Page 15

FIFTEEN

CASEY

Thursday Morning

“Bowie, get your furry butt back over here. It’s too early for this shit.”

As soon as Casey had opened the gate, Bowie’d rushed past him and disappeared into the brush around the corner of the boatshed.

Ever since a wandering orange menace of a cat had taunted him months ago, he made it a personal mission to check and see if the cat needed chasing off again. Bowie took his job very seriously.

The cat, for its part, seemed to purposefully enjoy provoking Bowie by staying just out of his reach. Casey suspected it was a stray. The damn thing had taken a swipe at him last week when he tried to see if it had a collar. Regardless, and against his better judgment, he’d bought a small bag of dry cat food and was keeping a bowl filled that he left just at the end of the boatshed.

Bowie ignored the command. The sound of a dog rustling in weeds reached Casey’s ears, and he sighed.

“Dog, if you don’t get your ass in the car right this minute, I’m leaving you here.”

Sure, he was—yeah, no. The rescue seemed to have bounced back from being abandoned in an empty but fenced yard when his owners moved out of the state, but Casey wasn’t willing to test him. And there was no reason to leave him behind anyway. Casey had the perfect job, one that allowed him to bring Bowie along for the ride.

“Right this minute,” Casey said sternly.

This time around, Bowie listened and trotted Casey’s direction, doing his best to look innocent and put-upon at the same time.

Opening the Jeep’s back gate, he tapped the mat. “Get in.” Bowie leaped inside. “Good boy.”

Casey had the engine running when a Twana County sheriff’s car pulled off the road, blocking him in. Deputy Deter Nolan was behind the wheel. After the other morning, Casey didn’t feel like dealing with him.

“What the hell now?”

With a sigh, Casey turned off the engine, opened the door, and got back out of the Jeep. Bowie tried to push past him and jump out too.

“As much as I would enjoy letting you have your way with Deputy Nolan, it’s frowned upon.” He shut the door, ignoring Bowie’s whine.

The conversation with the deputy wasn’t going to be a long one, and Casey knew what the topic would be. It had been a week since he’d sent in another request for records, and Sheriff Rizzi had now sent his top toady to tell Casey that once again they wouldn’t be complying .

It was almost as if the Sheriff’s Office had no clue what the Freedom of Information Act meant.

“How’s the boat?” Casey asked.

Nolan didn’t even bother to acknowledge his jab. “What is it with this bullshit request for information again?” he demanded as he exited his cruiser.

Deter Nolan was a little older than Casey and had been on the force about as long as Casey had been a forest ranger. He was average height and intelligence, had some serious anger management issues, and would do anything Sheriff Rizzi asked of him.

“It’s the same information I ask for every year,” Casey said with a patience he didn’t feel. “The complete files on my brother’s case.”

The information that had been shared in the past was incomplete, much of it redacted. There was more, Casey knew it, and he wanted to know what it was. If he could prove evidence had been mishandled or a witness ignored, he might be able to force investigators to reopen his brother’s case. Twenty years had passed since Maya Crane had been murdered and Mickie had been sent to prison for it.

“Nothing has changed,” Deter said flatly, his dark eyes icy with a dash of meanness and spite lingering at the back of them. “There’s no new information, nothing was missed.”

From the beginning, Mickie claimed he was innocent and Casey believed him. Mickie had been—still was—a great older brother. Casey knew in his heart that his half brother hadn’t brutally murdered his girlfriend.

“A lot of time has passed since then. Why would Sheriff Rizzi refuse to let me read the original files? From where I’m standing, it feels suspicious.” Casey leaned his butt on the fender of his Jeep with a nonchalance he didn’t feel. “So clarify for me, please.” The please almost didn’t sound sarcastic. Almost.

“You’ve been told this many times,” Deter said, his hands on his hips now. “There are ongoing related investigations. They would be compromised.”

Blah, blah, blah. Casey almost rolled his eyes at the attempt to bully and obfuscate.

“Ongoing investigations” was the sheriff’s standard excuse, one that Casey couldn’t fight. But it only convinced Casey that there was something Sheriff Rizzi didn’t want him to learn. He planned to keep filing requests until Rizzi fulfilled them or died.

Mickie didn’t deserve to be in prison and his freedom was up to Casey.

“It’s a bad look for you and your department, Deter. Frankly, it makes me think the TCSO is hiding something.” That earned Casey a sharp intake of breath from Rizzi’s sycophant. Maybe it’d been too much. Fuck, it was too early to deal with someone like Deter. Twice in one week was two times too many.

“Look, Lundin, I understand that you and your family are still upset. No one wants to believe one of their own is a?—”

Casey interrupted Deter before he could finish. “Don’t finish that sentence, just don’t.” He put everything he had into his glare. He’d been patient, he’d played nice for long enough. It was time to rock the boat.

The deputy shot him a hard glance and turned back to his cruiser. “By the way, there was some kind of a fire at Paulson Point last night, Spurring did a drive-by.” With that, he returned to his car and roared off, chunks of gravel and mud spitting out from underneath his tires.

“God, he’s an asshole. Maybe next time, I’ll let you out of the car. You’d just bark at him, and he’s really not worth the effort although it would annoy the hell out of him.”

Back behind the wheel, Casey reversed and turned the Jeep so he pointed toward the road. He was supposed to head into the office and grab the Forest Service vehicle before his rounds, but his anger and frustration at Deter Nolan had him riled up. Instead, Casey drove the opposite direction. It was the rainy season, but he needed a walk in the woods to clear his head after that encounter. Then he’d see if there was any damage at Paulson Point.

