“Which room is hers?”
“This isn’t a fucking bed and breakfast. People stay where they stay. Then they go.”
“Great,” I mutter, looking back down the hill toward the menacing outbuilding.
“Hey, wait, I know you.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. But when I turn back and look at her again, more closely, there is something familiar.
Suddenly she pushes herself off the rock. “Wait, yeah, I definitely do.”
“Ah, no, you don’t,” I say starting down the hill, bracing for her to say something about Jane.
“We went to fucking Hudson High together.” She points to herself. “Lauren Avery? We got drunk a few times together in Promenade Hill Park— you, me, Amy, Tim, Becca. All those people.” She’s looking at me now like I’m the one who’s got the problem. “Remember?”
And then, all at once, I see her the way she used to be. Lauren with the shiny auburn curls, the big smile, the noisy laugh. She was a loudmouthed clown back in high school, at the center of a group that I stayed on the far periphery of. I faded out for good when I left for UCLA. Some of us are still connected on social media that I never look at, but I haven’t spoken to anyone from high school in years. Most people move on from Hudson. Lauren’s dream had been a job in sales and marketing with the New York Giants. She was a guy’s girl and a sports fanatic. The drugs have ravaged her.
“Oh, right,” I say, finally. And luckily stop myself short of How are you? Because the answer is obvious.
“You’re a cop?” she asks. “Here?”
She knows about Jane, of course. Everyone always did. And even in her current drug-addled state, she thinks it’s a weird choice for me to stay and work as a cop in the town where Jane was murdered. She’s got a point.
“Yeah, I’m a cop,” I say, inching backward down the hill. There is nowhere good for this conversation to go. “You shouldn’t be staying here, you know. This isn’t a safe place. Trust me.”
Lauren shrugs and smiles sadly. “Then what are you doing here?”
“I don’t have any choice,” I say, turning to leave.
“Nah,” Lauren calls after me. “Everyone’s got choices.”
Back down the hill, I rap on the first of the ramshackle doors. Move one hand to my gun, just in case. Silence. Passed out, too high to hear me— so many possibilities.
“Police, open up!” My voice sounds deep, confident.
I wait a long, long beat, then pound again, even harder this time.
“Hold the fuck on!” finally comes a muffled voice— youngish, grouchy, male.
Noises follow: shit being hidden, thrown out, evidence destroyed. Not that I care if it’s only related to drugs, but there are other possibilities. I knock again. “Come on, open the damn door!”
“I said I was fucking coming!”
I take a step back as heavy footsteps approach, hand still on my gun. Finally the door snaps open.
“What the fuck?” The young guy in the doorway is shirtless, his chest concave-skinny, wearing faded boxer shorts with a sagging elastic that barely clings to his bony hips. His ribs look like they’re about to tear through his pasty skin. There’s something, someone, moving in the room behind him under a pile of blankets on the floor.
“Who is it?” A woman’s voice.
“That Crystal?” I ask, pointing.
“What?” He asks like he’s never heard the word crystal, much less of a person named that.
“Crystal!” comes the muffled voice again. “She wants to know if I’m Crystal.”
“Crystal?” he says, kind of disgusted. “Crystal’s not fucking here. Why would she be here?”
I take a deep breath. Patience. This is going to be a long conversation. “How about the last time you saw her?”
“I don’t fucking know. Check the Falls. She’s always hanging out there, trying to pick up weekenders so she can shake them down.”
This is the second time I’m hearing this. Maybe Crystal tried to rob Keith and Derrick, and things unraveled? But even if Crystal is a thief, it seems unlikely she could have taken out two grown men on her own. With Luke Gaffney’s help on the other hand?
“Have you seen either of these men?” I hold up Keith and Derrick’s pictures on my phone, swiping between the two of them a couple times. When the guy leans in to peer at the screen, he reeks of cigarettes.
“Nope,” he says finally.