. He’s disappeared before.”
“What do you want me to say? What do you wantthemto say, or to do? They can’t arrest him with no evidence any more than we can.”
“Goddamn it,” Jericho said, mostly to the ceiling. All the peace and relaxation he’d found with Wade had drained right out of him, and he was back to being tense and frustrated. “So what are we going to do?”
“We’ll keep working the case. Keep trying to find evidence. Now that he knows we’re on to him, we can talk to his neighbors, bring him in for questioning and try to shake whatever alibi he’s got cooked up. I don’t think we’ve got enough for a search warrant, but I’ll talk to the prosecutor about it, see what she says.”
“And Will? You’ll talk to her about getting Will out?”
“I’ll talk to her,” Kayla said. “But, shit, Jay, he’s still our best suspect. He’s the only one we’ve got any damn evidence against.”
“I’m going to get him a better lawyer. Someone with more experience, more fire.”
“You’regoing to do that,” she said. “You mean you’re going to pay for it? Yourself?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
She gave him a long look, then said, “Be smart about it. Talk to Ned Appleby and see if he’ll be your beard. Hell, see if he’ll go further than that. He was trying to raise money for Will’s bail, so see if he’ll try to raise money for this, instead. You can chip in whatever you need to, but get the Applebys and anyone else who believes in Will to give a little too. This town takes care of its own, you know, and if they believe he’s innocent, they’ll step up. But they need to do it with the Applebys in charge, not you. Okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” Jericho agreed. No point in making things more difficult for Kayla than they had to be, and an under-sheriff publicly supporting the defense in a sheriff’s department case would definitely not help appearances. “I’ll talk to him.”
He stood up and was halfway to the door of her office when she said, “Jay?”
He turned to see her burrowing through the purse she stashed in her desk drawer while she was on the job.
“Here.” She pulled all the bills out of her wallet. “And let me know if I can help any other way.”
“You sure? Might come a time when you’d like to honestly say you weren’t involved in this.”
“Might come a time when I’d like to honestly say I was,” she returned, and stretched the bills a little farther toward him. “Either way—at least I’ll know I did what I thought was right.”
It was probably unnecessarily saccharine, but he said it anyway. “You’re a good sheriff, Kay. Doing what you think is right? That’s how the person in this jobshouldbe making their decisions. They shouldn’t be worried about politics or people-pleasing or whatever else Jackson is always up to. You know that, don’t you?”
“I think I’m good at the job, or I wouldn’t be doing it. But what the people think?” She shrugged. “We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.”
“I’d really like to punch your dad in the face.”
“You’ve wanted to punch him in the face since you were fourteen years old. Don’t go digging for an excuse, Crewe.”
“You’re okay, though? I mean—” What the helldidhe mean? “You want to get a drink sometime and bitch about shit, let me know.”
She nodded, and he let it go.
It took about ten minutes to drive down to the hardware store and talk to Mr. Appleby, who responded with the enthusiasm Jericho would have predicted. The man was the kind of Christian who Christ probably would have actually liked.
After that he went out to the highway and pulled over a couple of speeding cars with out-of-state license plates, just so he could feel like he’d done something vaguely constructive with his time. Of course he should get in touch with Fernandez and let her know how the case had changed, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. She cared too much, and it would hit her hard when she found out things had gotten screwed up again.
But that way of thinking was too damn passive. Things hadn’t just gotten screwed up, Jericho had screwed them up. He could find excuses for himself—he hadn’t known what he was digging into at the start, so there’d been no reason to be stealthy about how he got his information—but that wasn’t good enough. He’d found Wooderson sufficiently strange to be worth investigating, so he should have made sure everyone knew his questions were confidential. Mrs. Andarov was a busybody, but she wasn’t a psychopath; if he’d tried, he probably could have persuaded her to keep her mouth shut at least for a while
As it was, he’d tipped off a murderer because he’d been too damn casual in his investigation. Whatever Wooderson did after this, whoever he killed next, that woman’s blood would be on Jericho’s hands.
