An hour later, Dalton’s on the deck again, having done … Honestly, I have no goddamn idea what he was doing.
He settles into his chair, and I walk out there, Abbygail’s file in hand.
“Read it?” he grunted.
“Nope.” I dump the file on his lap. “I will, but first you’re going to tell me about the case.”
He snorts.
“Oh, sorry,” I say. “Am I interrupting your whatever the hell you’re doing out here? The answer is nothing, Sheriff. You’re doing nothing. You’re sitting on your ass and ordering me to read files when the best person to discuss this town is you. Tell me about Abbygail Kemp. Then I’ll read the file.”
He goes inside, and I think he’s refusing. I start to follow, only to see he’s switching his coffee for a beer. He comes back, sits, and takes a long drink from the bottle. Then he sets it down and says, “Abbygail Kemp is my fucking biggest failure as sheriff, Detective.”
I think I’ve misheard. Or this is some sarcastic faux confession. One look in his eyes says it’s not.
“She came here at nineteen. Youngest resident we’ve ever had, and I fought tooth and nail to keep her out. Didn’t want that kind of responsibility. Like taking a teenage girl and dropping her off in the middle of Las Vegas at midnight. I said hell no. I’m not a babysitter. It was Beth who talked me down. Said she’d take responsibility. And the girl’s story…” He shook his head. “I wasn’t arguing that she didn’t need help. I just didn’t think she needed Rockton.”
“Her story?”
“Ran away at sixteen. Drugs. Prostitution. The family situation…?” He shifted in his seat. “I won’t pretend to understand the family situation, Detective. I know my limitations, living up here, and so I read up on stuff like that. I still don’t understand because, to me, it’s black and white. If your kid runs away and sells her body for money, you must be shitty parents.”
“Not necessarily,” I say. “If she was into drugs before she left, that would explain a lot.”
“I guess so. Anyway, leaving didn’t mean she hated her parents. She got herself into trouble on the streets, though. Big trouble. She ran home. The trouble followed. Some gang guys set her house on fire. Her parents didn’t get out in time.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. She was a fucking mess when she got here. Strung out and hating herself and hating anyone who tried to help, including Beth. But Beth wouldn’t give up on her. No one did, Detective, and that’s what you need to understand about this town. People here pull shit they never would down south. What’s that saying? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas? Same in Rockton. Except here, you can’t be an asshole and fly home the next day. You need to live here. So, as fucked up as it is, when things go really wrong, most people will pitch in to make it right. Someone like Abbygail shows up, and folks do their best. Eventually, she understood we weren’t putting her on a flight home, no matter how much shit she pulled. And she understood I wasn’t going to let her pull that shit. She spent nights in the cell. She spent days on logging duty. A year later, she was working for Beth, training as a nurse, making plans to go to college when she got out of here. And then…”
He trails off and takes a long draw on his beer, finishing it. “Mick saw her heading into the forest one night and gave her shit for it, and she turned around … but only long enough to make him walk away. Beth woke the next morning to find she’d never come home.”
“Why would she go into the woods?”
“She liked the peace and quiet of it. Her parents used to take her to the mountains every summer, and I guess those were good memories. I did everything I could—Fuck, no. That’s an excuse. If I’d really done everything to keep her out of those woods, she would never have gone in. I tried to manage the situation. Let her join the militia, come on patrols, gave her time in the forest under supervision.”
He looks at me. “You think I’m an asshole, Detective. I am. I’m going to ride you and everyone in this town every chance I get, and I’m going to be very clear who’s in charge. This is why. Because just when I think maybe I’m too hard on people, something like this happens, and I realize I can’t be hard enough.”
I don’t tell him this wasn’t his fault. That no matter how harsh he is, people will find a way around the rules, and with a young woman barely out of her teens, that goes double. He knows that. He doesn’t want absolution.
He continues. “It was the biggest search this town has ever seen. Round-the-clock manhunts for the first week. I don’t think Will or Mick slept the whole time.”
Not Dalton, either, I bet.
“Daytime searches for another week,” he says. “By that time … by that time we knew we weren’t looking for a survivor. We kept at it, though. No one was happy when I finally called it quits. Had to, though. Time to accept that we’d failed.”
“You said this was two months ago?” I say.
“Seven weeks.”
He still counted it in weeks, probably only recently stopped counting it in days. That’s what you do with the cases that haunt you.
“So about four weeks before Irene was murdered,” I said. “Five or so weeks before Powys disappeared.”
“Yep.”
“You think there’s a connection,” I say. “That Abbygail didn’t just wander into the forest. No more than Irene Prosser nearly cut off her own hands.”
He reaches for his beer. Remembers it’s empty and makes a face.
“Could Abbygail have been murdered?” he says. “I am not the person to make that determination. Not me. Not Will or Beth or Mick or anyone else who feels responsible for what happened.”
I take the file. Before I go in, I murmur, “Thank you. For explaining.” If he hears, he gives no sign of it. He’s already staring into the forest again.
* * *
Night falls. I’m packing up to leave, and Anders comes in.
“Want to grab a drink?” he asks.
I don’t. I’m in a funk, thinking about Irene and Abbygail, and all I want to do is go home and curl up and maybe have a shot of tequila on my own. But I get the feeling that drinking alone out here is the first step toward darkness. What I really want to do is see Diana. But she’s avoiding me.
I tell myself it’s temporary. Low self-confidence causes her to stay with guys like Graham, and it also means sometimes she decides she’s stuck in my shadow and needs to escape for a while. She’ll back off until her confidence returns.
Tonight, though, the loss of Diana just seems one more weight on the load already dragging me down. I’m in this godforsaken town with cannibals outside and a killer inside, and now the friend I’ve come here to help has abandoned me.
So no, I don’t want to go for a drink. But there isn’t any reason to take out my mood on Anders, so I say, “Okay,” then, “I need to drop a few of these files at my place. I’ll meet you—”
“Those files stay in that cabinet,” Dalton cuts in from across the room.
“All right,” I say, as evenly as I can. “I’ll drop off my notes—”
“Your notes stay here, too.”
I turn on him. “Excuse me?”
He’s sitting at the desk, doing paperwork. He doesn’t even lift his head. “It’s nine o’clock at night. You’re going for a drink. Work will wait.”
“All right. I’ll finish a couple of things and lock them in the file cabinet. Are we going to the Roc or the Red Lion?”
Silence. I look over at Anders.
“The, uh, Roc…?” He turns to Dalton. “You explained, right? About the Roc?” When Dalton keeps working, Anders curses under his breath. “Of course not. Stupid question.” He looks at me. “The, uh, Roc is for … Well, the women there … It’s not really a bar as much as . .”
“It’s a brothel,” Dalton says.
I turn to him. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“No, I’m pretty sure I didn’t, because there’s no way in hell you’d allow a house of prostitution—”
“Not my call.”
“It sure as hell is your call, Sheriff. You’ve told me this town has a problem with the lack of women. I went to see Diana last night and got hassled by three men on the way there. Then I’m knocking on her door, and the next thing you know, a guy is offering me a hundred credits for sex.”
“What?” Anders says.
I look at him. “You’re shocked? Really?”
“Hell, yes. No one should—”
“You live in a town where women do, apparently, sell sex, and you’re honestly shocked that a woman would need to deal with being offered money for sex? It’s called the setting of expectation and precedent. Sure, I’m not a whore, but no harm in asking, right? You just gotta find the right price. And if you can’t? Well, from the looks of your sexual assault file, I think we know what they do when they can’t find the right price.”
I don’t wait for a reply. I scoop up my notes and the case files, and I walk out.