“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s better.” He said it simply. No joke underneath. “It’s a hell of a lot better, Ben.”
He held my gaze for another beat. Then he opened the door, got in, and started the engine.
I stepped back and watched him pull out of the lot, the SUV turning onto the main road and disappearing behind the row of pines that lined the station’s perimeter.
Jolly met me at the door. Tail going, ears forward, his whole body a question about where I’d been and whether anything interesting had happened.
“Just me, bud.”
He followed me through the hallway to the dining room.
The investigation wall was still up. Seventy-five faces staring back at me in their neat rows under the overhead light. The same grid Donovan and I had built weeks ago,sorting a department into categories of suspicion. Low-risk. Medium-risk. High-risk. The crude system that had been our starting point and, as it turned out, close to our ending point too.
I started taking the photos down.
One by one. Methodical. The same way I’d put them up. Briggson came off first—his permanent scowl unchanged since the day we’d pinned him there. Then Reeves. The kid who delivered food five nights a week to save for a ring. Then the administrative staff, the records clerks, the faces that had been low-risk from the start and had stayed there.
Vance’s photo came off. Chief Rawlings’s.
The photos accumulated on the counter in a stack that grew with each pass across the wall. I worked from left to right, top to bottom. Faces I’d studied for weeks reduced to a deck of cards being collected after a game nobody won.
The last photo was the one I’d known would be last. I peeled it off the wall and held it.
Martinez. The guy who always seemed to have his phone out. Who’d told jokes during training and done a dead-on impression of Briggson that had made a whole room lose it. A decent cop who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
I set the photo facedown on the counter.
The wall was bare. The room looked bigger without it. Just white drywall and the faint outlines of where tape had held paper, the ghost of an investigation that had started with suspicion and ended with something sadder.
I gathered the files from the counter. Stacked them, squared the edges, slid them into a cardboard box I’d kept in the closet. The photos went in on top. I folded the flaps shut and ran a strip of packing tape across the seam.
Done. I’d return it all next time I was at the station.
I stood in the empty dining room. The overhead light was still on, casting the bare walls in flat, even light. Thecounter was clear. Now it was just a dining room in a rental house that didn’t have a dining table in it, which was something I should probably fix at some point if I was going to stay here for any length of time.
Which was looking more and more likely. I wasn’t even a little bit sure what to do with that information.
The clatter of the doggy door broke the silence. Jolly, heading out to his favorite place in the world.
I walked to the kitchen window. He’d already crossed the yard and dropped into the grass beside the fence gap—not the alert, purposeful positioning of a working dog, but the boneless flop of an animal settling into his most treasured spot. He rolled onto one hip, stretched his front legs out, and fixed his eyes on the opening in the cedar.
Nobody was coming. It was a school day. But Jolly didn’t seem to care about the odds.
I watched from the window. The yard needed mowing. The fence needed staining. The dog lying in the overgrown grass had decided this was where he belonged, and he was more sure about it than I’d been about anything in months.
I could definitely understand it.
I turned off the dining room light. Found a glass in the cabinet and filled it with water and drank it standing at the sink, looking out at the yard. A normal thing. The kind of thing a person did in a house where they lived.
Jolly’s tail moved against the grass. Slow. Steady. Waiting for a boy who would be home in a few hours.
I put the glass in the sink and went to find a tape measure. If I was going to buy a dining table, I should probably know what would fit.
Chapter 23
Kayla
