Barrons, Vermont

December 2014

The Barrons police headquarters looked the same as it always had, squat and industrial. Fiona crunched through the icy crust of last night’s snow through the parking lot and up the walk to the front door. She passed the picnic table where she’d sat the first day she’d told Jamie about the Idlewild story.

Christmas was a few weeks away, and someone had pulled out the department’s box of wilted decorations. A too-short garland made of tinsel sagged over the door when Fiona walked through, and a small plastic Christmas tree, topped with a Snoopy, sat on the dispatch desk. The old cop on dispatch looked up and nodded at Fiona as she came through the door. “Back interview room,” he said. “The chief’s waiting for you.”

Fiona tasted copper in the back of her throat at the words. The chief’s waiting for you. It wasn’t Garrett Creel; it was Barrons’ current police chief, Jim Pfeiffer. Still, she wasn’t quite used to hearing those words. She nodded and kept walking.

The open office had a low hum of activity that went quiet as she passed. Jamie’s desk was empty, his coat gone, his computer off. Jamie was on leave while his father’s case moved through the system.

People watched her as she walked by. This was the effect of being the person Barrons’ beloved longtime police chief had assaulted and nearly killed, the person that had caused his fall from grace. She kept her gaze forward and walked back to the station’s interview room.

Jim Pfeiffer was fifty, fit and vigorous, unremarkable except for the black-framed glasses he wore that made him look more like an engineer from 1960s NASA than a modern-day cop. He shook Fiona’s hand and offered to take her coat before he closed the door of the interview room.

“Sit down,” he said, not unkindly. “I thought we should talk in private.”

Fiona sat. “I already gave my statement,” she said. “Several times, actually.”

“Yes, I’m aware,” Pfeiffer said. “There are a few other things I’d like to go over.” He smiled. “First of all, how are you doing?”

Fiona smiled tightly back at him. “I’m just great. Thanks. Your entire force hates me because your former boss tried to kill me, but that’s okay. I sleep great at night knowing he’s out on bail.”

Pfeiffer leaned back in his chair. “That’s how the system works, Fiona. The judge made a ruling.”

A judge who was one of Garrett’s golf buddies, likely. But Fiona kept quiet.

“We’ve been getting some calls from the media,” Pfeiffer said. “Chief Creel’s arrest was public record, but I’ve been fielding inquiries that contain inside information.” He stared at her from behind his glasses. “Specifically, we’ve been getting calls about a case from 1993, the assault of a girl named Helen Heyer. There seems to be some belief starting up that the Heyer case has to do with Tim Christopher.”

“Is that so?” Fiona asked.

Pfeiffer sighed. “Please, Fiona, drop the act. We all know the Heyer case was one of your crazy theories before all of this happened.”

“Yes, of course,” Fiona said. “I had a crazy theory, and Garrett tried to kill me to shut me up. But my theory is crazy. Sure thing.”

“It will go through the standard channels of investigation,” Pfeiffer said, the exact phrase he’d used at the press conference. “But we don’t appreciate media muckraking over this.”

“Then talk to the media who are doing the muckraking, not me.”

“Except it is you,” Pfeiffer said. “It isn’t you making the calls, but it’s you feeding them. Please don’t insult me by suggesting otherwise.”

Fiona stared down at her hands and said nothing. She’d known from the first that none of it would be followed up properly—not Garrett’s cover-up of Tim’s assault on Helen Heyer, not Garrett’s attempts to cover Deb’s murder. Her father had raised a journalist, not a fool.

So she’d called Patrick Saller, the journalist who had written the original article about Deb’s murder for Lively Vermont in 1994. Patrick was freelancing now, and Fiona had offered him everything she knew about the police corruption case that was about to unfold—a case that tied back to Deb’s murder, to the piece Patrick had written, even back to the interview he’d done with Richard Rush in which he’d stated that Tim Christopher had eaten ice cream in his shop at nine o’clock. Saller had remembered every detail of the case, and of his own piece, and had jumped on the lead.

But she wasn’t telling Pfeiffer that.

“Okay,” Fiona said. “You’d like the media to leave you alone. Anything else?”

Pfeiffer shook his head. “I’m not getting through to you, am I?”

“Like I said, you need to talk to the reporters who are calling you, not me.”

“There’s a Web page,” Pfeiffer argued. “It’s called the Tim Christopher Truth page. There’s a bunch of garbage on there about police misconduct on these two cases. Christopher’s lawyer has caught wind of it. He says he might sue.”

“Interesting,” Fiona said. You can’t sue someone you can’t find, she thought.

“There are social media pages. There’s some hippie lawyer involved, working pro bono. Someone’s made a podcast. Fiona, this is crazy.”

“Well, there are a lot of crazy people out there,” Fiona agreed. “None of them are me.”

Now he was angry. “It’s you and your father, and you know it.”

Fiona suppressed a smile. Malcolm might not have known much about modern technology, and he couldn’t have made a Web page or a Facebook post to save his life, but it didn’t matter. Malcolm knew everyone. No one could muster the right people to get a message out more quickly, or in a more sophisticated way, than Malcolm Sheridan. He had Patrick Saller on his side, as well as a retired civil rights lawyer from his Vietnam days. He also had the support of Jonas Cooper, Fiona’s editor at Lively Vermont, who knew a few tech geeks from the local community college.

