Laurie stared her down so long, Saffy squirmed, the boil of hurt rising until it bubbled up, a choke. She stung. She seethed. She did not say another word. Halfway through the session, Saffy stood and walked out.
*
The farmhouse sat ten miles outside Essex. A stretch of rural wilderness, chaotic, untamed. Saffy’s GPS led her down a dirt road cratered with potholes, her tires bumbling over fallen branches and abandoned construction equipment as the tentacles of greenery loomed above. When she finally reached an opening, the voice on her phone crooned their arrival.
The land was abandoned. Long empty. The remnants of a house sat ruined in the clearing. The structure had collapsed on itself. Flecks of yellow paint dotted the exterior. Saffy imagined it might have been pretty once—the back porch was still intact, the beams sagging and splintered, overlooking the mountains. The farmhouse had been discovered by squatters, or teenagers looking for a spot to party; it was the kind of place Travis’s old crew would have loved, heedless and spooky, safe for the wrecking. Garbage littered the rolling field beyond the house, and graffiti snaked up the boarded windows.
Saffy crunched through the debris, the sound of her footsteps lost to the breeze. As she approached, the house seemed to sigh. The closer she came, the more uncomfortable she felt—the house radiated an ailing, ghostly energy.
Saffy would not go inside. The front steps creaked beneath her weight, and from the entry she could see a smattering of old furniture, torn apart by people or animals. The fireplace was filled with trash. The windows had been broken, and afternoon sun streamed through shards of shattered glass.
She did not like to picture them here. Two little boys, playing games on the unfinished hardwood. A child, a baby. No mother had been good here. No father had been kind. Saffy knew abandonment, she knew tragedy, she knew loneliness. She knew violence, from the lifetime she had spent chasing it—she knew how it lingered, how it stained. Violence always left a fingerprint.
*
When Saffy finally returned to the station, the afternoon was tense, subdued. The troopers were hunched over their paperwork, worryingly well-behaved—they’d been blasting a terrible combination of Tim McGraw and Flo Rida from their desks for weeks, but all was quiet now. When Saffy arrived, Jamie eyed her from reception.
“The superintendent is here. Corinne brought him to the backroom.”
The superintendent was a burly man from Albany, whom Saffy had only met twice. When she solved a serial rape case that had dogged Moretti for years, the superintendent drove up to shake Saffy’s hand, take a photo, congratulate her. And when everything spiraled with the previous BCI captain, with Kensington and the Lawson case, the state had sent the superintendent to suggest a voluntary retirement.
There was nothing to congratulate now. Saffy felt a singular sense of doom as she entered the backroom. The superintendent sat in a creaky chair across from Corinne, holding a paper cup of water, miniature in the thick of his hands. Lewis and Taminsky looked particularly unkempt today, sheepish, their ill-fitting shirts awkward and untucked.
“Captain Singh.” He stood for a handshake—Saffy had perfected the motion, spine straight, grip firm. “Sergeant Caldwell was filling me in about the Lawson case.”
Corinne glanced up, apologetic.
“You’ll continue investigating until the retrial? The DA has been in touch with our office, too. They’re not happy.”
“Of course, sir.” Saffy blistered beneath the severity of his gaze.
“I’m very curious what you’ll find,” the man said. “This case is getting a lot of press, and our image as an institution has suffered. We took a chance on you, Singh. I’d hate for this whole diversity initiative to flounder over one bad case.”
Diversity initiative. This was the first Saffy had heard of such a thing. It was true that, at thirty-nine, she was the youngest BCI captain appointed in years, that she was the only woman, and the only person of color, ever to hold the position within Troop B. But her stats had gotten her the title. By the time she’d risen to lieutenant, Saffy had the highest arrest record in the state.
Still, she withered under the superintendent’s stare. After reviewing the case and issuing another cryptic warning, the superintendent finally took his leave—when he had gone, the room seemed to deflate with his absence. A buzzing paranoia nipped at the edges of Saffy’s consciousness, a fly too subtle to swat.
*
Kristen’s house was beautiful in the summer. A jumbo-sized Craftsman perched in a cluster of vacation homes, with a yard that opened directly onto the shores of Lake Champlain. Saffy entered without knocking and followed the boys’ laughter down the front hall. “I want to be the ninja!” one of them yelled, as the other shrieked with delight.