4. Sell His Soul
FOUR
Sell His Soul
Harry
H arry’s thoughts were all over the place on his drive out to metaphorically bang his head against the wall at the Zowkower compound.
He should be going back to the station. Getting his shit tight. Re-reading that email from Coeur D’Alene. Re-assessing what little they knew about the bones they’d found in that grave on the side of that mountain.
But he didn’t because after meeting Lillian, it was now burned on his brain.
Man. Woman. Both in their mid to late forties.
Both died of gunshot wounds, and they knew that because they’d found the bullets in that hole with them, surmising they had once been in their bodies, along with bullets that had made the holes in the skulls.
He tried to rein it in, the varied directions his mind was leading him, but he could still feel Lillian’s grief wetting his shirt, and Harry knew all about grief.
So he was struggling.
He’d been in this business a long time. You get to know people, how they think, how they work, the fucked-up shit they get up to, the stupid mistakes they make, the depths of denial they could dig.
It didn’t take fifteen years in law enforcement to follow the trail of Dern dicking with Lillian’s parents, a clear frame-up happening with the Dietrichs (only for any investigation into that being mysteriously dropped when the Rainiers couldn’t be found), the Rainiers leaving town, and Lillian finding Willie, a good-looking bad guy with a way with the ladies, though he was the least of the trouble that was the mess of the Zowkowers.
But Harry had fifteen years of law enforcement and all of that tracked.
Something else tracked.
Something he didn’t want to think about, but something he couldn’t stop thinking about.
Twenty-five years he’d lived in that town with Lillian Rainier, and he’d never noticed her.
He was five years older than her, so he wouldn’t have run into her at school.
She said she’d come to a town council meeting, which likely meant she regularly attended, as did many residents of Misted Pines, and he couldn’t for the life of him place her there.
How he didn’t notice a beautiful woman with long, thick auburn hair, sparkling green eyes and a fantastic ass, boiled down to two things.
First, from the moment he met her, he saw no woman other than the one he’d made his wife.
Second, a year into their marriage, his wife died, and when she did, he saw nothing and did nothing but take care of his dogs and do his job.
Christ, he knew it at the time, which was the reason he got so damned pissed about it, but now it was crystal clear that his buddy, Doc, who’d gotten up in his face a year ago about this, was right.
For all intents and purposes, Harry had died when Winnie did.
When Lillian opened her door, it felt like someone hit him with a defibrillator.
It got worse after walking into her house, seeing her comfortable living room that shouted Home! And her warm, busy kitchen that stated clearly someone cooked there and liked doing it.
Fuck, it even smelled like cinnamon, rosemary and yeast. Like she’d just made cookies, a roast and bread.
That kitchen was a kitchen any person on the planet would want to come home to.
That kitchen was the kitchen, especially with the woman it belonged to, any cop would sell his soul to call his.
Both the kitchen.
And the woman.
This took him to the next thing that was on his mind.
That being, Willie Zowkower homed in on a young woman who found herself suddenly alone, and very vulnerable. Harry had no doubt he charmed her, took her hand in marriage, and then got his rocks off by fucking with her for fifteen years.
And that pissed Harry off.
It pissed him off so much, it was the years of suffering his loss that eroded the extremes of his emotion, the years of working under Dern that honed his level of patience into a weapon, that made him not blind with rage about it.
Especially coupling Willie targeting Lillian with the fact that Dern had targeted Avery Rainier.
One thing Harry could not abide was a cop abusing his position.
He’d lived under that too, and he’d hated every fucking second of it.
But whatever happened that made Sonny and Avery Rainier run had followed them to Idaho, and Dern was a son of a bitch, but Harry didn’t peg him as a murderer.
He had to get a lock on it.
He had no doubt Rita Zowkower, the matriarch of that clan—and considering the numerous run-ins they’d all had with her, she was known somewhat affectionately by LEOs as Ma Zow—was going to be the one who would open the door.
She was sweet as sugar to your face, lethal as a snake if you threatened one of her boys.
