Chapter 2
Hadley Dawkins
Hadley had read somewhere that caffeine was the most widely used drug in the world, and she had taken the news as a kind of personal validation. She certainly wouldn’t be giving it up anytime soon.
She pulled the mug from the new coffeemaker on the kitchen island and took the first sip standing where the morning light came through the window over the sink.
She closed her eyes in satisfaction. September was a transition month, and it wouldn’t be long before the sun couldn’t even keep the days warm.
The random thought had Hadley thinking of her time in Whistlerun.
It had been eleven months since she’d resigned from her position at the state police and taken over as police chief.
Eleven months since she’d left Troop H, traded in her detective badge for the one pinned to her blazer, and moved back to the town she had spent over twenty years running from.
It had been the small things that had made all the difference.
Take, for instance, the hinges on the back door of the old Victorian house that served as both the police station and her new home.
The metal plates had been oiled so that not a sound was made whether she was coming or going.
She’d done the same to the front door, too.
As for the hideous wallpaper in the dining room, she’d stripped it down to drywall and painted the walls a soft white after clearing all the junk out.
She’d also kept the light grey paint on the cabinets after they’d been fully installed, and the hardwood floors in the hallway had been completely refinished.
If she were honest with herself, the renovations were the only thing about the place she had finished. Now that she was done with them, she was already on the hunt for another project to keep her mind from spinning at a thousand miles per hour.
She crossed from the kitchen into what had once been the formal living room of the old Victorian, back when the house had been a house and not a station.
The room was by far the biggest on the main floor.
It held two desks, one of them hers. The far wall contained a bulletin board crowded with town notices and bail-jumper mug shots, along with a window that overlooked Main Street between two columns of original oak trim.
The dining room across the hall was where she kept the whiteboards, the supply cabinet, and the boxes of forms she had stopped using as much as the former police chief had during his short tenure.
The basement was for storage, and she resided on the second floor, which had basically been converted into an apartment.
The second desk that she couldn’t seem to clean out or move down to the basement belonged to former Police Chief Reed Langley. He had been the chief of Whistlerun before someone had put a bullet in his chest and burned his truck with his body still inside on a back road last October.
The case was now hers, the way the badge belonged to her.
Neither one had been her idea.
Hadley averted her gaze to her own desk as she rounded the edge. She set her coffee down on the corner before removing her dark brown blazer. She loved the color and material, mostly because they never showed the coffee stains she inadvertently got on the fabric whenever she wore it.
She fully expected the morning would have its usual shape, the one it had taken since she’d accepted the position.
She would read through the overnight dispatch, check whatever Sheriff Nick Turner had sent her about the county at large, walk down to Maisy’s for a refill at ten, and at eleven do whatever paperwork the day required.
Maisy’s convenience store stop wasn’t for the coffee, though. In a town the size of Whistlerun, the gas station was the one place to learn anything worth knowing. And Hadley was wise enough to use that to her advantage.
Before she could take a seat at her desk, the front door swung open. She parted her lips to greet Mrs. Foster, who came by most Mondays with a list of complaints. Hadley’s greeting faded when her mind registered her mistake.
“Don’t shoot,” Julian Ramos called out, lifting both arms in the air with the grin that had been irritating her in the best possible way for years. “It’s just me.”
Julian kept his hair too short to need much maintenance, though she could swear it was a quarter inch longer than usual.
The faint warmth his Cuban grandfather had given his complexion was a shade darker than the last time she’d seen him, the way it turned every summer, though the rest of him hadn’t changed since the days she’d walked into Troop H as a doe-eyed, fresh detective.
He never bothered to tuck in his dress shirt, left the collar undone, and rolled his sleeves to his elbows.
And the same gold chain he never removed was visible at his collarbone.
Hadley didn’t want to admit it, but she’d missed the hell out of him. A coffee from Maisy’s was in his right hand, and a paper sack of something in the other that she would bet money was two chocolate donuts.
