Trey thinks that over, turning the bottle. Cal wonders whether to bring up the fact, while they’re on the subject, that there’s plenty she hasn’t been telling him. He decides against it. He knows, by everything about her, that she’s not done keeping things to herself yet. She still feels unreachable. If he tries to reach her now, and she lies, she’ll be even further away. He waits.
In the end she looks up at Cal and nods. “Sorry I got your camera took,” she says. “I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cal says. All his muscles loosen a notch. He may not have fixed things, but this time, apparently, he’s at least managed not to make them worse. “Your dad might have you give it back to me. Once he’s wiped some stuff off the memory card.”
Trey blows air out of the side of her mouth. “Throw it in the bog, more like.”
“Nah,” Cal says. “He won’t want me kicking up a fuss, drawing attention to it. He’ll delete that footage, send back the rest. It’ll be fine.”
Trey turns her head at the sound of a car behind them. Through the trees and the road twists they can see flashes of it: chunky, white and blue, a marked car.
“Guards,” she says.
“Yep,” Cal says. “They were pretty quick.”
He turns to take one last look at the silent thing under the stripes of shadow. It looks skimpy and easily dismissed, something that’s in the way for now but that’ll be blown to nowhere by the next good wind. Cal understands what Trey doesn’t: the magnitude of the change, far-reaching and unstoppable, that the car is bringing.
The two uniforms could be brothers: young, beefy, healthy, with identical neat haircuts and identical raw sunburns. Both of them look like this moment is unprecedented in their careers, and they’re being extra official to show each other they can handle it. They take names and details from Cal and Trey, ask Trey what time she found the body—which gets them a blank shrug and “Early”—and whether she touched it. They take Rushborough’s name, too—Cal has his doubts on this, but he keeps them to himself—and where he was staying. Cal figures, with mixed feelings, that by the time they get there Johnny will be long gone.
The uniforms start stringing crime-scene tape between trees. One of them shoos away a couple of sheep that have drifted closer to investigate. “Is it OK if we head back to my place, Officer?” Cal asks the other one. “Trey here helps me out with some carpentry, and we’ve got a job to finish.”
“That’s grand,” the uniform says, with a formal nod. “The detectives’ll need to take statements. They’ll be able to reach ye both at that number, will they?”
“That’s right,” Cal says. “We’ll be at my place most of the day.” He glances at Trey, who nods. The crows, single-minded and in no hurry, have started to work their way down the branches again.
—
On the way down the mountain, Trey asks, “What’ll they do?”
“Who?”
“The detectives. How’ll they find out who kilt him?”
“Well,” Cal says. He shifts the car down a gear and taps the brake. He learned to drive in the hills of North Carolina, but the grade of this mountain still sometimes sets his teeth on edge. No one was taking cars into account when this road was made. “They’ll have a crime-scene team to collect forensic evidence. Like take whatever random hairs and fibers they find on the body, so they can try and match them to a suspect or his house or his car. Take Rushborough’s hair and fibers, in case some got on the suspect; samples of his blood, ’cause there’s gonna be plenty of that wherever he was killed. Scrape under his fingernails and take samples of the bloodstains, in case he fought his attacker and got some DNA on him. Look for any tracks to tell them how he got there, and from what direction. And they’ll have technical guys go through his phone, see who he was talking to, if he had any hassle with anyone.”
“What about the detectives? What do they do?”
“Talk to people, mostly. Ask around here to find out who saw him last, where he was headed, if he pissed anyone off. Get in touch with his family, his friends, his associates, look for any problems—love life, money, business, whatever. Any enemies.”
Trey says, “He seemed like he’d have enemies. Not just here.”
“Yeah,” Cal says. “To me, too.” He edges his way past a side road, craning his neck to make sure no one’s blithely speeding down it. He wishes he was sure Trey’s interest in police procedure was purely academic. “He give you that fat lip a few days back?”
“Yeah,” Trey says, like her mind is doing other things. She disappears into a silence that lasts her all the way back to Cal’s.
—
While he’s frying up a fresh batch of bacon and eggs, and Trey is setting the table, Cal texts Lena:
