Page 64 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane

Detective Olsen

Detective Frank Olsen props his elbows on the table and massages his forehead.

He can’t remember the last time he was this tired.

It’s been one hell of a night, interviewing one witness after another.

Maybe he’s getting too old for this. He remembers back in his early days on the force when an all-nighter was nothing, a stiff cup of coffee and he was good to go.

But now? Now he feels the exhaustion in his bones.

Maybe Mary was right when she said it was time for him to start thinking about retirement, spending more time with their grandkids, buying a little house in one of the Carolinas.

But whenever he begins to consider it, a case like this falls into his lap.

Something that gets his wheels turning, really makes him think.

He worries that if he retires, he’ll end up driving both of them up a wall.

What would he do with himself? Detective Olsen has never been the type to sit still—he can’t picture himself on a fishing boat, staring out at the glassy water, his mind as empty as his hook, or doing crossword puzzles in a rocking chair for hours on end.

What else are old retired guys meant to do?

Hell if he knows. He just knows that he’s not ready to give this up yet, not when there are still cases like this one in the cards for him.

The majority of the time, being a detective in Sterling Valley isn’t the most riveting job.

Most of the cases he catches are about a cleaning person who allegedly stole a family heirloom, and there was that one string of break-ins last summer that turned out to be a bunch of kids with nothing better to do.

But this case is looking more and more like a real homicide, something he can sink his teeth into, and he feels like he’s shaking the dust off, finally doing some real police work for a change.

See, Mary? I’ve still got it.

Detective Olsen spreads the latest witness statements out on the conference-room table.

There are four of them, one for each of the witnesses who are still holed up in the interrogation rooms while his team conducts a search of the Pembrook house.

Detective Olsen shuffles the pages, ordering and reordering them into a sequence that makes sense.

With the papers laid out like this, a story is emerging. He reads the relevant portions again:

Libby Corbin

I’d invited a man I met online, Peter, to the fall festival tonight, but when he arrived, things didn’t go as I’d anticipated.

He was behaving rather aggressively, making unwanted advances toward me, and when I refused him, he became quite angry.

He said something to the effect that he hadn’t come all this way to leave without getting laid.

He stormed off after that in the direction of the woods.

I’m making this report because I’m concerned that he might have been mixed up in whatever happened out there tonight.

Detective Olsen had shown her a photo of the deceased, and she’d identified him as the man she’d known as Peter.

Evidently, he’d given her a fake name in their exchanges, as the driver’s license they’d found in his pocket listed his name as Dean Tucker.

Detective Olsen had done some digging into Dean Tucker.

As it turns out, this last run-in with the law was far from his first. He’d found arrests for shoplifting, assault, and more than a few complaints from ex-girlfriends accusing Dean of roughing them up.

It looks like Ms. Corbin had been rather fortunate, in the grand scheme of things.

He looks at the next statement in front of him:

Christina Pembrook

I was on the walking path through the woods when some man just grabbed me out of nowhere.

I yelled and screamed but he wouldn’t let me go.

I was kicking and fighting, and I think I must have kicked him in his genitals, as he let out a yelp and I was able to break free.

I ran home and told my mother what had happened.

She sent me to stay with Mrs. Corbin and said that my father would handle things from there.

I’m not sure what happened after that. My mom came and woke me in the middle of the night to tell me that I needed to come down here and tell you what happened to me in the woods.

Detective Olsen pauses, considers this one again.

On the face of it, the girl would have no reason to lie about being attacked by Mr.Tucker, and given the man’s rap sheet, it wouldn’t take a stretch of the imagination to believe it.

But there’s something about the wording, something about the strange, detached way the girl recounted the story in the interview, that makes Olsen feel uncertain.

He remembers the way she seemed to look over his shoulder as she spoke, her eyes drifting upward as if she were trying to remember her lines rather than the event itself.

He gets the impression that there’s something missing here, something the girl intentionally left out; he’s just not certain what it is.

He moves on to the next statement: Georgina Pembrook’s.

After I told Colin what happened to Christina, he was furious.

I followed him out to the garage, where he put on his coat and took a flashlight from his workbench.

I begged him to call the police, to leave this up to them to resolve, but there was no reasoning with him.

He was determined to go into the woods on his own and find the man who attacked our daughter.

He’ll come back to this one later. He jumps to the final statement, reads the relevant section again, the narrative unfurling more clearly now.

Audrey Warrington

I was at the fall festival when I saw Colin Pembrook walk out of the woods, heading in the direction of his house.

He seemed to be in a rush, but I followed him.

I’d wanted to talk to him about something important.

I’m not proud of this, but Colin and I had an affair.

