QUIT NOW.
LEAVE.
THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING.
Ethan Brand took a sip of coffee and read the note again. No signature. The paper was letter size and white, as common as what they used in the department’s copy machine.
The coyote had loped around to the side of the porch, its pale blue eyes tracking him. He’d never seen one with blue eyes before.
“You didn’t happen to get a look at who did this?” he asked the animal.
No answer. Whoever had taped up the note had likely also placed the heart on his porch. An anonymous warning. His first day as chief hadn’t even started, and already he was getting death threats.
Ethan Brand was forty-two, and had never envisioned a career on this side of the law. As a kid he’d loved westerns, but rarely rooted for the town marshal. The saddle tramp, the cowpuncher, the brave—that life of adventure and movement had appealed to him. He’d spent a good portion of his teens raising hell, his early twenties at loose ends, roaming, working odd jobs, avoiding college.
At twenty-three he’d joined the Marines, 2nd Light Armored. Spent two tours in the Helmand Valley, barreling down roads in the belly of a LAV, hiking across broken terrain, attempting to sort friend from hostile while men and women younger than him died at his side. His time in Afghanistan had wiped away any romance of violence. A roadside IED had wiped away everything else.
Medevacked to base camp, to a hospital in Frankfurt, and finally on to Bethesda, Maryland. He woke up in Walter Reed with what remained of his left foot in bandages. In the months after, he’d cling to two things: the memory of a week spent in bed with a civilian translator, and a growing desire for the nullifying effect of OxyContin.
His mother had died while he was overseas. For a year he haunted the empty rooms of her home, doing nothing, feeling as little as possible. He’d done his damnedest to block out the world. Blaine, Washington, in the upper northwest corner of the country, was as good a place as any to lie low.
And then one day he’d had a visit from Chief Frank Keogh. The heavyset Black lawman had come up the drive and sat down on his porch. Saying nothing for a long while. Letting Ethan Brand wallow in his shame.
Eventually Frank said, “I heard a rumor Agnes Brand’s son was asking around town where he could score some hillbilly heroin. That really what you want, Ethan?”
He’d been too ashamed to respond.
“You really want to pursue that life, it’s not too hard,” Frank said. “I won’t say I know what you been through because I don’t, and I really don’t care. Got my own sack of woes to tote around.”
“So then why are you here?” Ethan asked.
“Call it a recruitment drive,” Frank said. “Blaine is growing, more folks crossing the border every day. The department needs another body. I got good kids working for me, college kids, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt, having someone knows their way around a gun.”
Frank Keogh had taken a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint from his front pocket, offered it to him, then unwrapped two sticks for himself.
“Understand me, son. The last thing I need is some cowboy who draws first and asks questions never. But a fellow who knows what it means to take a life, who can walk a situation back from violence—a fellow who’s clean, and not prone to moping around his house—a fellow who’s got his shit so together he can wipe his ass clean with one square—that’s a fellow maybe I can use.”
The moment was as close to an epiphany as Ethan had ever had. Fifteen years later he still remembered the feeling. One moment life had felt gray and static, the next a horizon of challenge and possibility. As if he’d just been handed a viable future. In a way, that was exactly what Frank had done for him.
The chief told him to apply a month from now, giving him time to cleanse the toxins out of his system, put his house in order, and find out if he could still hit the broad side of a mountain. Frank Keogh left him with words he’d remember the rest of his life.
“You want to find anything worth looking for, son, you need to look beyond yourself.”
So he had.
***
Ethan drove to the station with the heart on the seat next to him, wrapped in newspaper, and the note on his dashboard. The truck had been his mother’s, a beige and white Dodge with more scrapes, scuffs, and miles on it than the department’s entire motor pool. Randy Travis played from the tape deck. “Forever and Ever, Amen.”
Blaine had a population just above six thousand. To the north, the town limit was the Canadian border, on the territory of the Semiahmoo Nation. To the south along I-5 was the city of Bellingham, Seattle ninety miles beyond that. Blaine saw higher than normal criminal activity for its size, most of it born from economic desperation. In the summer months, fishing and tour boats crowded Drayton Harbor, and businesses swelled with travelers en route to California or Mexico. It was April now, the morning pleasant but on the chill side.