Going up against her, Harry had to have his shit together.
He had no idea if hyena mommas acted like lionesses, but if they did, Rita would be their queen.
She had five boys, Willie being the middle. And all those boys cut their teeth on everything from drag racing to joy riding to mailbox bashing to drunk driving, only to graduate to bar brawls and domestic disturbances, dealing, helping themselves to things that weren’t theirs, and one of them (the only one incarcerated, so far) experimenting with cooking meth.
Although he had occasion to drive up the lane to the Zowkower place dozens of times in his career, as he did it this time, he saw something different.
Lillian didn’t have a lot to work with. Harry had been in many houses like hers, and he knew what he saw was half of what she had. The rest were two bedrooms at the back.
But she’d made every inch of it an alluring safe haven.
Even her little bathroom, with its mix of exposed barn wood and white-painted shiplap on the walls, the claw-footed tub resting on ornate chrome feet under the back window, the droopy, fernlike trees growing out of pots in wicker baskets flanking the tub, the square bowl of a sink resting on top of a long vanity that was designed to make the most of the space, was welcoming and invited you to hang for a while.
Rita Zowkower had done the same with the eight-acre compound that was her domain.
If you didn’t know who lived there, you wouldn’t know this was the den of iniquity it was.
The house was essentially a massive log cabin broken up by a foundation of stone. Hearty landscaping was perfectly clipped and augmented by beds and borders of bright annual flowers.
He could see the fenced garden off to the side with late-growing pumpkins, squash and vegetables still verdant green. The fortified-against-predators chicken coop with fancy chickens right then pecking and tottering outside it. The pristine pole barn on the other side that Harry knew housed snowmobiles and ATVs.
Harry owned four acres south of town. He kept it shipshape, but it hadn’t been a home since Winnie died. And he had to admit, Winnie was no homemaker.
They’d had a deal. He did the cooking, because he liked it, she did the cleaning, because she enjoyed seeing the results of her efforts. He took care of the land; she took care of the animals.
But there would never be any pots of button mums on his porch, or fresh flowers on his kitchen table, not because Winnie wasn’t energy and adventure and light and love, but because that simply wasn’t her thing.
She’d loved daisies, so they’d had another thing: Harry bringing her daisies once a week. It could be a Monday. It could be Saturday morning when he’d run out and grab some for her. But Winnie knew, once a week, she’d get daisies from her man.
So it was Harry that put the cut flowers in their home.
He wondered now, with the Zowkower place spread before him, what Lillian could create with his land.
And that was entirely fucked up.
She’d just learned there was a good likelihood she’d lost her parents for good.
And he was an emotional disaster.
As he drove up and parked next to a shiny-clean, silver Ford F-350, he spied the woman of the manor walking out the front door.
He knew she’d wear no makeup, but she had skin of a woman ten years younger. At her age, her hair couldn’t be that healthy blonde naturally, but it looked it, and the attractive ponytail it was pulled back into appeared fashioned by a professional’s hand.
Over a tank, she was wearing an old, oversized flannel shirt that had probably been her husband’s, or one of her boys’. This topped jeans that had dirt on them, but they weren’t dirty. All of this covered the trim, fit, average-tall body of a woman in her early sixties, but if you didn’t know that, you’d think she was no older than her early forties.
He got out of his cruiser and started toward the walk, raising a friendly hand.
Rita crossed her arms and waited for him at the top of the steps but belied that closed posture by painting a welcoming smile on her face.
Or, maybe it actually was welcoming.
With Rita, you never knew.
“Well, sheriff, you sure know how to brighten a girl’s day,” she called when he got closer.
Rita Zowkower used everything at her disposal to keep her clan safe and free, including flattery and flirting.
He stopped at the foot of the front steps, wondering if he had rifles trained on him, though he didn’t reckon he did. Her boys might be pissants, even her husband, but there wasn’t a stupid bone in Rita’s body. She’d never make that kind of mistake, no matter if Harry was there to haul one of her kin away. She’d figure out how to get him back without landing her clan in deeper water.