“When the time comes, you can bite him for me.”

He could have sworn the dog smiled.

Sheriff Eli Rizzi was the power in the county—and the county commissioner’s unofficial right-hand man on Heartstone. Casey wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that most of the commissioner’s decisions were put through a Rizzi filter first. Rizzi’d held the position of sheriff for almost twenty years, and unless someone more popular came along and unseated him, Rizzi was going to have the job for a lot longer. Especially with deputies like Nolan and Spurring, who thought the sun shone out of Rizzi’s ass. The thought left a bitter taste in Casey’s mouth.

When he reached the fort’s access road, Casey turned down the long drive that passed by the battlements and eventually ended at the picnic area where he’d had to help Deter and Richie. A trail that he liked followed along the fence line of the mothballed base, running behind the enormous, military-built, cement structures.

Growing up on Heartstone, Casey, along with most of the island kids, had explored all the battlements, tunnels, and supposed secret rooms the military had built underneath the massive buildings. There were all sorts of stories floating around about dead soldiers, murders, and of course, ghosts.

The path was rarely used, even in the summertime, so it tended to be overgrown and was perfect for when Casey needed a break from everything. It ended near a sealed-off entrance to one of the tunnels and an artillery foundation that had never been completed.

“Go on. Don’t chase anything,” he told the dog. “Don’t do your business where I can’t clean it up.”

Bowie bounded off but not out of Casey’s sight. Every few minutes he’d slow down and look back over his shoulder, silently urging Casey to hurry the heck up. For his part, Casey forced the conversation with Deter out of his mind. He inhaled a lungful of the oxygen-laden air and was rewarded with an immediate feeling of calm. Then he rolled his head, forced his shoulders to relax, and followed Bowie into the woods.

He was enjoying the peace that being outside away from humanity gave him when, uninvited, an image of Gabriel Karne popped into his head.

Karne was a bit taller than Casey and had slightly narrower shoulders. There were hints of silver in his short dark hair and in his beard, overall bringing a younger, darker Timothy Olyphant to mind. And fuck it, but Casey had always had a thing for Raylon Givens. The stranger was probably about ten years older than him, which meant nothing, but it did bring up questions as to why he’d shown up on the island alone during the offseason. Men of his age usually came in with families or fishing buddies in the height of summer.

Casey didn’t trust him. Nothing in their two encounters screamed trustworthy. Hell, there wasn’t even a whisper.

Who was this disreputable castaway that Elton had taken under his wing?

Something about him grated hard on Casey’s last nerve. He wasn’t sure if it was the smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, the tinge of wariness in his gaze, or the sleazy charm he employed to try and weasel out of consequences. Karne was up to no good and Casey was going to figure out what it was before he hurt Elton or anyone else in Casey’s jurisdiction.

Bowie barked and dashed off, snapping Casey out of his thoughts.

“Bowie, come!” Casey ordered. “By me!”

There was a rustling in the underbrush ahead of him, then Bowie came back into his sight.

“What the hell?”

Bowie was well behaved and trained because Casey worked with him almost every day, and in general, the dog wasn’t interested in humans unless he’d been introduced to them.

“You can’t just take off like that.” What had prompted him to bolt? If Casey asked, he’d just get a doggy roll of the eyes.

“Sorry, dude. I gotta do this if you’re gonna be like that,” Casey said, clipping Bowie’s leash onto his collar before they followed the trail around the bend. “I don’t want you scaring anyone.” The trail they’d just used might be lesser known, but the public area they were approaching was not. Even during the winter months, the fort had its fair share of daytime visitors.

After a bit more of a walk, they reached the first of the huge cement battlement structures and one of the unfinished artillery foundations. The big guns intended for the fort hadn’t been delivered by the time it closed, but that didn’t stop kids and adults from climbing in and around where they would have been mounted. Aside from the one Casey was heading for, there were eight more of them scattered across the park.

He stopped walking and peered down into the cement-lined hole in the ground. A crumpled wet paper bag from a fast food place lay at the bottom. At least he’d been prepared to find litter here because there was always something.

Bowie had his nose to the ground, following an interesting scent that led away from the gun mount and toward the battlement .

There was another impatient tug on the leash. “Alright, I’m coming.” He’d grab the bag on his way out.

On the one hand, the battlements were fascinating, especially if you were a history buff or a twelve-year-old kid. But they didn’t belong in the forest so they were also just plain weird, a relic of a brief period of time.

When they reached one of the mammoth metal-plate doorways, Bowie looked up at him expectantly.

“We can’t go in there, remember?” Casey reminded his companion.

In response, Bowie whined and pawed at the ground.

“Nope. No can do.”

Bowie whined some more.

“What is up with you today?” Casey asked. “By me, right now.”

This time, he did get a roll of doggy eyes, but Bowie obeyed his command while making it clear Casey was missing out.

He made a note to return later with the keys. An animal had probably somehow gotten trapped inside the cement structure. Not a common occurrence, but also not unlikely.

Originally, a network of underground passageways had connected all of the battlements so that soldiers would be protected during battles that ended up never happening. Several of them had been filled in and closed off, but not all of them. Most of the public had no idea they still existed, but those that grew up on the island did. And there was always a new rumor floating around about secret unmapped rooms and tunnels.

Casey took one last look at the four-inch-thick iron door. The lock appeared secure; if there was a creature trapped inside, it hadn’t come through the obvious entrance. He’d check again when he returned with gloves and a trash bag.