Callie #2
“Not a cop, thank you very much.” Thank God, she thinks.
“No kidding,” Reynolds mutters.
“I better get back there.”
“All right, Hauser.” Collins has a wink in his voice but for once it’s not mocking.
Maybe it’s the beer. Maybe it’s that Collins and Reynolds have split from the other guys. But the question slides out before she can help herself. “Hey. Do either of you know who has been putting shit in my mailbox?”
Collins grins. “So Hauser, there are these nice people in blue. Not like us. They ride around in little trucks. They’re called postal—”
“Shut up. And I don’t get any mail except for the Pine Barrens Gazette.” She thinks of the stacks of papers in her recycling, nothing more than a police blotter and listings for farmers’ markets, classified ads filled with old boats and rusted out cars for sale. “You know what I mean. The animals.”
“What animals?” Collins asks.
“Dead ones.”
“You know? You gotta get off this man-hating, we’re-all-against-you thing, Hauser. Okay, so some of the guys gave you a hard time or froze you out. But we’re not barbarians. We’re not putting dead fucking animals in your mailbox. Jesus.”
He’s a good liar. His outrage is believable, a pulse to it but doesn’t feel too cooked up to be real. Callie will give him that. “Come on. Don’t bullshit me. I let you guys have your fun or whatever. But really. Just tell whoever is doing it … enough.”
Collins and Reynolds fix her with identical stone-faced looks. “I’m telling you, it’s not one of ours. Come on, Reyn. Why don’t we let the lady get back to her date?” Collins throws an arm around Reynolds and steers him away.
When she gets back to the table she apologizes to Adrian.
“I knew I had to talk to them or else they’d keep staring.
I’m sure they imagine me at home every night with my nose in a stack of duty logs and reports.
” She hesitates, wanting to be honest. “Though maybe that’s not too far off from the truth.
” She looks over to see Collins racking up for a game of pool, Reynolds chalking the cue, and is relieved that they’re distracted.
“Is that your usual type? Fellow cops?”
“Oh god, no. Not those guys. Well, the last guy I was with up north was a cop, but that was…” It sounds so feeble, so sad, to say it.
It was about convenience. It was about understanding they were each too wrapped up in the job to give their personal lives a passing thought.
It was about satisfying the animal need for a warm body next to yours every few weeks. “It was nothing, And now it’s over.”
“Glad to hear that.”
And just like that, she sees something new in his eyes, in the fierceness of his stare. Desire. She has to suppress the urge to press the cool of her glass against her flushed chest.
“Okay then,” he says. She likes his smile. The way the lines around his eyes are a little paler than the tan of his cheeks.
“Okay,” she says, and slides her hand into his.
She has a second drink when she gets home, watches another one of the TikToks Jane has sent.
A petite blond with crimson lipstick leans toward the camera.
Get a load of this. Number one on our look back at college murders that were never solved.
Amber Fields, murdered in her dorm room bed on February 14—that’s right, Valentine’s Day.
The image cuts to a pale-pink rose on a white sheet, a smear of what is or is made to look like blood on the petals.
Maybe it’s the drinks or maybe it’s the stupid videos or maybe it’s the sizzle of the goodbye kiss from Adrian—the hard press of his hand on her hip, hint of his tongue in her mouth—but when she lies down she tosses and turns, adrenaline zipping through her.
She’s finally fallen asleep when there’s a pounding at her door, three urgent knocks. She checks her phone and it’s 2:00 A.M.
Jane, she thinks. It can only be Jane. A fall. A blood clot. A seizure. Some ugly aftershock from the accident gripping her in the night.
She runs to the door and flings it open.
Billy Fauver is standing on her front porch.
“Nice place,” he says, and his smile makes her gut drop, puts a metallic taste in her mouth.
She calculates the time it would take to get her personal weapon from the safe, but that would mean turning her back on Fauver, and she doesn’t like that.
He’s a big man, but surely he’s out of shape.
She could hold him off, unless he’s got a weapon she can’t see.
“What are you doing here?”
“And looking nice. Where were those legs the other day, Officer Hauser?”
“It’s Chief Hauser. And you need to get off my porch. Now.”
He puts his hands up. “I only came because I remember something. There’s a name you should know.”
