“But he WAS there—” Millie began.

  “A couple of my friends and I,” Louis said over her (no mean feat), “we saw him leave. I can give you some names if that would help.”

  I waited for the sheriff’s cross-examination of Millie, but all she said was “Thank you, Louis. I’d like you to make a statement too, and I’ll need you to provide Deputy Mai with those names.”

  When I was brave enough to risk another look, the pain on Millie’s face looked even deeper. Louis was still patting her hand.

  It felt like that awful, frozen moment would go on forever, but then Fox said, “Leaving aside Millie’s terrible attempt at an alibi, you can’t tell me you think Keme had something to do with that man’s death. Keme wouldn’t hurt a soul.” Fox seemed to consider this, head cocked to the side, and then added, “Except Dash.”

  “I understand that this is a difficult, stressful time,” the sheriff said, “and emotions are running high. Right now, the best thing you can do for Keme is be ready to show him your love and support when you’re able to see him. I understand if you feel like you need to wait here, but I encourage you to go home and get some rest. I’ll contact you when Keme can have visitors.”

  Another of those frozen gulfs opened up.

  “But you can’t be serious,” Fox said. “This is ridiculous. We’re talking about Keme.”

  “Bobby, go ahead and take those statements,” the sheriff said. “Dash, if you’d come with me.”

  She didn’t seem to be asking, so I followed her out of the lobby.

  As the sheriff led me down a hallway, she said, “I understand you’re already conducting your own investigation.”

  “I don’t know about an investigation,” I said, “but I did talk to Keme’s mom and—I don’t know, her boyfriend.” I filled her in on the conversation, including their vagueness about why Keme had gotten upset and the reason for his argument with JT, and then I told her about the other man, the one from Orange County, who had argued with JT.

  “California?” the sheriff asked.

  “I have no idea. Foster didn’t seem like the chewiest, um, cookie in the drawer.”

  (I was sixty percent certain that was an expression.)

  “Why would someone drive all the way up here from California to argue with JT?” the sheriff said, but it wasn’t really a question, so I just offered a shrug.

  We passed the squad room, where Salk and Dahlberg were having a conversation in low—and what appeared to be unhappy—voices. Neither of them looked up when I passed. We continued down the hall. There were more of those public safety posters. (One of them was about Sasquatch, but I was pretty sure it was a joke.) And someone had hung the kind of “public spaces” art that you could get at TJ Maxx. (Skyscrapers in black and white! A triptych with a distressed wooden frame!) I’d been back here before, of course—even as a suspect myself. But the last year, and my relationship with Bobby, had wiped away a lot of those bad associations. Now it felt like I was seeing everything anew, and it all felt wrong. Like the building had been turned upside down. Or this was one of those dreams where you were lost in a maze.

  “You understand,” the sheriff said, “that your personal connection to the case means that I can’t contract you to help with the investigation.”

  “I know,” I said. And maybe it was the disorienting unreality of the moment that made me brave enough to add, “But I’m still going to try to help Keme.”

  “I know,” the sheriff said.

  She opened a door, and we stepped into a dark room. The only bright spot was a smoky piece of glass that looked in on the next room, where Keme sat at a table. Even though I knew he couldn’t see us, it felt like he was staring right at me, his jaw set with familiar belligerence. A bruise was darkening at the corner of his mouth, and the skin had split above his temple. He also had one heck of a shiner.

  “I’ll have to send someone to take statements from them again,” the sheriff said. “From his mom, I mean, and her partner. When Salk tried to talk to them, the boyfriend wouldn’t give him the time of day. He told Salk he didn’t know where the mom was. Didn’t know how to reach her.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “He told September she was asleep when the deputies came around to ask about Keme.” I hesitated. “She took a pill while I was there. I don’t know what it was, but it felt…weird.”

  Weird actually didn’t begin to describe it, but I wasn’t ready to get into the details.

  The sheriff only nodded. Then she said, “We canvassed the park, as I’m sure you guessed, and the statements we took back up what you told us. No one was seen entering the house after Deputy Tripple and Channelle left.”

  “So, that’s the last time anyone saw him alive,” I said. “Do you have a time of death?”

  “The district medical examiner puts it somewhere between eight and ten last night. We’re thinking it had to be around ten, since JT made a couple of phone calls around nine-thirty.”

  “Who’d he call?” I asked.

  “Deputy Tripple for one,” the sheriff said drily. “Apparently he had complaints about how Tripple handled things earlier, but he framed it as wanting to ‘add something to the incident report.’ Jaklin put him through to Tripple’s phone, and he read Tripple the riot act. After that, JT called over to the Bay Bridge Suites. Apparently he knew, or he guessed, that’s where Channelle would be staying. He kept asking the front desk to connect him to different rooms, hoping he’d get lucky. After a while, May—the woman working the desk—told him to stop bothering people and hung up on him.”

  Then something I hadn’t really thought about occurred to me. “He lived in the park office?”

  “Yeah, it’s got living quarters attached to the back.”

  “Where was he found?”

  “In the garage.”

  “And he was killed with a blunt object.”