The town looked different to him this morning. Part of that was the weight of responsibility. His town now. Last night had been Frank Keogh’s retirement party, and Ethan had the mild headache of a hangover to show for it. His swearing-in ceremony was this afternoon.
The other reason for the difference was the death threat. More likely than not, it had come from someone he knew in Blaine. Someone who right now was waking up inside one of the small clapboard houses, drinking coffee at the Ocean Beach Hotel or Lucky Luk’s Café, or getting ready to open one of the shops along Peace Portal Drive. Someone who wanted him scared, or someone who wanted him dead.
He still loved westerns, and deep down a part of him would always root for the outlaws. But a threatening note, paired with a heart—where did you even start looking for the kind of person who’d do something like that?
There were the people he’d put away, and the ones he was still trying to. Maybe the heart was a way to intimidate the new chief, or to protect a criminal operation. The McCandless family weren’t above trying something like that.
Or the motive could be political. Wynn Sinclair had put his considerable wealth and status behind Brenda Lee Page’s campaign for the position of chief. Brenda Lee was a good officer, and he couldn’t say why Frank Keogh had put Ethan’s name forward instead of hers. This morning he hoped to take Brenda Lee aside and smooth out their working relationship going forward. But there might be more animosity there than he suspected.
Were there others who felt the job should be theirs? Or who worried about what Ethan would do with the office? As if he knew that entirely himself. The political nature of the job was new to him.
What if the note was from someone close? He hadn’t lived a life of pure virtue. There were friends he’d lost, both in the corps and in the days after. People he’d failed to protect, still others he’d harmed unintentionally, doing what seemed right when there were no perfect choices. Doubtless some of those people might hold him responsible, or their loved ones would. In one or two cases he’d agree with them.
There’d been a married woman he’d been seeing since his separation, though Steph
had called that off. Still.
He pulled the Dodge into his usual spot in the station’s parking lot, next to Brenda Lee’s Subaru and the empty space reserved for the chief of police. His spot, he remembered. Ethan reversed, three-pointed, touched bumpers with a prowler, cursed, and backed into the chief’s space.
Nothing could ever be simple.
The Blaine police station was one story, brick on three sides, white clapboard along the front. Built in the 1980s, its clean and quaint exterior contained catastrophe and disarray. In the summer the building was sweltering, in the winter the pipes froze. The basement flooded every other spring. Between renovations, exterminations, the updating of computer and electrical systems, and the use and abuse heaped on it by officers and citizens alike, every day Ethan marveled that the building still hadn’t crumbled to a fine powder.
The department comprised fourteen officers, plus civilian staff, auxiliary officers, and volunteers. Jon Gutierrez, the senior civilian administrator, nodded from behind the front desk and handed him a sheaf of message slips.
“Morning, Chief. Still feels a little weird calling you that. No offense.” Jon noticed the newspaper bundle under his arm. “Fish or a fragile antique?”
“A heart,” Ethan said, garnering a quizzical look from the office manager. “Long story. Any hassles?”
“Quiet morning. Officer Ruiz is responding to a 10-23 at the scrapyard, which seems to be the work of our favorite rock chucking high school brigade. And Officer Page is—”
“Present and accounted for,” Brenda Lee Page said, emerging from the booking station with her hand extended. “Good morning, Chief. Sincere congratulations. I wish you all the best.”
Brenda Lee’s manner of speech was always a tad formal, a match with her posture and fastidious workspace. More mannered than usual this morning, though. This was her concession speech to her former rival.
“I appreciate it,” Ethan said, stepping behind the desk into the shared office space. “What do you have going right now?”
Brenda Lee Page had joined the department a few months after he had, graduating from U of W with a degree in criminology. They weren’t exactly friends, but they’d worked reasonably well together for more than a decade. Brenda Lee clearly felt as awkward about the change in their professional relationship as he did.
“We’re still considering our options,” Brenda Lee said. “Terry has his real estate license, and we have a good amount saved in our joint checking. There’s a possible opening for an assistant chief in Kelso next year. Wynn—Mr. Sinclair—also mentioned that if I was no longer required in Blaine as an officer, but wanted to stay in town, Black Rock has need of security personnel—”
“I meant what do you have going this morning,” Ethan said.
“Oh.”