“Humor me.”
“Trent Brentwood.”
“Who is that?”
“A little bitch.”
“You drove here in the middle of the night to tell me this? Why do I need to know the name Trent Brentwood?” As she speaks she’s doing another calculation in her head.
If Fauver had something to do with Jenna’s disappearance, would he really take the risk of showing up on her porch in the middle of the night?
“Let’s just say I have friends keeping their eyes and ears out for me. I heard my name came up at the bar.”
Callie stares at him. Does he mean Reynolds or Collins? Did one of them tell Fauver she was trying to put the screws in them, angling for probable cause? Is this what that look from the biker was about back at the bar? “Who do you mean?” she asks.
He smiles. “Someone pretty close to you.”
Her stomach lurches. Is he talking about Jenna? Is he keeping her somewhere?
“My mother—” she starts, and he raises his hands.
“I don’t have shit to do with that. Or this Riley thing. Look up Brentwood. Ask him what you asked me. Goodnight, Officer Hauser. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” He steps off the porch, whistling into the night.
She follows him. The temperature has dipped into the forties, and her bare legs sting.
Goose bumps rise on her arms. She winces as a rock stabs the sole of her bare foot.
He’s parked far down the lane. Wanted to scare her, or at least catch her off guard.
Couldn’t risk her seeing his headlights, hearing him pull up.
And it also tells her he’s capable of being strategic.
Not just a puppet jerked around by his own impulses.
Someone who could commit a crime and cover it up, or plan a crime and the cover up.
“Fauver. Why did you and Sabrina get into an altercation in front of the bait shop?”
“I told you, she was crazy. She was going on about me ratting her out for stealing something. A necklace some guy had meant for another girl, or something like that. That he was super pissed. But I didn’t know anything about it. What would I give a shit about any necklaces for?”
“Did she say who she stole it from? Who was he?”
“I don’t know. Brentwood was the only guy I know who she was fucking around with. Everyone thought he was such a charmer, but he dropped her fast. You wanna know about what happened back then? I have no idea. Go ask him.”
“What makes you think he’s the father and not you?”
“I never slept with her. She didn’t want to.”
The sting of rejection in his voice is clear even all these years later. She sure as hell doesn’t buy this idea Fauver has of himself as righteous, good, just because he never forced a girl into sex—if he’s even to be believed. “How do you know she slept with Brentwood?”
“She was always trying to make me jealous. All, ‘Trent’s going to take me to prom, Trent and I are hanging out Saturday…’”
“Did it work? Were you jealous?” There’s still a version of the story she can picture with Fauver at the center, jilted and taking revenge on the girl who taunted him, turned him down.
But Fauver only shakes his head and climbs into his car, leaves her shivering in the dark.
Trent Brentwood is easy enough to find in the system.
He’s got a few priors, arrested for possession, a little bit of weed.
A DUI five years back. She’s able to find him easily on social media too.
He’s a skinny white guy, blue-eyed with thick, fringed lashes.
Posts lots of photos of the bay at sunset.
Of himself on the back of a fishing boat.
One in a blood-stained apron with the name of the fish market where he works.
Geotags. Employer. A shot crouched by the tailgate of his truck, license plate in clear view.
His whole life laid out for anyone to see.
Three days later Callie is off and not watching Opal until the afternoon.
She decides to interview Brentwood, will try him at the fish market where he works down in Sea Isle.
As she drives the thickness of the woods yields to a wide stretch of parkway, but still there are stands of pine along the side of the road even as she starts to smell salt in the air, sees signs for Cape May and Wildwood, the casinos of Atlantic City across the marsh.
But sunlight—so much sunlight, compared to the Pine Barrens—riches of it, gilds everything.
She arrives at a little tollbooth perched high on the middle of a bridge, and then just on the other side she’s in Fish Alley, fishmongers and bait shops and seafood restaurants where people can tie their boat up while they enjoy a scampi and white wine.
She likes talking to people when they’re at work.
They’re less inclined to make a fuss, don’t want to draw the boss’s attention, whereas at home, on their way to their cars, they have doors to slam.
Places to recede. Another one of the reasons it’s been hard to press Billy Fauver—he only seems to answer to himself, has no appearances to keep up.