The weathered door of The Bucket swung open too easily as Beck pulled the handle, and sure enough, a patron had been pushing it from the other side. They each offered a quick apology as they traded places, the outgoing man squinting against the fading evening light while Beck stepped into the familiar dimness of the bar.
He paused just inside the threshold to let his eyes adjust. The interior featured low ceilings, scuffed hardwood floors, and a long mahogany bar that ran nearly the length of the room. Neon beer signs cast a warm, hazy glow over the patrons, and the familiar scent of aged whiskey and grilled burgers hung in the air like a welcome mat. On any other night, both would have tempted him, but he’d already eaten dinner. He wasn’t here for a drink, either.
He scanned the room, searching for one person in particular. It was also a relief to confirm that neither Kinsley Aspen nor herpartner occupied their usual back booth. His encounter with her at The Local Plow two days ago still irritated him. She hadn’t even bothered with pleasantries before launching into an attack, practically accusing him of stalking her with his continued interest in the Gantz story. All she’d really accomplished was confirming what he’d already suspected. There was something more beneath the surface, something Kinsley was trying very hard to keep buried.
Beck made his way toward the bar after locating his source at a table across the room. He was already drawing glares from a handful of off-duty officers who had no doubt finished their shifts for the day, but he didn’t pay them any attention.
He understood the dynamics.
The Bucket was their territory, a refuge for locals seeking solace and officers unwinding after long hours, and a journalist walking through the door was about as welcome as a health inspector at a barbecue. That was fine. He didn’t need them to like him. He just needed them to keep drinking and not listen too closely.
“Draft, right?” The bartender and owner, known around town simply as Tap, nodded in recognition as Beck approached. He was already reaching for a pint glass without being asked, a courtesy that suggested Beck had been in here more often than he probably should have over the past few months.
“Thanks,” Beck replied, sliding onto an empty stool. He positioned himself at the corner of the bar where he had a clear sightline to Sergeant Laura Mitchell’s table. She would spot him eventually, and she’d come over on her own time. Pushing would only make her dig in, and he’d learned from experience that Laura Mitchell did nothing on anyone’s schedule but her own.
She currently sat at a high-top with some fellow officers, their laughter occasionally rising above the low hum of conversation and the classic country music playing from thejukebox in the corner. As Tap placed the golden beer before him, Beck’s thoughts drifted to the reason he was here.
Calvin Gantz.
The name had been lodged in Beck’s mind like a splinter for the better part of two years. The exclusive interview he’d landed with Gantz during the trial had launched his freelance career and simultaneously earned Kinsley Aspen’s lasting animosity. Most journalists covering the case had focused on the sensational aspects. Three women murdered, their throats slashed by a man who wanted a front-row seat to their deaths. The horror of it had sold papers and driven clicks, and the media had been content to feed the public’s appetite for the gruesome details.
But Beck had taken a different approach.
Rather than rehashing the crimes themselves, he’d examined the killer and, more specifically, the peculiar relationship between Gantz’s legal counsel and the arresting officer. Father and daughter. George Aspen, the veteran defense attorney, had taken on the case of the man his own daughter had spent over a year hunting down. The article had practically written itself, and the piece had been picked up by national outlets within days, giving Beck his first real taste of recognition beyond the Bismarck newsroom where he’d been grinding out local stories for years.
He took a slow sip of his beer, the bitterness matching his mood. Despite what Kinsley believed, he hadn’t written the piece to undermine her work or humiliate her family. He’d followed the story where it led, which was what journalists did. What they were supposed to do. The fact that the truth had been uncomfortable for the Aspen family wasn’t his fault, and he’d long since stopped apologizing for it, even in the privacy of his own mind.
What he couldn’t stop doing was thinking about what came after. Calvin Gantz had been acquitted on a technicality. A forensic technician named Elliott Goff had been bribed by a reporter to photograph and film the inside of Gantz’s house during the active investigation, and the defense had seized on the breach to argue that the crime scene had been compromised. It had been George Aspen, of all people, who’d uncovered the lapse. He’d overheard his daughter on a phone call with her partner discussing the technician’s misconduct, and he’d used that information to dismantle the prosecution’s case from the inside.
And then?
Calvin Gantz had simply vanished.
That was the part that wouldn’t let Beck go. Men like Gantz, men who had courted media attention at every opportunity, who had discussed book deals and television interviews from the courthouse steps with the confidence of someone who believed he was untouchable, did not simply vanish. They performed. They calculated. They played games with the public’s attention because they fed on it. A man like that didn’t slip quietly into obscurity. He either surfaced somewhere bigger and louder, or something had happened to make sure he never surfaced at all.
Beck had spent months tracking down leads, interviewing Gantz’s former associates, piecing together the man’s final known movements. He’d found no credit card transactions after the acquittal. No phone calls. No social media activity. No forwarding address, no utility accounts opened under his name, no rental agreements or property purchases anywhere in the country. It was as if the man had evaporated into thin air, which, in Beck’s experience, was not something people did voluntarily. People who disappeared on purpose still left traces. They rented apartments under assumed names, they used prepaid phones,they made mistakes. Gantz had left nothing at all, and the absence of any trail was itself a kind of evidence.
The official line in Fallbrook was that Gantz had left town after his acquittal, driven away by community hostility. Some speculated he’d moved to another state, changed his name, started fresh somewhere nobody recognized his face. Others whispered darker theories about vigilante justice carried out by the father of one of the victims. But no one seemed to care enough to dig deeper. The town was content to let the story end with his disappearance, treating it as a kind of cosmic justice that spared them the discomfort of having a freed killer living among them.
Beck wasn’t content with that outcome.
As a matter of fact, he’d never been content with convenient endings.
A movement in his peripheral vision pulled him back to the present. Laura had risen from her table and was exchanging goodbyes with her colleagues, gathering her phone, and collecting her purse from the back of her chair. She said something that made the group laugh one more time, then turned to walk toward the bar.
Toward him.
She moved with confident strides, her gaze fixed on his as she came to a stop beside his stool. She tilted her head and studied him with an expression that managed to be simultaneously amused and guarded. Her dark hair was shorter than when he’d last seen her, the ends now barely touching her shoulders, and the new cut gave her a sharper look that suited her.
“I thought you went back to Bismarck,” Laura said, using her eyes to gesture toward the empty stool beside him.
“I got a little sidetracked,” Beck responded as he slid his drink down a space and shifted over, allowing her to take hisoriginal seat at the corner. “You know how it goes. One story leads to another.”
Her perfume, something subtle with notes of vanilla, drifted his way as she settled onto the stool. He turned slightly, allowing himself a moment to appreciate her company. There was an ease between them that surprised him every time, given that she was a sergeant and he was a journalist and the two professions had roughly the same natural affinity as cats and water.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No need,” Laura replied, reaching for his glass with casual intimacy. She lifted the beer to her lips without breaking eye contact, taking a slow, deliberate sip that left a faint imprint of lipstick on the rim. The gesture was both possessive and challenging, a statement rather than a question.
