AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We need to talk to Dalton,” Theo said.
22
The Dore County Jail was attached to the sheriff’s station, which in turn was part of the complex of government buildings on Jefferson Street. With the exception of city hall, with its classical façade and shining dome, the primary objective of whatever committee had designed the government complex seemed to have been, in Auggie’s judgment, to showcase the period of Midwestern architecture when, for one shining moment, everyone had loved the color brown.
“Stop,” Theo murmured.
Auggie laughed in spite of himself as he turned into the parking lot.
To be fair, the buildings weren’t actually hideous—ok, maybe they were. But they looked like a lot of the town that had been developed at the same time: the low, single-story construction because land was abundant; the flat roofs; the windows with some sort of thermal coating that tinted them yellow. It was the kind of stuff that someone had been proud of because they could tag it with the wordsaffordableandsensibleandon-budget. Auggie wondered, not for the first time, if architects had a high rate of suicide.
They waited in the station lobby. Aside from the deputy at the desk, the only other occupant was an old man with a sour onion smell. He was picking at a scab on one elbow, and he was wearing Minnie Mouse slippers that looked decidedly too small for him. He caught Auggie looking and snarled—a little, lips-pulled-back snarl—and Auggie decided now would be a good time to look at his phone.
“Sorry about that,” John-Henry said when he came through the doors. Then he saw the old man and said, “Hi, Wallace.”
“It’s my .22,” the man said. “And they’re my squirrels.”
“Well, let’s see what the sheriff has to say about that.” John-Henry continued across the lobby to join Theo and Auggie. “I had to make a couple of phone calls after we talked.”
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Theo asked. “We don’t want to put you in a bad spot.”
“The sheriff seemed fine with it. He was very accommodating about the room, and anyway, it’s my investigation. If I want to bring in a couple of civilians to help, that’s my business. Here we go.”
Auggie turned around to see Sheriff Engels emerge from a hallway. The sheriff was a trim man with a silver mustache and silver hair, and he gave Theo and Auggie a nod before turning his attention to John-Henry. It gave Auggie a chance to study the sheriff more openly. He looked older than Auggie’s initial assessment; it showed in his face, but only when you really looked—his movements, his energy, they all suggested a vigor that Auggie wasn’t sure was entirely real. Not too long ago, the sheriff had lost his only son to a deranged killer, and Auggie wasn’t sure anyone came back from that, not at any age. Look at Theo, a quiet voice said inside Auggie’s head.
“Do you need anything from me?” the sheriff asked.
John-Henry shook his head. “Thanks for arranging this.”
He led them to a cinderblock room with a scarred and battered table that had a metal bracket bolted to the top of it. The chairs were tubular, with orange upholstery that was pilled from too many asses. Across the room, a steel door connected to another part of the building—presumably, the jail itself. Auggie had visited the jail before, but never this room—he’d been thinking of the general visitation room, which was long and narrow and divided into cubicles with reinforced windows and telephones.
“Lawyers use this room to meet with their clients,” John-Henry said to the question he must have seen on Auggie’s face.
“And law enforcement uses it for questioning,” Theo said.
“Sometimes.”
John-Henry motioned for them to sit, so they did, and then Auggie could see where someone had scrawled the name DONNY on the table, going over and over the name in whorls of blue ink. A bit of adhesive-backed paper was wrapped around one chrome table leg—a leftover bit of nametag, maybe. The smell of the place was stronger—a watered-down artificial perfume that made him think of floor cleaner, and something else that he couldn’t name but was like a film on his tongue.
The sheriff waited long enough to see that they were settled, and then he left. When the door closed behind him, the room seemed to seal itself off from the rest of the world. The silence tightened until Auggie thought his eardrums might pop.
“Are we being recorded?” Theo asked.
“No,” John-Henry said.
“That’s why law enforcement only uses it sometimes for questioning.”
“That’s one of the reasons.” He gave them a cool look. “You’re convinced that Dalton knows something he’s not telling. He has a legal right to counsel, and he’s also got the right to remain silent. He’s not going to talk to you if he’s got a lawyer glued to his side while we record the circus. But, on the other hand, if he tells you something and I’m not recording it, I’m going to get my ass burned. This is what we call a calculated risk, and I’m doing it because I was wrong earlier.”
Auggie wasn’t sure how many police chiefs across the world were capable of a sentence like that, but he thought the percentage wasn’t high. “It’s going to work. There’s something weird, something he’s been keeping secret.”
“I’m sure there is, Auggie. There always is. But one of the things you learn when you do this job is that everyone keeps secrets, and they’re not always worth ferreting out.”
The door across from them opened, and Dalton came into the room, followed by a deputy—moon-faced, cheeks red. The kind of kid who had grown up eating a lot of dairy, Auggie thought. Then Auggie’s attention moved back to Dalton. He wore prison scrubs, and he looked thinner than Auggie remembered. During the short time he’d been in jail, he’d changed drastically. His forehead and eyes were lined, his hair lank, his cheeks sallow even under a scruff of beard. Auggie was a little surprised that there was little sign of the violence from Theo’s questioning at the community theater—a swollen nose was the worst of it. The real changes were from fear. And, of course, withdrawal. Dalton’s eyes came to rest on them before darting away again, scanning the room, and then came back. They darted away again almost immediately. Remembering the community theater, the sweeping gestures, the voice projected to the back row, Auggie wondered how much of this was real. If it was a performance, then this was Dalton’s role of a lifetime.
The deputy connected Dalton’s cuffs to the ring set in the center of the table and said, “Need anything else?”
John-Henry shook his head.
