Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
She regulated her breathing as she navigated the rocky terrain while moving at top speed. This was the most difficult section. Her legs felt like Jell-O, and one careless step could result in a wipeout. She liked the challenge, though, because it made her feel invigorated.
The trail at Mesa Rosada used to be a breeze.
The summer before entering the police academy, she’d worked up to doing it twice a day, along with push-ups, sit-ups, and enough pull-ups to make her arms quiver.
She’d been manic about physical conditioning back then.
The pull-ups were the worst—she’d never had much upper-body strength—but she’d done them anyway, along with countless trail runs, propelled by a burning desire not to be shown up by her male counterparts.
Her determination not to embarrass herself had been her rocket fuel.
Leanne had worked her ass off that summer.
She’d dropped weight and gotten in shape, and she’d managed to stay that way up until a year ago.
The moment she hit thirty, everything changed.
It was like her metabolism somehow knew she was sensitive about the milestone and suddenly decided to take a nosedive.
The abrupt change had caught her off guard, and she didn’t like that.
As a teenager, Leanne hadn’t spent much time considering what life would look like in her thirties.
Whatever vague idea she’d had, had been of something else, though.
Maybe a partner by this point. Maybe a place of her own in a big city.
Definitely a better car, not a battered Chevy pickup with a hundred thousand miles on it.
And she absolutely hadn’t planned to still be in Madrone—a town where dating apps were pointless because the pool of people was so tiny—living in a rental house with a stray cat for an occasional bedmate.
Never get too confident, her dad used to say. Life has a way of knocking you on your ass.
Of course, she hadn’t listened. She had gotten too confident. Putting Madrone in her rearview mirror had made her feel a little too pleased with herself, maybe even smug.
The last two years had taught her that her dad was right. And the biggest irony? His death was the thing that had knocked her flat.
Leanne passed a mile marker and took her gaze off the trail for a moment to check the stopwatch on her phone. Despite a two-week gap since her last workout, she was making good time. She rounded another switchback.
I’m sure as hell glad your dad’s not alive to see this.
Anger festered inside her as Jim McBride’s words came back. It was a feeling that hit her with increasing frequency these days.
Leanne had discovered that Grief, Year Two, was very different from Grief, Year One.
That first year, especially in the early months, people took pains not to say her father’s name—as if the mere mention of him would remind her of a crushing loss she might otherwise forget.
That whole first year she’d found people’s avoidance of saying his name to be hurtful, even insulting.
But Year Two was different. Now she didn’t care what people did or didn’t say about him. She’d gotten used to not caring.
With the odd exception of Jim McBride. Whenever he said anything about her father, she felt the overwhelming urge to smack him in the face. She thought of their meeting today, and his cavalier responses. The man infuriated her, and Trish Rawls was right about him never having any balls.
Leanne rounded another switchback. Her toe caught a rock, and she pitched forward, catching herself on a cedar tree right beside the drop-off. She stopped to get her breath and looked out from the cliff.
The valley stretched out before her, vast and empty.
A two-lane highway bisected the arid land, and in the far distance, she could see the snowy white peak of the Desert Star yurt.
The late-day sun cast a golden glow over the canyon, making the shadows long, and she took a moment to take it all in.
Leanne understood the severe, untamed beauty of her desert birthplace.
But she also knew the ugly side—the racism, the poverty, and the constant threat of violence in a region crisscrossed by coyotes and drug traffickers and vigilantes set on frontier justice.
She stepped back to the trail and focused on her run. Her quads burned, and she had a cramp in her side, but the thought of water spurred her on. Rounding the last switchback, she spied her Chevy at the trailhead, alongside a familiar black pickup.
“Crap,” she muttered.
She picked up her pace for the final stretch and tried not to look like she was on the verge of collapse.
Duncan watched her from behind his mirrored Ray-Bans.
“Hey,” she said, approaching him.
The left side of his mouth ticked up. “How far’d you go?”
“The loop.”
“Nice.”
She stopped beside him, taking care to position herself downwind.
“I haven’t been out here in months.” He peeled off his sunglasses and looked her up and down.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I saw your truck from the highway. I was planning to call you later.”
