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“Then there’s Penny, who disappeared in the forest, with the only lead being that she followed Yolanda, who refuses to say why she was in there. What are we doing about that?”
I glance at Dalton. “This is going to have to be your call. Sorry to dump it on you but…”
“That’s the perk of being the boss,” Anders says.
“Yeah, I know,” Dalton says. “I’ll make the call, but I need input on the options.”
I nod and take out my notebook, flipping to the right page. “Option one, we drop it for now. Option two, we call her bluff. If we go with option two, we take the chance that she walks away from the job, unfinished, and takes her crew with her. Would she do that to Émilie? I don’t think so, but we can’t pull that trigger unless we’re ready to accept the consequences.”
“Which are that she leaves,” Anders says. “And we need to muddle through the rest of the construction. Could we do it?”
“‘Muddle’ would be the key word,” I say. “But the bigger issue is that if we call her bluff and she leaves, we not only have an unfinished construction job—we could be letting her walk away from a crime.”
“How likely do you think that is?”
I glance at Dalton. “What’s your read on it?”
He shifts in his chair and takes a swig of beer before saying, “Fuck if I know. She’s a pain in the ass, and this is complete bullshit she’s pulling. I’m damn tempted to call her bluff just to show she can’t do that. Which is the completely wrong response. As for whether she could have done something? Hurt Penny? Killed this woman? Again, fuck if I know.”
“I don’t think she did,” I say slowly. “I’m being careful with that, because I’ve made the wrong judgment call before.”
“We all have,” Anders says. “Part of the job.”
“I know. But looking at this from a purely logical perspective, taking Yolanda herself out of the equation, I can’t imagine anyone would murder Penny and then urgently call us in to investigate her disappearance. She’d have sat on it for a while, and then said she figured they took off together and would make their way back.”
“Did she seem to recognize the dead woman?” Anders asks.
“That’s complicated. She has mild prosopagnosia. She wasn’t sure whether it could be one of her crew—one of the members she doesn’t know well enough to identify her without other cues. That’d be a weird thing to lie about.Oh, sorry, I don’t recognize her because of my face blindness.”
“Yeah, thatdidn’tseem fake,” Dalton says.
“She also would have needed to preemptively lie to Kendra, who knew about it. Pushing past that, though, it comes down to a simple question of what she hopes to gain by blocking us.If she hurt Penny or killed this woman, why not just say she went for a walk, like Bruno did? Fought with Bruno, needed a moment alone, and didn’t see Penny.”
“It’s a power play,” Dalton says. “She’s letting us know where we stand.”
“In a place where we can’t touch her,” I say. “She’s in charge, and just in case we start to think otherwise, she’s reminding us that until she’s done the job, this is her town.”
“She’s being an ass,” Dalton grumbles.
“Agreed, and you and I both want to show her that we can be bigger assholes, which is why it’s a good thing we now have…” I glance over at Anders.
“Yep,” Anders says. “In a pissing contest, I prefer to stay on the sidelines. Also, to mix my metaphors, I don’t yet have a dog in this fight, having not been in town long enough to form an opinion of Yolanda. She’s tough as hell, and prickly as hell, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say she probably has a reason.”
I nod. “Gunnar summoned the angry-Black-woman stereotype. Someone like Yolanda is going to get that thrown at her every time she asserts herself strongly, which is unfair.”
“Yeah, and she’s dealing with more than that. She comes from serious money. Billionaire money. And that’s the white side of her family, which adds complications on complications. Now, what she’s doing—blocking your investigation for what seems like a power play—is still shitty, and I’m not excusing that. But maybe don’t turn this into a pissing contest.”
“Step down.”
He shrugs. “Refuse to play. That’s easier than giving ground. Just move on, as if her blocking you is of no consequence. Now, if something comes up that suggests she’s a suspect, obviously that changes. Otherwise…”
“Let her focus on her work, while we focus on ours.”
“She’ll be done and gone soon enough.”
“And then the town is all ours.”
Anders smiles. “It is.”
