Chapter 5
Five
COle
The day after my weird quasi-breakup with Heidi, I'm stuck filling in on patrol because three of my deputies have called in with a stomach bug that's been going around the department.
I always cruise town whenever possible—if I'm to keep the peace in my county and in town especially, I have to be out amongst the community, not perpetually holed up in my office like the sheriff before me and after Dad died—Old Man Beasley.
Fucker was terrible. He was a hardass extraordinaire, a sexist bastard who treated domestic abuse victims like criminals, and habitually swept problematic deputy behavior under the rug.
He sat in that office like a king, wearing a stupid ten-gallon Stetson with his star on his chest and his gun belt always just so.
I think he thought he was an Old West lawman, or something.
That was a dark time for Three Rivers. And for as much as I strive to police the community like my father did—with fairness, compassion, and an eye for building and maintaining community rather than focusing on punishing wrongdoing—I strive nearly as hard to do the job as far from how Beasley did it as possible.
I sit facing the highway a few miles north of town, hidden behind a Murdick's Fudge Shop that, despite its location this far outside town, is bustling.
I have my radar gun out, watching for speeders who think they can blast through town going fifty.
I don't bother with anything less than ten over, usually.
I'm not out here to pump up the department budget by nickel-and-diming via speed trap.
My mind tries to take me down memory lane with Lacey…
yet again…and I have to somewhat savagely squash the line of thought.
But then, instead of letting me focus on, oh, I don't know, my job, my stupid brain shows me Lacey in that remodel next door to Nyxie's.
Those huge tits of hers—they didn't move like implants, not that I'm an expert, but as far as I know, silicone doesn't jiggle like that.
But they were significantly larger than they used to be, and I should know.
I know bodies change with time, but she's as svelte and trim as ever, just with bigger boobs than the last time I saw her.
Color me confused.
And aroused.
No, dammit. No matter how good she may look, objectifying her isn’t the move.
I don't know what the move is, but fixating on her giant boobs isn't it.
Neither is the sadness in her eyes. The despair. The loneliness. The hurt. Other things I can't name because I don't know her anymore.
Fuck. I can't do this.
I stow the radar gun and head back to the office. On a whim, I swing by Cammy's B-and-B; Lacey's fancy little black Macan is parked in front, and I can see even from a slow roll-by that she's got everything she owns in that car.
I bet I could snag a cup of coffee off of Cammy if I went in.
No.
She'll find me when she's ready to talk.
I land back in my office, staring at paperwork I'm not really seeing. Eventually, I know trying to actually work is futile. My mind is in too many places.
Therefore, the only logical thing to do is look at Dad's case.
I swing around in my chair and unlock the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet in which I keep the handful of Three Rivers' cold cases. There's not many, thank god.
A woman back in ’68 who vanished while cross-country skiing—the working assumption is she suffered an accident and died of hypothermia.
Her body was never found, though, so it remains a cold case.
A 16-year-old girl named Samantha Weaver who ran away from home in ’87 and was never seen again—her father was incarcerated at the time and her mother was an addict with a history of dating abusive men, and CPS case files indicate a strong likelihood that Samantha had been assaulted by one of her mother’s boyfriends; the working theory is that Samantha made a new life for herself somewhere else under another name.
Neither case has even a whiff of suspicion of foul play.
A man’s dead body was found in the snow on the beach directly across from the busiest part of downtown.
No ID, no identifying marks, no prints in the system, no hits on dental records; cause of death was drowning.
The discovery of his body coincides with the timing of a man’s disappearance from Wisconsin a couple weeks before—the Wisconsin man in question was deeply in debt to a notoriously violent loan shark.
Not exactly cased closed, but there’s not enough solid connective tissue to warrant further investigation by the FBI, according to the memo from Dad included in the case file.
And last, but definitely not least, Amber Brunner.
Twenty years old. Vanished in ’03. A local girl, played JV volleyball for the high school, graduated middle of the class, got her cosmetology license, and was making an average life for herself post-high school.
