“Nah. I don’t know,” Kirby says, his eyes darting over her shoulder in a way that makes Callie think the opposite.
“You sure? You don’t want me to have to come back and take a look around, see if there’s anything I missed this morning that might be relevant to my case.”
He turns and looks over his shoulder, making sure no one else will hear. “Rumors are Fauver is in on it. But you did not get that from me, right?”
“Who is Fauver?”
“Billy. Billy Fauver. But please. It comes down to it, I didn’t give that name to you.” Callie looks him over. He’s really scared. There’s a new neediness in his voice, his jittery movements and that evasive stare have turned focused, intent.
“Why are you afraid of him?”
Kirby looks at Callie with disbelief. “You wanna stay alive? You don’t piss that guy off.”
Back at thestation she shuts the door to her office—something she almost never does—and dials Jenna. She wills herself to concentrate on something blank, simple: the cup of pens on her desk; the patch of wall discolored from where someone had once hung a framed picture.
She gets Jenna’s voicemail again.
“Mom. Please let me know you’re okay. I just… Just call, all right? Or text. Anything.”
The girl—whose name was Layla Hart—let Callie drive her to the hospital in the end, silent and seething. Callie had walked her to the check-in desk at the ER, offered her her cell phone number if Layla needed any help down the road. But she still can’t shake it, the chill that runs through her every time she has to pull someone back from the edge.
A half hour passes before another call comes in, Keegan asking for backup on an accident scene. Robbins and Latour are engaged on a theft issue at the Stop and Shop. Or so they say. Callie will besure to look for that incident report. She sighs, gets the details on the accident location, and tells Keegan she’ll make her way over there.
She drives west,passing a cranberry farm. A yellow school bus in the parking lot. A field trip—though she can’t help but wince at the sight of the bus. There’s a row of kids toeing up to the edge of the bog in bright sweatshirts. One of the mothers on the trip bends over her daughter, smears sunscreen on her cheeks, as the girl tries to duck away.
At the accident site she finds Keegan standing next to a conversion van that wrapped itself around a tree on the town’s little Main Street, where there is a general store, a gas station, a pizza parlor.
She approaches the vehicle. In the back, stacks of long, narrow cages.
“Muskrat traps. One of them got loose. Driver tried to catch him without pulling over first,” Keegan tells her, gesturing at the twisted van, more stacks of traps lined up on the side of the road. She squints and can make out fur between the bars. She toes closer until she can see the muskrats’ twitching whiskers and hand-like paws, the long snake of their tails.
“What’s the plan for these guys?” Callie asks.
“We can’t tow the vehicle with them in there. Let’s free them and call it a day,” Keegan says. Keegan and the older guys give her shit, but the tenor is different from the younger cops. Something if not quite avuncular, at least not pointed.
She puts her fingers on the bars of one of the cages.
“Careful you don’t get bit. They can have rabies.”
“Why do they trap them?”
“You can dye the fur, make it look like mink.”
“There a lot of money in imitation mink these days?”
“It’s resourceful, I’ll give them that.”
She waves a sedan around the flares and cones, though she can tell the driver wants to linger, rubberneck. “I guess.”
She waits a beat to ask the next question. “I’ve been looking intothat Baby Doe case from the ’90s. You were on patrol when they found the baby, right?”
“Rookie. Just took my test the year before.”
“How about my mom? Did you know her?”
Keegan falters. Takes a minute to put together his thoughts. “Not really. I was a few years older. But I knew it was a kid who found the baby.” Keegan shakes his head. “God knows how that would mess with you.”
“It just seems like in a small town, people would talk a little more. About something like this. They would have theories about who might have been involved.”