The thought that Brenda Lee worried he might fire her, or that she might quit, hadn’t occurred to him. Would she have fired him under the same circumstances?
Her posture shifted closer to at ease, or as close as she got to ease. “I was just typing up notes from a car theft. Seeing if it matched any others. Nothing pressing. Why?”
He set the newspaper on his desk—his former desk—and unwrapped the heart.
“Most people bring in doughnuts,” Brenda Lee said.
“Someone left this on my porch, along with a note. You know anything about that?”
“Absolutely not, Chief.”
“Ethan.”
“I don’t know anything about this.”
He believed her. Brenda Lee Page took a more hard-line approach to the job than he did, and in her personal life leaned toward the conservative side. She’d never been untruthful to Ethan’s recollection, certainly not when it came to the job. If anything, Brenda Lee could be a little too truthful at times.
“Don’t tell anyone else about this,” he said, placing the heart in an evidence bag.
“Understood.”
Ethan shoved the bag onto a shelf in the small evidence refrigerator. It was eight fifteen by the wall clock. He hadn’t finished his coffee this morning, and the emptiness of his stomach was getting harder to ignore.
“You have time to grab breakfast at Lucky’s?” he asked Brenda Lee.
“I already had yogurt, but I wouldn’t turn down a cup of tea. Let me just finish my report.”
He left her to type, crossing H Street, passing the war memorial cannon on the corner. Blaine was waking up. He nodded at Sally Bishop, smoking an electronic cigarette while sitting on an overturned milk crate out front of the Super Value Food and Drugs. His destination was Lucky Luk’s Café. The old-fashioned neon sign, which announced the restaurant name and cuisine in three languages, wasn’t lit, but the blinds were raised, and Mei Sum could be seen inside, filling the cups of the morning customers.
Mei was the seventeen-year-old niece of the restaurant’s owner, Walter “Lucky” Luk. She was also what the school called an “accelerated learner,” what Ethan would call a genius. Of all the people he saw in the course of a normal day, Mei was the one Ethan found it easiest to talk with. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe because Mei’s intellect seemed as much a gift as a curse for her. He sympathized.
“Heya, New Chief,” Mei called, snapping off a salute with the cleaning rag still in hand.
“At ease.”
He took a seat at the counter. Mei kept a magnetic chessboard behind the fortune cat. He’d been trying to beat her for a year now. So far he was zero for twenty-six, with two stalemates and a draw.
“How does it feel being top cop?” Mei asked. “Must feel great to know you could arrest anyone you want.”
“Touch and go,” he said. “Any chance of coffee?”
“Pot’s on. The usual?”
His usual was an over easy egg, rice, and red eye gravy, which Lucky’s made with hoisin sauce. Mei moved the chessboard in front of him. They’d started a match days ago, and while he studied the positions, Mei cracked an egg on the grill and poured coffee.
Ethan slid his bishop over to G8, capturing a rook. “Wouldn’t do that.” Mei put his coffee down and hopped her knight over to the empty square, which he realized far too late gave her an attack on both the king and queen.
“Gotta watch for the fork,” Mei said.
The game was over by the time Brenda Lee Page joined him at the counter. The officer accepted a mug of chamomile tea, one sugar, and adjusted the volume on her radio.
“Seems to be a normal animal heart,” Brenda Lee said. “Beef would be my first guess. On my way over, I asked at the butcher counter if the Super Value was missing one, but they couldn’t say. There’s little demand for organs, though certain cuisines do consume the heart, for both dietary and spiritual reasons.”
Ethan nodded. “And the note?”
“Seems to be from someone
who doesn’t like you.”
“Would you add your name on that list?” When she hesitated to answer, Ethan said, “This is you and me talking. I can’t replace you, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. But I’d like your read on our relationship, where you and I stand, and where we go from here.”
“All right.”
Brenda Lee turned her stool a quarter toward him, propping her elbow on the counter. Her take on a relaxed and informal pose, he guessed.
“Respectfully, Chief, I mean Ethan, I believe I would have been a much more suitable candidate for the job. I think Frank Keogh made a mistake. I think he let his personal favoritism for you outweigh my experience, education, and temperament. Yes, temperament. I think you can be a little, well, lackadaisical.”
