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With that thought in my mind, I slid into sleep…
…only to feel someone’s hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake. “Selena!”
Chuck’s voice, sounding urgent, worried. My eyes flared open, and I realized that the sun was already slanting through the trees, edging the green canopy overhead with gold.
In the next second, I also sensed that my neck was aching fiercely, thanks to falling asleep in that chair with my head tilted to one side. The discomfort fled, however, as I realized Chuck wasn’t alone. Chief Lewis stood a few feet away, and beyond him, expression grimmer than I’d ever seen it, was Calvin Standingbear.
“What’s going on?” I asked. My head throbbed, almost as if I’d spent all night drinking, even though no alcohol had passed my lips since my dinner with Chuck two nights earlier.
Calvin and Chief Lewis exchanged a glance, and the Globe police chief’s lips compressed. When he opened his mouth, a chill flooded through my body, even though it was already almost too warm outside.
“Lilith Black was found dead this morning,” he said, and again he paused.
It was Calvin who spoke next. “I’m going to need to talk to you…now.”
10
Usual Suspect
“We’ve gotto stop meeting like this,” I quipped feebly, but Calvin’s stony expression didn’t change.
So much for trying to lighten the mood. Not that my mood was feeling exactly light right then — it was just that it seemed as if I needed to say something to make this moment seem a little less fraught.
“I’ll need you to tell me exactly where you were and what you did last night.”
We sat in his office at the San Ramon tribal police station. In a disturbing echo of Lucien Dumond’s murder, Lilith’s body had also been found by the river, and so the crime was under tribal jurisdiction. Calvin had brought Chief Lewis along with him when he came to find me at Shady Oaks Ranch as a courtesy, nothing more.
And while I’d idly daydreamed about all the ways my path might cross Calvin’s one day — our brush-by in the Walmart notwithstanding — I honestly hadn’t thought it would be because I’d been hauled in for questioning about yet another murder.
I tilted my head at him and said, “You don’t really think I killed Lilith Black, do you?”
Calvin settled against the worn leather seat back of his office chair, dark eyes opaque. As usual, his long black hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, revealing all the sculpted lines of his high cheekbones and firm jaw. It was actually more difficult to face him than I’d thought it would be, because underneath my worry about the current situation thrummed the constant question ofwhy.
Why did you ghost me?
Why did you kiss me in the first place if you were just going to pull a disappearing act?
The door to his office was shut, affording us some privacy. I suppose I could have asked him those questions, since no one would have been able to hear what I was saying.
But the coward in me kept quiet.
“I’m not a judge or jury,” he said. “It’s not my place to assign guilt or hand out punishment. All I can do is assemble the facts of the case and then pass them on to the D.A.’s office.”
He sounded deadly serious, and there wasn’t even a hint of warmth in his dark eyes. A chill crept down my spine, and my stomach, already sour thanks to the stale coffee he’d poured for me as a courtesy once we reached the station, performed an uneasy flip-flop.
Did he actually think I was capable of killing Lilith Black?
I swallowed. “I had a solstice bonfire at Chuck Langdon’s ranch. It was poorly attended, and so, once I was done with the ceremony, I helped Josie and Hazel load the leftover food into their cars so they could take it over to the Third Street Shelter. I stayed awake a while longer, but I fell asleep not too long after they left.”
Calvin made a notation on the yellow pad that lay on the desk in front of him. “What time was that?”
Good question. I hadn’t been wearing a watch, and my phone had been tucked away in my dress pocket. And I, still an L.A. girl to the bone, had no idea how to tell the time by the position of the moon or the stars overhead. “I don’t know,” I said, knowing how weak that response must have sounded. Trying to help, I added, “Maybe around eleven?”
He wrote that down. “And you slept out there in the clearing all night?”
“Yes,” I replied, and gave him a rueful smile. “And I have the crick in my neck to prove it.”
Not even the faintest twitch of his lips in response to my comment.
