This Liam, not so much. He wondered if Jim was right and he should pull the plug, or at least start planning for it. State troopers were well paid and the time he had served in the Bush would amp up his pension admirably, and he was pretty sure Wy still had the first dime she’d ever made. They wouldn’t be rich but they would be comfortable. He could learn how to hunt and fish, fill the freezer every year. Maybe travel some. He hadn’t been out of the country since college.
God, that sounded boring. He wondered what Wy was doing, and what she was wearing, and how quickly he could get her out of it that evening.
They had woken up that morning to make love, do form on their new deck, showered together, made pancakes and eaten them together, and he’d left her reluctantly when it was time to go to work. But then that was always the case. She had disappeared out of his life once. He didn’t ever want that to happen again, and some part of him lived in fear that she would.
The window was open and a mild, cool breeze carried in the scents of autumn, woodsmoke, unpicked berries rotting on the vine, fallen leaves decomposing. He heard a noise like the sound of someone knocking on a metal door. He looked around to meet the beady black eyes of a huge raven sitting on a spruce bough almost exactly level with his gaze.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Kraaaack—kraaaaaaaack,” the raven said.
The bird wore coal-colored feathers that looked as if they’d been oiled. He was at minimum two and a half feet beak to tail and had fed well enough this past summer that he significantly bent the branch he was sitting on.
“I thought I left you behind,” Liam said. “Like a long fucking way behind. Like far enough behind I wouldn’t have to put up with you anymore.”
“Koo-kluck-kluck-kloo-kluck,” quoth the raven.
“Do it to me again and again” Donna Summer sang behind him.
“Kraaack!” With one beat of his iridescent wings the raven was aloft and gone.
Liam spun around and picked up his phone. “Hey, Brillo.”
“Yeah, yeah, happy fucking Monday to you, too, Campbell.”
At least he wasn’t operating at a Barton decibel level today. “You have the results back from the DNA?”
“Yeah, the kid is definitely Joshua Petroff.”
“How soon can you release the body? His family wants him home.”
“As soon as I sign off on the paperwork.”
“Let me know and I’ll send Wy to pick him up.”
“Yeah, listen, I got something else going on here. Something weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah, weird. As in freaky, creepy, spooky. Weird. I told you how the kid died, somebody bashed his head in.”
“I remember.”
“Yeah, well, I think the same weapon that killed the kid was used to kill Erik Berglund.”
Liam sat up so fast he pushed himself away from the desk and banged off the windowsill behind him. “What?”
“I told you, weird, right? There’s a kind of corner, almost but not quite a right angle to the impact depression in both of the skulls. I measured and it’s almost exactly the same size in both. It’s higher up on the kid and lower down on Berglund, but I’m pretty sure the same thing was used both times.”
“You realize Joshua Petroff and Erik Berglund were killed thirty years apart?”
Brillo sounded testy. “I can read a report.”
“Are you sure the wound on Berglund’s head wasn’t from the old injury?”
“What the hell, Campbell? I told you the old injury had healed to the point I could barely tell where it was, let alone what caused it. Oh, and if you could get your other girlfriend the hell out of my hair, I’d be grateful.”
“My other—”
“The scribbler. She’s been on me about this PM the whole goddamn week. She annoys me even more than you do and that’s saying something.” Brillo hung up.
Liam let the phone drop into its cradle and picked his jaw up off the floor. He looked down at the square.
Couldn’t get around without a cane.
But Blue Jay Jefferson had been with him that night.
As if Liam’s thought had conjured him out of the ether, the door to his office opened and Blue Jay Jefferson thumped in with his walker. He didn’t look happy. He was carrying Hilary Houten’s cane and he dropped it on Liam’s desk. It knocked the phone out of its cradle and then the entire phone crashed to the floor.
Over his shoulder Ms. Petroff said, “I’m sorry, sir, I tried to stop him.”
“It’s all right, Ms. Petroff. As you were.”
She disappeared without closing the door.
Liam picked up the phone and set it back on the desk. There was a chip out of the handset but there was still a dial tone. He put it back in its cradle and looked up. “You have something you want to tell me, Mr. Jefferson?”
“I didn’t know about the kids,” Jefferson said, and sat down.
“Hil came back across the Bay with me after the Chamber do,” Jefferson said. His face was set, his mouth a straight line.
“That afternoon Garvey Halloran came over on his Bayliner. He’s a volunteer for the fire department, and he was there when you pulled that skeleton out of the cave.” Some emotion must have crossed Liam’s face because Jefferson snorted. “Garvey went to school with my kids. They’re all living Outside now so Garvey checks in on me. Since