“Good word,” Mei called from behind the counter.
Ethan took a drink of coffee and looked at his hopeless position on the chessboard. “I didn’t campaign for the job,” he said.
“That’s my point. It was handed to you.”
“Frank Keogh made a recommendation, which City Council took. Not like I came in off the street.”
“No,” Brenda Lee said. “You’re a very good officer.”
“Thank you.”
“I just happen to be better.”
A matter of opinion. He let it go.
“Why did you want the job?” he asked. “I mean, what would you do differently from Frank?”
“I won’t say the salary wasn’t a factor, because it was. I’m long overdue for a raise.” Brenda Lee placed the tea bag on the corner of the saucer. “Were I chief, for certain I would be tougher about parking violations. The beachfront lots should get ticketed twice as often. That’s a source of extra revenue right there. Operationally, I would target the McCandless family, chiefly their cross-border operations. And as far as personnel goes”—here Brenda Lee hesitated—”I would terminate Cliff Mooney.”
Ethan was somewhat surprised. Mooney had been suspended with pay for over two months, having been caught tampering with evidence in the case of a suicide. He’d claimed it was accidental, that the diary from the dead woman’s apartment had been lost somewhere between his prowler and the station. Ethan himself had investigated Cliff Mooney’s ties to the deceased, finding that Mooney had not only been in a relationship with her, but had arrested her previously for solicitation and petty theft. Whether their arrangement was business or romance, the officer had bent the rules to keep the woman out of trouble. Ethan had found video footage from the courtyard of a motel that showed Mooney accepting money from her. Whether the diary contained evidence or not, it would likely have showed their relationship was improper.
The decision to fire
Clifford Mooney should have been an easy one. But Mooney denied he’d done anything intentionally wrong. He’d lost the diary, and anything beyond his mishandling of evidence was part of his personal life. That was headache one. Headache two was Mooney’s family connection. Cliff was the nephew of Eldon Mooney, mayor of Blaine, and a longtime supporter of Frank Keogh.
Frank was too moral to let Cliff rejoin the force. He also knew that an outright firing would alienate the department from City Hall, probably wrecking the career of anyone Frank endorsed. So Cliff Mooney had sat at home playing video games since Valentine’s Day, drawing his salary, in law enforcement limbo.
Ethan wanted to fire him more than anything. What shocked him was finding out that Brenda Lee Page felt the same.
“You’d take the political hit?” he asked her.
“I would, yes. Cliff is a disgrace to the uniform and what we represent.”
He wondered exactly what that was. “Firing relatives of the mayor could make someone a short-term chief.”
“True, but the increase in revenue from parking would help offset any—”
The radio erupted, Heck Ruiz’s voice calling a 10-38, request for backup. His voice rising in pitch, breaking code and saying, “Ethan, Brenda Lee—anybody—I’m at the train tracks, a mile and change south of the scrapyard on Portal Way. We’ve got a, well, I forget the designation, but it’s important you come here quick. Follow the tracks.”
Heck was a new hire, and the rookie’s excited tone almost certainly meant a body. From the sound of it, not an accident. Ethan threw back his coffee, left money next to the abandoned chessboard.
“After you,” he said to Brenda Lee, and to Mei, “Game to be continued.”
He followed his senior officer out to the motor pool, thinking the day was getting stranger by the minute. Considering how it had started, that was no mean feat.
Mo’s Scrapyard had been in the Singh family for three generations. The property was southeast of the town center, past the point where Peace Portal Drive turned into Portal Way. An industrial area, the road was abutted by train tracks and a thicket of blackberry.
They drove in the Dodge, Ethan realizing that Frank Keogh hadn’t turned over his keys to the chief’s SUV. He’d get them from Frank at the swearing-in ceremony this afternoon. Assuming their current business didn’t interfere.
“About that heart,” Brenda Lee Page said. “I noticed impressions in the tissue. Possibly stab marks.”
“Bite marks, actually. There’s a coyote that’s been skulking around my property. She got to the heart before I did.”
“A coyote.”
“With blue eyes. Ever seen one like that?”
“You should call Animal Control,” Brenda Lee said.
“There are bigger problems at the moment.”
She nodded. “Like who might want to kill you.”
He’d actually meant the business they were driving toward. ...
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