And when it came to exposing the attempted cover-up of his daughter’s murder, Malcolm was both connected and motivated. Lighting a fire under the cops was his God-given talent.

“I wouldn’t care about all of this,” Pfeiffer said. “People post shit on the Internet all the time. My problem is that yesterday I got a call from BCI. They’re opening an internal investigation into Garrett Creel and four of my other cops for criminal misconduct.”

Fiona tried not to show her shock. That was new to her. She didn’t think even Malcolm had any sway with the state police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. That was why they’d come up with the Internet campaign.

“This is just the start,” Pfeiffer said. He had a head of steam now. “There will be more names. I’ll have to put more guys on leave, which makes me understaffed. I have to pay for overtime, which shoots my budget to hell. Morale is going to be a problem. I’m hardly swamped with recruits here. I still have to get up every morning and work in this community.”

“And this is my fault?” Fiona said. “He covered for my sister’s killer, and then he tried to fucking kill me.”

“I get it. I do. It makes me mad. But I have to catch the next Tim Christopher who comes along.”

“Then your cops shouldn’t have tried to cover for the first one.” Fiona pushed back her chair. “We’re done.”

“Call off your dogs, Fiona,” Pfeiffer said.

“I told you, they’re not mine.”

“Just answer me one question.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“I read your statement. You say Garrett told Tim to dump the body in the woods, to buy time before it was found. Yet Tim dumped it in the field. His words, according to you, were ‘He dropped it and ran.’ ” Pfeiffer paused. “That doesn’t seem to fit, does it? Tim was cool enough to call Garrett that night, cool enough to go along with the plan.” He looked at Fiona through the lenses of his glasses, and she could see he hadn’t missed a detail of this case. “Why do you think he botched it up so badly? Why did he lose his nerve?”

Fiona had actually thought about this; it was true the facts didn’t fit. Unless you remembered that this was Idlewild. “I think something scared him,” she said. “I think he dumped her and ran because he was afraid.”

Pfeiffer’s brows rose. “Tim Christopher was so scared he ran?”

“Yes.”

“What could scare him that badly?”

She’d thought about this, too. Lain awake wondering about it, actually. What had Mary Hand shown him? What sights, what sounds? Tim Christopher, a murderer—what had she reached into his mind and shown him that was so frightening he’d dropped Deb’s body and run?

She shook her head at Pfeiffer. “We’ll never know,” she said. “But I really hope it was horrible.”

Her breath puffed before her as she walked away from the station. When she rounded the corner of the building, heading for the parking lot, she stopped when she saw the figure leaning against her car. Her heart pounded, and suddenly she felt light-headed, as if the sudden jolt of happiness could make her fly away.

“Jamie,” she said.

He moved off where he’d been leaning and stood straight, his hands in the pockets of his coat. The cold wind tousled his hair. He looked paler than he had the last time she’d seen him, but his vitality hadn’t dimmed, and he held her gaze with his own, his look dark and worried. “Hey,” he said. He cleared his throat, looking her over. “Are you . . . okay?”

She was quietly, surprisingly elated to see him; what should have felt complicated suddenly didn’t feel complicated to her at all. But Jamie was tense, his posture hard. “Sure,” she managed. “I’m fine now. How are you?”

“All right, I guess,” he said. “I saw your car by accident. It was an impulse. I guess I can’t stay away from this place. I’m not stalking you.”

“Good to know.”

He glanced past her to the station. “You’ve been to see Pfeiffer?”

“I was summoned.” Fiona crossed her arms. “He’s pissed about the BCI investigation. He blames it on me. But I think he’s going to figure out pretty quickly who’s behind it.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and she watched the wariness drain from his expression like water. “I didn’t instigate it—given what’s happened, they opened the investigation themselves. But I’m cooperating, Fee. I’m giving them everything I know.”

“About your own father?” she asked gently.

“He covered for Tim. He tried to kill you. He shot at me.” Jamie shook his head. “But I told you before all of that. I was already done. And I meant it.” He gave her the ghost of a smile. “I guess it’s safe to say I’m not going to be a cop anymore.”

“So what will you do?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think of something. Maybe I’ll take up woodworking, or buy an apple orchard.” He took his hands out of his pockets, and she saw the bandage on his hand. “I hear journalism is a particularly lucrative career, except I can’t write for shit.”

That made her laugh, the sound brief before it died again. He didn’t have to be a cop to do good, to help people. Maybe in time he’d realize that. “Jesus, Jamie,” she said, rubbing a hand over her forehead. “What a mess. How is your mother handling it?”

“Not good,” he said, looking grim. He glanced at her. “She blames you, at least for now.”

Of course she did. She was a cop’s wife, a cop’s mother. His mother hates me and his father tried to kill me, Fiona thought. This is never going to work.

As if reading her mind, Jamie said, “So what now, Fee?”

She looked around at the cold, empty street, beneath gray skies that threatened more snow. At the police station behind her. At the man in front of her.

What now?

And then she took a gamble.

“Do you want to go for coffee?” she asked him.

He thought it over, and then he answered.

But he didn’t have to. She already knew what the answer would be.