“I come bearing lots of sugar,” Julian announced, lifting the sack a little higher as he advanced her way. “Looks like you need it, too. Skin and bones, Dawkins. Skin and bones.”
“Julian.” Hadley breathed his name out in a small laugh. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“Visiting,” Julian replied, setting the coffee and bag down on Reed’s desk. “Since you clearly aren’t visiting me, or those other idiots I work with on a daily basis, you left me no choice.”
He wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug when she came around the corner of her desk to greet him. Her shoulders went stiff for the first second and then, in the next, eased into it. He still somehow managed to smell like fresh air, and she breathed in the comforting scent.
“You drove an hour and a half to give me a hug?” Hadley asked, stepping back before he sensed the overwhelming doubts that had immediately washed over her the moment he’d walked in the door. “You’re a horrible liar, Julian.”
“Fine. I drove an hour and a half to make sure your ass was still among the living,” Julian replied, studying her the way a doctor takes in a patient he has not seen in too long.
She shifted from side to side at the unspoken judgment in his gaze.
“You haven’t answered your phone in three weeks, Dawkins. ”
“I have,” Hadley responded, lifting her chin a fraction. “I texted back each and every time.”
“You’ve sent me one-word replies, so that doesn’t count.”
“That counts.”
“It does not count,” Julian countered as he reached behind him. He opened the bag and didn’t waste time pulling a chocolate donut from its depths. He then handed the bag off to her. “Here. Eat something. You clearly haven’t been feeding yourself.”
Hadley took the rumpled paper bag, but she set it on her desk in exchange for her mug. She leaned back against the edge before kicking off the conversation he clearly wanted to have in person.
“How is Brosmer?” Hadley asked, covering up a slight wince when she realized that she hadn’t responded to his email last week, either.
Sergeant Ellis Brosmer had been her superior at Troop H for as long as she’d been a detective.
He never would have sent her back to her hometown if he’d known it would have led to her resignation.
He had handed her the Claymont file last October, ignored her arguments about conflict of interest, and told her to be in Cane County the following morning.
The investigation she had stepped into was supposed to take two weeks tops, because it had been more for the media’s sake than to step on any other law enforcement’s toes.
Instead, she had decided to permanently move back home, and the simple sight of a former colleague had her second-guessing that decision.
“He’s fine.” Julian walked around Reed’s desk. “Sarge sends his regards and wants you to know he still thinks letting you resign was the worst mistake of his career. By the way, he’s still waiting for a reply from you, too.”
Julian pulled out Reed’s chair and sat down.
Hadley tightened her grip on her mug, forcing herself to take another sip of her coffee.
That small space behind her sternum began to ache, but she did her best to ignore it.
If she were to rub the spot with her fingers, Julian would notice, which would lead to him figuring out that she was still having trouble coming to terms with Reed’s death.
“And Cedric?” Hadley asked, working to keep the question lighter than it was. “How’s the custody case going?”
“Lost,” Julian replied, the smile leaving his voice. “Kim moved to Seattle in May. He gets the kids over winter break and a month in the summer.”
“Damn,” Hadley murmured, her heart going out to her other former colleague. “That sucks.”
“Yeah,” Julian agreed with a shake of his head. “Tell me about it.”
“How is he?”
“He’s drinking more than he should, which doesn’t actually mean much, because Cedric’s threshold was already pretty high.”
“What about the rest of the department?” Hadley asked, grateful for the safer ground.
“Adamski’s pregnant,” Julian said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Holden retires in January and won’t shut up about his new fishing boat. There’s a new guy named Chip who came over from Oklahoma and is the worst kind of newbie. He—”
“Let me guess,” Hadley said quickly, cutting him off and holding up a hand to stop him from saying too much. “He eats out of containers that have someone else’s name on them.”
“He ate what was in the blue container, Dawkins. The blue one. In the back, on the second shelf.”
“No.” Hadley grimaced, and this time, she didn’t stop herself from rubbing her chest. The thought of eating something that had been in that refrigerator for at least two years was enough to make one sick. “That’s disgusting.”