  The sheriff nodded. “The garage is half storage unit and half tool shed, so there were plenty of things lying around. It’s possible the killer planned this and came prepared, but it feels spontaneous to me—an argument escalated, and someone grabbed whatever was at hand and hit him with it.”

  On the other side of the smoky glass, Keme’s face was stone.

  “He didn’t do this,” I said quietly.

  “Dash, I’ve got a shirt, shorts, and slides covered in blood. We already typed it, and it matches JT. The DNA results will come back as a match too, I’m sure. And I know you want to be a loyal friend, so I’m not going to ask you to confirm this, but I know those clothes belong to Keme.”

  “Did Bobby—” I regretted the question as soon as I began to ask, and I mumbled, “Never mind.”

  The silence drew out between us until the sheriff said, “No, Dash. It wasn’t Bobby.”

  After a deep breath, I said as firmly as I could, “Keme didn’t do this.”

  Sheriff Acosta nodded, but she said, “You understand I can’t take your word for it, though.”

  “I know. But I want you to know he didn’t do it. What about the wife? What about the other man who got into a fight with JT yesterday? Nobody actually saw the killer go into the house, right?” The sheriff didn’t answer, so I continued, “They had to have entered from the back. They walked through the trees and got inside the office that way. I mean, the front of the office is practically a fishbowl—someone would have seen the killer.” She still hadn’t said anything, so I said, “You knew that. That’s why you had Dahlberg searching the tree line.”

  “And that’s where she found the only physical evidence in this investigation,” the sheriff said. “Do you see my problem?”

  I wanted to say again, Keme didn’t do this. But I didn’t.

  “Right now,” Acosta said, “I need you to convince Keme to help himself.” At my glance, she continued, “He won’t talk, Dash. To anyone. He just stares us down.”

  “He’ll talk to Bobby.”

  “He won’t, actually. Bobby was in there for almost an hour, and Keme didn’t so much as look at him. I thought maybe his mom…”

  The trailed-off sentence seemed like an invitation, so I shook my head. “I don’t know how much help she’d be. I can’t figure out their relationship.”

  “Turns out, it’s a moot point; when I finally got her on the phone, she said she wouldn’t be coming down to the station because, quote, ‘Keme’s an adult now, and we raised him to be independent.’” The sheriff snorted. “‘We raised him to be independent’ is pretty big talk for a woman who lives off a trust her dad left her, with a sponge of a boyfriend who spends half his time catting around.”

  I’d never heard the sheriff editorialize like that.

  Clearing her throat, she gave an embarrassed shake of her head that was almost lost in the dim light. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Uh, no, that was amazing.”

  For some reason, she put her hands on her hips—like I was the problem. “I’d like you to see if you could get Keme to tell us where he was last night. Even if he thinks it won’t help because he was on his own, there’s a chance we could verify the alibi. If we can verify it, Keme’s in the clear, bloody clothes or no bloody clothes.”

  “If he won’t talk to Bobby, he won’t talk to me, but I guess I can try.” I took a step toward the door, and then I stopped. “Sheriff, do you think Keme’s bad? I mean, do you honestly believe he’s capable of something like this?”

  She was nothing more than a silhouette, hands on her hips, like a darker spot in all the darkness. Finally, she cleared her throat again. “He’s had a rough life, Dash. He has a temper, and a history of fights, and—and I don’t know how to put this. I know you and your friends care about him. But you’ve got to understand, to a lot of the town, Keme is…strange. He doesn’t talk to most people. He’s closed-off. And frankly, he’s downright rude sometimes. He doesn’t act like a normal kid, so people don’t know what to make of him. And people are afraid of things they don’t understand.”

  I waited for more. And then I said, “I didn’t think you did.”

  She didn’t say anything, but as I swung open the door, she said in a low, hard voice, “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  Chapter 6

  When I stepped into the interview room, Keme didn’t look over. He kept staring straight ahead, his gaze fixed on his reflection in the mirror, arms folded across his chest. The bruises looked worse without the filter of dark glass between us, and although his hands were tucked under his arms, I wouldn’t be surprised to see split knuckles. He sat very still, his breathing shallow, and I wondered how many more bruises hid under the hoodie.

  The room was small, with fluorescent panels and oatmeal-colored walls and straight-back metal chairs that looked like they had zero lumbar support. It smelled like Funyuns, and it was bright enough that I thought too long in this light would give me a splitting headache.

  I pulled out the chair next to Keme. My knee bumped his, and he pulled his leg away, but he didn’t look at me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Are you okay?”

  Still nothing.

  “That was a dumb question,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  His breathing was still high and thin. Sitting next to him, I could almost feel his heart racing. How long had they had him in here? How long had he been alone, panicked, frozen? I knew what it was like to be a suspect in a murder investigation. It was, to put it bluntly, horrible. It was disorienting. It was terrifying. There was a kind of dissociative disbelief, like I’d stepped out of my life by accident and couldn’t quite get back. And I’d been in my late twenties, with parents who would, at a bare minimum, provide the financial resources I needed. What would it be like to be a teenager whose mom couldn’t be bothered to come down to the station because her latest boyfriend was trying to make a point? A teenager who’d had to rely on himself for most of his life? Who had learned the hard way that even the people you thought you could depend on weren’t going to be there for you? Like his mom.

