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“Jesus Christ,” North muttered.
He tried to think of a way to say no. He tried to find an escape hatch, a release valve. Hell, he’d settle for a Wonkavator. Anything to get Shaw out of this. But the sharp, fierce beauty of Shaw’s face was set, and North recognized the expression, knew that he’d lost this fight the way he’d lost most of them. He brushed that errant strand of hair away again, kissed Shaw once more—just a brush of lips, but he went slowly, the way you move when you’re holding glass. Then he pulled back, looked for the darkness in Shaw’s eyes, and found only Shaw—hazel, the rims red.
“Well, then,” North murmured, “fuck me.”
4
The county jail was attached to the rear of the sheriff’s station, which sat in the center of Wahredua alongside several other government buildings. A few of them, like city hall, were remarkable pieces for a town this size—built when civic pride meant spending the time and money to do things right, in limestone and bronze. Other buildings, though, showed the inspiration of budget restrictions and committee groupthink: long, low buildings that had been thrown up when land was cheap and available, and when the driving aesthetic imperative had been brown.
“Brown’s making a comeback,” Shaw decided to tell North.
“No, it’s not.”
Sheriff’s department cruisers crowded the parking lot, many with their lights still flashing, and North parked a hundred yards off. Men and women milled around with the purposeless activity of people who didn’t know what to do but didn’t know how to leave, either. Many of them wore deputy uniforms—or, like one guy with sleep-tousled hair and boxer shorts to complement his uniform shirt, parts of their uniform—but others were clearly paramedics, and others had the look of administrative personnel. It was a small town, and tragedy meant people you knew.
North and Shaw made it through most of the restless crowd without more than a few side-eye glances, but as they drew closer to the sheriff’s station, a square-jawed guy darted into their path and held up a hand. He wore a rumpled deputy’s uniform, and he smelled—to borrow a phrase Shaw had heard from North and would never have used himself, on account of being sex positive—like a two-bit whorehouse.
“Hold on,” the guy said, in case putting his hand up wasn’t clear. “You can’t go in there.”
“We can,” North said, detouring around him, “and we are.”
“Hey!” the man barked, prancing backward, hand going to the gun at his side. “I’m ordering you to stop right now!”
North stopped. He gave the man a slow up-and-down look. It was similar, Shaw thought, to the time North had caught Shaw and the puppy arguing over who was going to get to sleep with North that night. That sounded silly, Shaw decided. Nobody argued with a puppy. They had been negotiating.
“Buzz off,” North said.
The deputy’s eyes flicked to him and back to North. “I don’t know who you are, but—”
“Jackass, the chief of police sent us over here, so you can call Chief Somerset and clear it with him. While you do, my partner and I are going to get to work.”
For a moment, the deputy looked like he might back down. Then his face hardened, and he opened his mouth.
“Let them through, Moore.” The voice belonged to a woman who stood in the station’s doorway, backlit by the yellow wash of interior light. “McKinney? Aldrich?”
“That’s us,” North said as they started forward.
She wore the brown uniform of a deputy, and her nametag said Weiss. She was past forty, on the stocky side, her brown hair cut short. She gave Shaw a familiar negotiating-with-the-puppy look, and when she turned to face North, Shaw caught a hint of a limp in the way she carried herself. Now, up close, Shaw could make out the film of shock covering her features, and beneath it, the deeper layer of grief. After checking their IDs, she jerked her head for them to follow, and they went inside.
They didn’t go far. She stopped in the lobby and said, “Chief Somerset said to give you whatever you need. What do you need?”
“We’d like to see Dalton Weber’s cell,” North said, “as well as the route the sheriff would have taken. Then anything you can give us that might help with finding Welch: security footage from before the cameras went down, visitor logs, phone records.”
Weiss nodded. “The cell’s locked down until Highway Patrol can get here and process it—Chief Somerset’s orders. But I can walk you past it, and you can take a look.”
“That works.”
She took them down a hallway that led toward the back of the building. The station looked like a lot of government facilities Shaw had been in: the high-traffic carpet squares with a microdot pattern meant to disguise dirt and wear; painted cinderblock walls that never quite looked like they were meant for human occupation; sterile pieces of non-art mixed with informational posters about how to run a neighborhood watch or what to do if someone left their briefcase at a bus station (SAY SOMETHING!). One of the posters had to be from the Depression—it showed a woman in a nightgown and curlers peering out her door at the suspicious outlines of two tramps, bindles over their shoulders. The words were simple: NOT IN OUR TOWN.
“Jesus,” North muttered.
“I have those curlers,” Shaw said.
North tried twice to slap him upside the head, but both times Shaw was faster.
It was silly, yes. It was stupid. It was, Shaw knew—because he could hear his mother and father saying it in their own distinct ways—wildly inappropriate. But it was the lifeline he and North threw each other when the darkness was too deep to swim in. Plus, it was fun, and it made North smile, and that went a long way toward pushing the nightmares back.
Instead of taking them through the visitors’ entrance to the jail, Weiss unlocked a steel security door and led them through a suite of offices. She stopped where another security door was propped open. Inside, a bank of monitors showed empty screens. Large windows looked out into the jail’s chow hall. “As you can see, the cameras are still out of order. The tech is supposed to come out tomorrow and tell us what happened.”