Pretty enough girl. She was the kind of girl that can slip under the radar.
An only child who was not close to her parents; they moved away after she graduated, and she stayed on her own.
Didn’t have a ton of friends, never dated anyone seriously. Just lived a quiet, unremarkable life.
According to Dad’s notes in the file, she disappeared between leaving the salon downtown where she worked as a hair stylist and nail tech and going home.
Again, according to Dad’s investigative notes in the case file, her coworkers at the time reported that she’d mentioned in passing that she had been seeing someone new recently, but hadn’t volunteered any further information about her possible paramour.
Her coworkers report she left the salon to go home at 6:55 pm on Thursday, April 2nd, 2003.
Her car was spotted on CCTV footage heading north toward Cooper’s Hollow, where she lived; her car was later found several miles north at the end of a dead-end dirt road near the county line.
No sign of Amber, but her blood was found in the trunk of the car and there were signs of a struggle in her trailer and blood on the TV stand.
No body and no DNA other than Amber’s. No witnesses at the trailer park—neither neighbor on either side was home at the time, and the other neighbors nearby were all asleep.
It was obviously either a murder or accidental death and a successful cover-up, and Dad was never able to let it go.
He kept the case open; I remember him sitting on the couch at home with his files spread out on the coffee table, readers perched on his nose, a pen clamped between his lips as he flipped through reports and scrutinized crime-scene photos.
He was never able to pin down a suspect, and then, on July 19th, 2012, Dad died in a car accident I’ve long suspected was suspicious.
Beasley, the man who succeeded Dad as sheriff upon Dad’s death, closed the case of the accident less than forty-eight hours after Dad's death, ruling it a car accident. Which, to be fair, it was. But there are problems with the idea of it being an accident.
I set the other cold case files aside and opened Dad's file.
The first image is the wreck: Dad's department Explorer is wrapped around a tree, mangled beyond recognition. It also caught fire, and if Dad hadn't died immediately upon impact, he would have died in the subsequent fire.
The next image is the autopsy photo—I flip past that.
The autopsy showed nothing suspicious—no alcohol in his system, no drugs, nothing.
Dad didn't drink much, and he certainly never did any drugs, so that's not surprising.
The next few images and pages are the technical reports of the investigation, however abbreviated, into the cause of the accident—ruled operator error, because the brake lines were all intact, no engine issues, no stuck accelerator, no transmission problems, nothing.
As far as the SUV goes, there was nothing wrong with it, technically.
Therefore, Beasley labeled it Dad's fault, closed the case, and took the chair before Dad's body was even in the ground.
I've never bought it, for a few reasons.
One, Dad was a driver in the Army Corps of Engineers, a job he did for twenty years—from enlisting for Vietnam until he came home in the late eighties.
I know accidents can happen to anyone, but Dad's "accident" happened on a clear, beautiful fall evening.
No rain, no snow, no fog. There were no skid marks indicating he was trying to avoid a deer or another car.
So: No mechanical failure; no environmental conditions contributing to the crash; no animal or vehicular interference; Dad was no novice driver, obviously.
He knew these roads like the back of his hand—he grew up here, same as me, and spent his career behind the wheel, patrolling the county, checking in on the rural folks and the lonely elderly people.
There's simply no possible fucking explanation for Dad just driving off the road and into a tree.
But more to the point, in his cold case investigation notes, he indicated pretty clearly that he believed the suspect was a member of the Three Rivers community and was most likely a law enforcement officer.
If Dad had anyone in particular in mind, he didn't write it down anywhere that I've ever found, not even coded into his notes. Just the phrase, scrawled hastily in the margin in crabbed, sideways writing: "sus.: LEO?"
Meaning "Suspect: Law Enforcement Officer?"
In the years since, I've gone over everything I know a thousand times and gotten no closer to deciphering a single thing. No clues. No suspects. Nothing.
All I've got is the idea—without a shred of proof—that Dad was investigating a member of the Three Rivers County Sheriff's department as a possible suspect in a cold case murder from 2003.
A lot of maybes in that theory.