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CHAPTERONE
FOUR MONTHS AGO
In the nearly three years that Mason Walsh had been in police custody, he’d only ever had one visitor: his mother, the sole person who never doubted him when he insisted over and over again that he was innocent.
Valerie Walsh couldn’t believe that her baby boy—who might be quickly approaching thirty, but was still her baby boy—was capable of what he’d been accused of. And that was true three years ago. A reputable deputy for the Hamlet Sheriff Department, with his charming smile, flirtatious nature, and tendency to act the part of the white knight for any damsels in distress, Mason couldn’t be responsible for the double murder that had haunted their small village in the years since.
And he wasn’t.
How could he be? As fond as he became of the outsider’s wife, he never met Jack Sullivan until the man was a corpse. He only met sweet, innocent Tessa hours before Sullivan’s murder, when Mason found the woman was a lightweight who might’ve indulged too much down at Thirsty’s that fateful night.
Doing his duty as a deputy—and hoping he’d be there to get to know the outsider woman after she slept off the night—he’d brought her to the station house, letting her sober up in one of the habitually empty cells so that she could eventually drive.
Helping his mother with a back-to-school project once he was off shift, he missed seeing Tessa again that morning, though when the emergency call came through on his radio that there was a DB at the Hamlet Inn, he was there to comfort the woman. But just because they got close in the days after the inexplicable murder, that didn’t mean he was responsible.
The same thing went for Caity’s assassination. Shot dead in broad daylight in front of her home, the sheriff of Hamlet wasn’t just his boss. She was his friend. He never would’ve hurt her.
And, yet, he’d spent the last three years in Montgomery County jail, awaiting a trial that he was beginning to doubt he’d ever see.
When was first arrested, it wasn’t any of his fellow deputies who slapped the cuffs on him. Oh, no. Besides him and Caitlin De Angelis, only two others worked for the Hamlet Sheriff Department: Wilhelmina Park, the admin, and Sylvester Collins, a former outside who moved to Hamlet a year before the murders. Rick Hart—a fellow local and, like Sly, a Marine—was helping the crew out… but it was Detective Rodriguez from nearby Montgomery who arrested him.
It was a conflict of interest, he was told. Bullshit. His entire life, what happened in Hamlet, stayed in Hamlet. No one called county when there were suspicious deaths before, just like how no one involved the big city after the outsider died.
But after Caity was killed? The town council needed a sacrificial lamb to appease the rest of the village. Somehow, Mason was served up on a silver platter.
They said there was evidence. The rope. The bullet casings. The same make and model as his official issue… all of that supposedly tied him to the double crime. No matter how he tried to offer an alibi, it didn’t matter. He was marched out of his house, taking out of the small town he’d spent his entire life devoted to, and locked behind bars in the county jailhouse.
One day, he would see court. When that happened, he’d argue his case with the help of the best lawyer his mother could buy—Sadie Oliver, one of her neighbors in Hamlet—and hope that the judge would see he was nothing but a fall guy for the true murderer—or murderers.
Because Mason… close to three years after he was locked up, he had his own suspicions of what really happened that September.
He had his own suspicions—and his own ideas of what he would do if he could avoid prison and make those who cost him so long in a cell. Revenge was a dish best served cold, and after how the solitude and the injustice twisted him, turning him from an earnest deputy to a broken inmate, thinking of revenge… it was the only thing that kept him from losing his mind at just howunfairthis was.
His mother’s visits helped. Whenever Mason was torn between lashing out at the LEOs who treated him less than for once being of them or giving up when it seemed as though he’d live in this nightmare forever, she was there to promise that she’d do anything to make things okay again.
After all, that’s what a parent was for, wasn’t it?
That’s why, when the rookie CO came to bring him from the county cell in the pod he’d called home sweet home these last couple of years, he expected the visitor waiting for him in the jail lobby would be his mother.
It wasn’t.
The lobby itself was a small room with a spattering of tables, cheap folding chairs bolted to the linoleum, and fluorescent lights that had Mason wincing as Officer Stewart led him in. Visits at Montgomery were allowed three days a week, and usually the lobby was decently full descending the jail housed over four hundred inmates.
Today? There were two people waiting in the room.
One of them was seated, the other standing. At first glance, Mason didn’t recognize them, and he was surprised when Steward marched him to that table and told him to sit.
The guy standing was a big bastard. Dressed in a suit too tight to fight his muscular frame, he had dark eyes, dark hair that buzzed short in a military-style haircut, and a face said that he’d kill you without blinking.
And, yet, the gentleman seated across from Mason seemed infinitely more dangerous.
He was probably a good decade younger than the guard at his back. Mason would put him at his mid-to-late twenties, though he had a weight on his shoulders that made him appear older. His hair—a darker shade of blond—was styled perfectly, a pair of deep blue eyes watching Mason closely. He had handsome if nondescript features, an expensive watch on his wrist, and a suit that was tailored perfectly to his slender form.
On his left hand, he wore a wedding band. Mason saw that because the other man was tapping his fingers anxiously, as though he’d been waiting all day for his arrival.
Maybe he had been. One thing for sure, Mason had never seen him before.
As soon as he sat down, the big brute shifted a few steps away from the seated gentleman. Mason barely noticed, instead keeping all of his attention on the man watching him closely.