She waited. She wasn’t about to assume it would have been a social call.
“I got in touch with my friend Jackson.”
“Jackson’s your tire expert.” She pulled a key from her zipper pouch and clicked open her locks.
“Yeah, Brett Jackson, with the state lab in Austin. He agreed to take a look at that tire tread. I sent him your photo this afternoon.”
She grabbed her water bottle from inside. “Thanks.” She unscrewed the cap and took a swig.
“I told him it was a homicide case and that I need it soon. He owes me a favor, so it shouldn’t take too long.”
“I appreciate it.” She searched Duncan’s eyes. Where was this sudden cooperation coming from? “Thanks for calling in a favor for me.”
He stepped closer. “What’s wrong? You look pissed.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. I can tell.”
It irked her that Duncan could read her so easily when most of the time his emotions were a black box. She took another swig of water.
“McBride is—” She wanted to launch into a rant about him, but she didn’t want to seem like she couldn’t handle a tough boss. “He’s on a tear this week.”
“Because of the Moriarty thing?”
“Probably.”
He tipped his head to the side. “What’s the story there, anyway?”
“Don’t you watch the news?”
“I want to know from you. Your dad was on the case, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, you remember it?”
She wiped her brow with her forearm and looked away. “Everyone remembers it.”
She felt him watching her, waiting for more. Naturally he was curious, being a cop. But it was hard to describe to someone who wasn’t from here what an impact the case had. One minute they were this sleepy little town, and the next they’d been hit by a meteor.
“My dad headed up the case.” She looked at Duncan. “Him and McBride. They were smack in the middle of it.”
“And Novak?”
She shook her head. “He wasn’t here yet. This was Ron Hausmann. He’s a judge now.” She took a swig of water and tried to compose her thoughts.
“You know the Rawls family?” she asked.
“I haven’t met them. I’ve driven past their place.”
“Well, their daughter’s murder was the biggest law enforcement thing that ever happened here. It shook everyone up. Nothing has been the same since.”
“Why?”
She looked at Duncan’s calm blue eyes. It was such a basic question, and she wasn’t sure she knew the answer, just that there was a before and an after.
“I guess…it shattered illusions for people? Idyllic small town and all that?” She shook her head.
The concept probably sounded ridiculous to someone who’d grown up in a large metroplex where murders happened all the time.
“I mean, this teenage girl goes missing, and then there’s a frantic search, cops in from everywhere, people on horseback, search dogs.
This place was a circus. Then finally they found her, and it was as bad as your worst nightmare.
She was stuffed in an old well. She’d been strangled and beaten. Then the real trouble started.”
“You mean the investigation?” he asked.
“For weeks, they didn’t have a clue, and there was all this finger-pointing. It was a drug cartel that got her, a long-haul trucker, a coyote. And then they arrested someone from here. Sean Moriarty.”
“Were they a couple?”
“They didn’t run in the same circles, but it came out that she’d been seeing him on the sly, knowing her parents wouldn’t approve. And that’s when the rifts happened. Everyone’s toxic biases came out.”
He frowned. “Biases how? Moriarty’s white.”
“Yeah, but I mean, there’s different types of white around here.
There’s rancher white and tourist white.
There’s oil field white. Sean’s family was dirt-poor, and he’d been in trouble all his life, so people were pretty quick to believe he’d done it.
Plus, he confessed, so…” She looked away again.
This was the part she didn’t want to talk about with Duncan.
The part where her dad’s work was now being called into question, along with his integrity.
She knew what people were saying, even though they weren’t saying it to her face.
“As damning as it was, though, the confession wasn’t the only evidence they had at trial,” she said. “Moriarty lied to investigators multiple times about his interactions with Hannah on July Fourth, the night she disappeared.”
“So, their relationship came out, I take it?”
She nodded. “Her friends tipped off police. They questioned Sean, and he denied even seeing Hannah that night. But several witnesses saw them in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen, where people were hanging out after the fireworks. Hannah had been standing beside Sean’s car and talking to him through the window.
When they confronted him, Sean admitted that he’d talked to her in the parking lot but said that was it. ”
“Let me guess. That was a lie, too.”