  Or Bobby.

  The thought flashed through me. It left my fingertips tingling, and a faint tremor in my hands.

  I worked saliva into my mouth. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s okay. But I want you to know that nobody who knows you thinks you did this. We don’t think you did it. I don’t think you did it. I know you didn’t do it. And we’re going to make sure you’re okay.”

  The muscles in his jaw tightened. How hard was he trying, I wanted to know, not to show anything? Not to give away even a single moment of weakness—or what must have felt to him like weakness?

  “But I hope you’ll think about telling us where you were last night. Even if it’s embarrassing, or you think we’ll be disappointed in you, or you did something you’re not proud of, it doesn’t matter, Keme. What matters right now is proving you couldn’t have done this. So, we need to know where you were last night. And we need you to help us.”

  His eyes were dark. They shimmered with the rainbow drift of the fluorescents.

  Relationships had never been a strong suit for me. I mean, my whole romantic life had been a series of ongoing disasters, mostly because of my indecisiveness and my general lack of self-confidence when it came to knowing what the heck was going on. It had been true to a lesser extent with friends, and so my friend groups had always been small, and they’d always been more about who wanted to invite me to things than about active effort on my part to cultivate meaningful relationships. (See above about indecisiveness and lack of self-confidence—plus, I overanalyzed everything and because, you know, social interaction made me want to scream into a pillow.)

  But I’d been trying to do better. To take risks. To make myself vulnerable. And Keme was my friend.

  Which was why it only took me about thirty seconds of panic-calculating before I reached out to touch his arm. His whole body went stiff, which wasn’t exactly encouraging, but I plunged forward. “And I want you to know that all of us—Bobby and Fox and Indira and Millie—”

  Keme didn’t exactly flinch. But he did shift away from me in his seat.

  “—and I, we care about you so much.”

  And then came the truly scary part.

  I was a little embarrassed by the thought that Bobby would be proud of me.

  I scooted forward in my seat, and I brought my arms around Keme to hug him. “We love you—”

  Keme knocked my arms away. He shot up from his seat, his face reduced to dark lines, and he shoved me.

  The force of the push threw me out of my chair. I landed hard on my butt. My elbow cracked against the table, and it must have gotten my funny bone exactly right because it felt like I grabbed a live wire. I stared up at Keme.

  He had backed himself into a corner, his hands held out in front of him like I might come after him. His face was impossible to read, but he was breathing like he’d just finished a race, and his hands were shaking.

  The door swung open, and Sheriff Acosta stepped into the room. She had her hand on her gun, although it was still holstered, and she looked at Keme first and then at me.

  “I’m okay,” I said. It certainly seemed true—my arm was zinging, and my butt ached, but those were minor things. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  To prove it, I used the table to get to my feet.

  I looked at Keme. His eyes were blank, like he wasn’t seeing me. Or like he’d never seen me before.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He stared at me.

  “Step out here,” the sheriff said.

  I moved backward, unable to take my gaze off Keme until I reached the hallway and the sheriff shut the door.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  I nodded, rubbing my arm. (Better than rubbing my butt.) “I shouldn’t have—he doesn’t like—” Tears welled up, and I blinked desperately to keep them from falling. The tide of embarrassment at my reaction only made things worse, though, and despite my best efforts, my voice thinned as I tried to say, “I should have known.”

  “It’s okay,” the sheriff said. “As long as you’re okay.”

  I shook my head, but I didn’t know at what. “I’m going to get him a lawyer.” My face was hot. I was starting to shake. “I should get him a lawyer. I’ll call Lyda.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” the sheriff said. “Dash, why don’t you sit down for a moment?”

  I shook my head again, and I managed to firm up my voice a little. “Can you—can you wait? To arrest him, I mean. It’ll be on his record, you know, if you arrest him. So, if you could wait. Like, a day.” She looked back at me with unhappy eyes. “I know you have to do it eventually, but just a day. Please.”

  Slowly, the sheriff said, “I have to charge him by the end of the day tomorrow.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  “I really think you need to sit down. Let me find you somewhere private—”

  Waving off the words, I turned and stumbled toward the closest exit.

  Chapter 7

  I made it to the Pilot and got behind the wheel before I started to cry. At first, they were tight, furious tears. Tight because I was trying so hard to hold them back. And furious because—well, because I was furious. At myself, most of all. For being so stupid. And for crying, because it was so embarrassing. Then the dam cracked, and I cried harder, and some of it was for Keme, and some of it was for myself.

  The door clicked open. I blinked stinging eyes at Bobby. His face was grim and drawn, but it softened when he pulled me into his arms.

  He let me cry, and he rubbed my back and made soft, comforting noises. And after a while, I was better. Or I stopped crying, at least. My eyes were hot and itchy. My nose was clogged. My cheeks felt sticky with salt tracks.

  Bobby found tissues in the pocket of the door (I told you it was a mom car), and as I pressed a wad of them to my eyes, fighting an aftershock of fresh tears, I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” Bobby said. He was rubbing my shoulder, and he paused now to squeeze for emphasis. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

 

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