As for Kip and Racer, their murders went unsolved. Darrell was fighting an uphill battle to find evidence and witnesses, because no one really wanted the murderer to be caught. A human killer would spoil the myth, and local businesses saw dollar signs in the story of the Ursulina. Plus, nobody missed Kip and Racer. The consensus around town was that the monster had done us a favor by wiping them off the earth. Darrell was pretty much the only person who actually wanted to see the crimes solved. To him, it was a matter of principle. Murder was murder.
That was how the Ursulina legend took off.
That was also how I got a job in the sheriff’s office. I’d been on my own that summer. My father was away on the road, and my brother was hauling nets on an Alaskan fishing boat out of Seward. I had a freshly minted associate’s degree, but no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I was young and restless. As the media besieged the sheriff’s department with Ursulina calls, Darrell needed someone to answer the phones, so I volunteered. Darrell was a neighbor, which meant I’d known him since I was a girl.
Eventually, my part-time role on the phone turned into a paid gig as the office secretary. I probably would have stayed in that job until I retired, but Darrell’s partner drowned in a boating accident right around the time that Ricky got fired from the mine. Darrell knew we needed more money, and he told me I had the makings of a great cop. He also had a niece on the county board who’d been riding the sheriff hard about hiring a woman for the force.
So I became Darrell’s partner. We’d been partners for almost two years.
I was about as welcome in that role as Sandra Thoreau was when she got her job at the mine. The other deputies made sure I knew it. They began filling my desk drawer with porno magazines and used condoms. When I didn’t lose my cool, they switched to dead rats instead.
Sooner or later, they figured I’d quit.
But I didn’t. I wasn’t going anywhere. I kept my head down, and I took it, and I never said a word. In my heart, I was still Rebecca Colder. A little bit stronger, a little bit bolder.
Chapter Four
I caught up with Darrell outside Gordon Brink’s house.
He was bent over at the waist, his hands on his thighs. Around others, he kept a poker face at the sight of blood, but I knew him better. We dealt with a lot of blood. Together, we’d witnessed severed limbs from mine accidents, shotgun suicides, and shredded faces that had gone through car windshields. None of that compared with the horrors Darrell had seen as a marine in Korea, too. He remained stoic through all of it, but I knew how deeply he felt things, and blood in particular seemed to give him flashbacks of his days in the service.
Given how much my own dad was away, I’d grown up thinking of Darrell as almost a second father to me. He was the most solid, serious man I knew. Religious. Faithful. Humble. He’d told me once that life was a relay race, where you take the baton from your parents and pass it along to your children, and in between, you try to run around the track with as much strength and grace as you can. I liked that philosophy.
You wouldn’t really have been impressed to look at him. He wasn’t tall, and he’d never been a pretty boy like Ajax. Even in his sixties, he kept his hair military short, jet black, not a gray strand to be found anywhere. His nose had a drooping hook, and his ears looked big and wide under his buzz cut. His cheek had a long scar where a North Korean bullet had sliced him. It would have killed him if it had been another inch to the left. That kind of good fortune made him conscious of the choices he made in living his life, and he was determined to make the right ones.
If there was one quality about Darrell that sometimes made me bite my tongue, it was that he had a black-and-white outlook on the world. Things were good, or things were bad. Things were right, or things were wrong. His own moral compass always pointed due north, so he was quick to pass judgment on people. Even at my young age, I’d figured out that the world was a lot more complicated than that.
“I’m sorry, Rebecca,” Darrell said when I joined him. He was still bent over, breathing hard.
“For what?”
“For telling Ajax to keep his hands off you. I know you hate that.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I noticed the pale cast of his face. “Are you okay? That was an ugly scene back there.”
“I’ll be fine. I’ve seen worse.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets and glanced across the white field of snow. “I know that, but you don’t have to pretend with me.”
Darrell straightened up, wiping away a little sweat that had gathered on his brow even on a cold night. “Thanks.”
“So what do you think?” I asked, because I was very curious to know if Darrell had come to any conclusions yet. “This must be a copycat, right?”
He put on his stolid deputy’s face again. “I don’t know. Maybe. If it’s the same killer, where has he been for six years? And why come back now? The only thing I do know is that none of these crimes were committed by a mythical beast.”
I could have given him a different take on that, but I didn’t tell him what I was thinking.
Inside the house, we found Gordon Brink’s son, Jay, in a bedroom on the top floor. This was three stories above the main floor master suite that Gordon and Erica shared. The huge house felt oddly empty and quiet — so much space for only three people — and I thought it had to be strange for a boy from the city to be stuck here in the middle of nowhere. The bedroom was large, but clean and uncluttered, which surprised me from a teenager. I assumed that Jay shared his father’s organized legal mind. On the other hand, the posters on the log walls — all neatly hung and absolutely level — revealed a rebellious spirit and a bookish intelligence. I saw punk bands like the Flesh Eaters and Dead Kennedys, alongside portraits of Oscar Wilde and D. H. Lawrence. He had half a dozen bookshelves crammed with classics like Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass that would have put other seventeen-year-old boys to sleep.
Jay lay on top of the carefully made king-size bed when we arrived. He had his hands behind his head and was staring at the ceiling, and he was dressed in a flannel shirt and corduroys, with bare feet. He didn’t acknowledge us, although he obviously knew who we were and why we were there. He was a handsome kid, thick reddish-brown hair, a prominent nose and close-shaved face, with intense dark eyes. He was tall but not particularly muscular or athletic. He’d just lost his father, but I didn’t see any indication on his face that he’d been crying.
Darrell went to the large bedroom windows, stared outside for a while, and then turned back to Gordon Brink’s son. “Jay, I’m Deputy Darrell Curtis. This is Deputy Rebecca Todd. We’re very sorry about your father.”
The teenager didn’t look away from the ceiling. “Thanks.”
“You and I met last week,” I reminded him. “I came over here when your stepmother called about the bucket of blood.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Jay replied. “Do you think whoever did that also killed Gordon?”
“It’s too early to know.”
Darrell was still by the window, and he nodded at me to continue the interview. I pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down. “I know this is a difficult time, but you might be able to help us figure out who did this to your father.”
Jay still showed no reaction on his face, and his voice had a flat, numb quality to it. “I have no idea.”
“Well, you might have heard or seen something that was important. A lot of times, people know more than they think.” I took out a notepad from my pocket and uncapped a pen. “I’d like to go over a little background with you first. Okay?”