He tried to blackmail me into continuing our arrangement, but I’d told my husband, Seth, the truth earlier that night.

You can ask Seth yourself if you’d like.

He will tell you the same thing. I wanted to tell Colin that it was over, that my husband knew about us and he had nothing left to hold over me, but when I caught up with him, I could see that there was blood on the sleeve of his jacket.

He was holding a flashlight that had blood on it as well.

I asked what happened and he told me to mind my own fucking business.

In the time I’ve known Colin, he’s been a violent and vengeful person.

I’m concerned he had something to do with the person that died in the woods tonight.

Detective Olsen flips back to Georgina Pembrook’s statement, where the story reaches its conclusion:

I hid in our guest room while my husband was out looking for the man who’d hurt Christina.

I don’t know how long he was gone. I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up, it was pitch-black outside.

I went to our bedroom to check if he was home, and I found him in our bed with blood on his clothes.

That’s why I came to you. I don’t know exactly what my husband did, but I know what he’s capable of.

He would kill me if he knew I was here, but I had to say something.

I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.

Detective Olsen had watched her carefully as she recounted her story.

He’d have to have been asleep at the wheel to miss the signs of abuse on her: the swelling around her eye that was blossoming into quite a shiner, the wavering note of fear in her voice as she spoke about her husband, the way she seemed to flinch whenever Detective Olsen so much as cleared his throat.

There was no question that this woman was afraid of her husband, that it had taken a lot for her to come forward and speak out against him, but she was whip-smart too.

Probably, Olsen suspected, smarter than most people gave her credit for.

Olsen wanted to believe her, he really and truly did, but he wasn’t entirely sure that he could.

Just as with the daughter’s statement, something felt off about the whole thing.

He just couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

And then there’s the anonymous call to consider. The tip he’d received earlier about looking into a strange man who had been casing the houses on Hawthorne Lane. He rewinds the recorded call and listens to it again now:

There was this man wandering around the block. And he just, I don’t know, something felt off about him.

The voice sounds faintly familiar. Almost like Libby Corbin’s, but he can’t be sure. Whoever had made the call had done her best to disguise her voice.

But why would she have made that call? Was it possible that she was trying to shape his perspective on Dean Tucker, get him to see Dean as a criminal prowling the neighborhood with nefarious intent, and to direct his attention away from whatever is hiding underneath these statements, the ones that are painting a tantalizing picture of one dangerous man killing another?

Detective Olsen may never know for certain. But what he does know is that the women’s statements were enough to warrant a search of the Pembrooks’ residence, something he’d dispatched his team to do while he finished interviewing the witnesses.

His cell phone buzzes now, rattling on the metal table beside him. It’s the call he’s been waiting for. “You find anything?” Olsen barks.

“Sure did,” his partner, Ruth Sutherland, responds.

Sutherland is a good kid with the makings of a great cop.

“The guy was asleep when we got here. Caught him red-handed. Literally. His knuckles are all swollen, and there was blood all over his hands. And we found his jacket and flashlight in the garage, both with blood on them too. Forensics is lifting the bloody prints on the flashlight now, but given the blood on his hands, I think it’s safe to assume they’ll be a match. ”

“Why wouldn’t he have washed up?” Colin Pembrook is a lawyer, and a good one from what Olsen can gather. Why would he let himself be caught so easily? “It doesn’t make sense to me. This guy goes out and kills someone and then just goes to sleep without even washing the blood off his hands?”

“No idea, old-timer.” Olsen pretends to hate it when the kid calls him that. But he smiles on the other end of the line despite himself.

“Maybe he wasn’t thinking straight,” Sutherland continues.

“Or maybe he passed out before he had a chance. We found some sleeping pills on his nightstand. Who the hell knows. But there’s an ADA on the scene now.

She’s telling me that with the statements we have and the evidence in the house, we have enough to make an arrest. Do you want to come down here and do the honors? ”

“This one is yours, kid.” Olsen doesn’t have to see Sutherland to know that she’s smiling as she ends the call.

He should be happy. Wrapping up a case like this in record time, evidence served up on a silver platter.

But something is still nagging at him. Maybe how easy it all was, the way it’ll all be tied up with a neat little bow as they hand the case off to the district attorney’s office.

Justice served. It’s possible it’s all in his head, but the truth, Olsen knows from experience, is often far messier than meets the eye.

He thinks again of Georgina Pembrook, of the bruises on her face, and for the first time in his long career, he wonders if justice and the truth must always be one and the same.

He’s starting to be able to picture it now, that little house in North Carolina, his wife in a rocking chair by his side, his grandkids running through the grassy yard. Maybe, just maybe, this is an ending he can live with.