Headlights(47)

“I mean … they like me more.”

She stares at me a moment, and I don’t know what to read there. Then she softens, a little. “Remember Austin?”

Of course I do. On a whim after our wedding, we took a drive down to Texas and alternated dancing at the White Horse and playing pool at Casino. Always my hand in her back pocket or her head on my shoulder, always the two of us leaning on each other. We’d stayed up all night, talking about cases from the past. We never stopped, never turned it off, even on our honeymoon, this job of ours. This job that is everything we are.

“Do you … you think it’s all gone?” I ask.

She stares at the ground again. “Maybe there were times when I didn’t want it to be. I thought you’d call. When you left. In those early days, I thought maybe I’d hear from you.”

“I thought you didn’t want to. We were divorced.”

She pulls the sleeves of the sweatshirt down over her hands, trying to figure out how to say what she wants to, bites the inside of her cheek. I don’t know what I’m hoping for.

“Nat and I don’t talk about work, at home,” she says. “We … To him, the job matters, and it’s important. But it’s not his whole life, it’s not who he is.” The words hang around us in the morning air. What she’s not saying, what she means, is he’s not like us.

I nod. Because what else is there? Neither of us can turn it off, neither of us want to. But she gets a reprieve now, with him. Josie and me leaning and leaning on each other for so many years. Maybe she just wanted someone who didn’t need to lean back.

“How’s your case?” I ask, swallowing the lump in my throat.

She shrugs, takes a sip from her thermos. “Drawn out, stressful,” she says.

“Why do we do this job again?”

I think it’ll make her smile, but it doesn’t. She furrows her brow. I know the look, and I know by now that it’s about me.

I say, “I’m fine. Just had a bad night. It’s just … Whileago.”

She looks me up and down, then faces back out. The amphitheater before us, the stage at the bottom, and the giant rocks and hills beyond. “It’s not though. Daniel, you gotta tell Jack. You shouldn’t be working this case. These are major offenses you’re committing, not to mention that it’s fucking you up, and you’re too close to it all. You’re not gonna get anywhere when you’re so deep in it, and frankly, it’s gonna look real fuckin’ suspicious when—”

I put my hand on her knee, and she stops talking. She turns to me, and I can see it all there. All the belief she ever had in me washed away. But it brings me back too. I’m here again, solid. Here on the bleachers sitting next to a woman I used to trust. Who used to trust me. A woman who I know in this moment it’s completely over with, who I will never lean on again.

I know it now, here, in this bright cold morning. I have a lot of faults and a lot of messed-up tendencies and enough baggage for a hundred people.

But she’s forgotten what I’m capable of.

“I’m solving this case, Josie,” I say. Because there’s no other choice. “And you’re not gonna interfere.”

And I do something I’ve become very good at.

I stand up and walk away.



* * *



As I drive back to Denver, I think about the figure in the headlights. The one I saw on the way here. The shadow that turned and became a person, in the same spot the truck hit us. Marianne, Noel, and me.

The shadow that became Calvin Keller.

My dad.

Or maybe it was me.





13



Everett and Mona Brown’s house sits in the middle of the Rock Creek development up in Erie, in various shades of brown and beige, like all the other homes surrounding it. An elaborate security gate bars our entry until we’re cleared by three different guards on the way in.

“A little intense,” Tillman says.

Security cameras watch us, turn as we drive. Every house looks completely identical. We pass each one, and it feels like we’re driving further into an endless state of déjà vu.

“When did this place crop up?” I ask.

Tillman shrugs. “So many of ’em, I can’t keep up.”

I wouldn’t say that Denver was ever a pretty place to me. The mountains around it are beautiful, the towns in them and the trails there some of the most impressive in the world. But these plains that just happen to butt up against the mountains, live directly in their shadow, are just … that. Dust. Settlements. Strip malls and soccer fields and a big REI. Plains trying to claim something of the mountains beside them.

“Do you know the population these days?” It seems like a thing Tillman would know. Today’s podcast topic is tommy-knockers purportedly haunting Colorado mines.

“Seven hundred thousand, give or take,” he says immediately.

I remember when I was a kid. Teachers telling us Denver’s population was under five hundred thousand. Who are all these people? Where did they all come from? And why are they settling here? House after house, yard after yard. Matching. All of it slipping, sliding, blurring at the edges.

We pull up out front, and I turn the car off. I say, “Anything on Everett’s involvement in the chat room and relationship with Wizdumteller. And the motel too, ask her if she’s stayed there before or if that location has any significance to her. And if she knows Hannah Lawrence or Tony Howell or ever heard Everett talking about them.”