“More have died.”
“And you find missing women, too.”
She appreciated that he didn’t say, or imply, what others sometimes did: that the missing women were a side job.
“Other than that, I couldn’t find anything on you. No interviews, even though I found mention of you on some pretty high-profile cases.”
She smiled a little to herself. “The attorneys like to take credit. It’s okay.”
“I’m sure you could get publicity, if that’s what you want.”
“That’s not what I want.”
He looked at the last of his beer, sliding down the inside of the glass. He didn’t seem in a rush to drink more, like many people. She liked him now.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“That’s a big question,” she said quietly.
She could feel it in the air then. The hum.
They looked at each other for a long moment.
“How about you?” she asked.
He sighed, rubbing his chin. “When I was a little boy... no, I won’t burden you with that story. Instead I’ll just ask, because I know you probably want to finish your work here, when you get back to Portland, and I’m there, too, will you go out with me? We could even drive down to Winchester Bay.”
“I’d like that,” she said.
He smiled, truly happy. He carried their empty glasses to the bar, and the bartender smiled, too, observing that the couple looked years younger than they had when they came in. He liked to think his pub was like that: Magical things happened here.
42.
The two officers of the Pickleweed police—Aaron Evans and Patrick Dufur—reacted the way they had been trained to. They kept their guns pointed at the suspect until they had him in their car, cuffed so tight his fingertips turned blue. Mitchell was groggy and nauseous. He struggled to remember how he had gotten there.
The morning sun was bright, and he blinked, looking around, bewildered. He was outside a gas station in a place he had never been before.
He could see from the back of the police car into the gas station.
There was blood all over the floor.
His eyes widened, and his heart thumped in his chest. The police had left him in the locked car to go inside, and the kid who had called them was standing frozen by his bike, just looking.
Mitchell could see gobbets of blood on the cooler doors. It looked like a slaughterhouse in there. An interior prayer started in him, and it went,Dear God, don’t let this be trueandThis cannot be true. This is not happening. I am sleeping. I will wake up. I will wake up back in my apartment in Union City. I will wake up by the Chinook River.
One of the officers came back outside, staring at him as he made a call on his walkie-talkie. It was the coldest stare Mitchell had ever seen, and being a Black man, he had gotten some cold looks. This one went beyond cold. It took him a moment to see it for what it really was, and he didn’t think it had anything to do with race. It had to do with murder.
It was hate. Icy cold, white-hot hate.
Later that day, they took Mitchell to the police station. There, in a back room made of concrete with no windows, the officers took turns beating him. They knew he was guilty—it was obvious. His keys had been found on the counter, and in the front seat of his truck, next to where he had been sleeping, there was a blood-splashed wallet.
In the concrete room, Mitchell could barely breathe. The blood had settled in his lungs. His eyes were black with it. His lips were so swollen that it hurt to swallow. His neck was scratched from being choked. Over and over again, the officers asked him,Where is she?And one even cried with rage while beating him, saying,I know you done it.
Later, he would not remember confessing. All he remembered was the terror. He knew, in that moment, he would never leave the land of small concrete rooms. He had been jettisoned from a world where he had never belonged, and now there was no going back.
At the gas station, the officers scraped samples of the blood off the floor, and put them in vials. They asked a local farmer with bloodhounds to search the woods, using a scrap of clothing from Betty’s farmhouse closet.
Mitchell’s truck was taken into impound and the bloody handprint photographed. After a few days, he was stripped out of the clothes he had worn while being beaten, and these, heavy with blood, were put into an evidence bag and, along with the vials of blood, taken to the tiny crime lab in the back of the station, where they were examined by the solitary technician. He knew his job. They all knew their job.