Or, like the son of hers they caught, she’d sacrifice him for the greater good of the whole but get him the best attorney money could buy so he wasn’t away from the gang for long.
He already knew this visit was a wasted effort, but Harry was coming to terms with a lot of shit that day, apparently, including equating his mother’s constant lament at how stubborn he was with just how long he held on to losing his wife.
He shook off that thought and noticed Rita had work gloves sticking out of her back pocket, and he wondered if he’d interrupted her gardening or burying a body.
Harry launched in with, “You probably know why I’ve come out this way.”
“Told you before, don’t mind sayin’ it again, sheriff, my boy just upped and disappeared. Reported that to you months ago. Not sure he was even in this state when that assault occurred. Not sure where he is. Was hopin’ you’d find him.”
She did indeed file a missing person’s report on Willie.
She did that the day after twenty witnesses reported they saw Willie beat the absolute shit out of a man at The Hole, a bar on the outskirts of town.
He now had more information, about bigamy, about Willie leaving the country, he just had to be careful not to throw Lillian under the bus when he used it.
“This is what I’ve come out here about, Rita,” Harry lied. “Don’t want to get your hopes up, not certain how valid this information is, but got word Willie’s up north.”
Nothing showed on her face. Not surprise, not what he knew she was doing: running down the possible culprits who might have let this information slip.
“Up north?” she asked.
“Canada. Vancouver way.”
Again she gave him nothing, except, “Not sure what my boy would be doin’ up there. Got no family up that way.”
“Well, facing an assault charge with a fair few witnesses who say it was him, on top of a drunk and disorderly and destruction of property, figure, with his record, he’d go about anywhere to escape the law.”
There was a slight raise of her chin before, “Even an innocent man would flee, he fears his freedom taken away when he didn’t do anything wrong.”
Harry figured that was absolutely true, considering it appeared like Sonny and Avery Rainier did just that.
Harry lifted a boot and rested it on the step in front of him, but made no other move to get closer to her.
And then he did what he’d never done since it happened, something he was willing to use to get Willie Fucking Zowkower in one of his cells and on a path to justice for putting a man in the hospital and pulling shit with Lillian.
“Winnie and me,” he started quietly, and Ma Zow came out when he saw her take a soft, indrawn breath and the skin around her eyes gentled, “we didn’t have the time to start a family. But the way I loved her, I know the babies we would’ve made would be everything to me. Since I know I’d do the same for Winnie, I figure I’d do it for our kids, that being anything to keep them safe. Now it might go against the grain for you, thinking what’s safest for your boy is for him to turn himself in and answer for what he’s done.”
When he saw the gentle seep out of her features, he changed tacks.
“Or follow the path of justice that man who spent three days in the hospital deserves and find himself exonerated and free to be with his family if he didn’t do it. But things can get messy when we gotta call in other agencies, Rita, like me phoning up to Vancouver to get them to be on the lookout for your son. And if they find him, extradite him down here. Judges tend to get crotchety when someone strains the resources of an already thin law enforcement arm with an unnecessary and prolonged chase, paperwork, and all that shit. Things ease up a whole lot when someone comes forward to answer a few questions, or admit what they’ve done, apologize for it, and face up to the consequences of it.”
It was a day of surprises, he noted, when it looked like she was considering this.
He gave it a beat.
She said nothing.
So he sighed and shared, “My next step is a call up to Vancouver. You think on what I’ve said. We’ve got our eyes peeled and we’re gonna widen the net. One thing I reckon, we’ll have Willie home soon.”
Only then did she give him something.
Her mouth tightened as Harry took his foot off the step.
“You take care of yourself, Rita,” he bid.
“You do the same, sheriff,” she replied. And he had to hand it to her, there was warmth in her tone, like she meant those words.
Then again, maybe she did.
He jerked up his chin and headed to his cruiser.
Rita Zowkower remained on the porch even, Harry saw in his rearview mirror, as he drove down her lane, turned at the end, and only then did he lose sight of her.