Page 72 of This is Why We Lied

Dave started chuckling as he took his place back in front of the fire. He leaned against the felled log, returned the boning knife to its place on the tree stump. Will could tell he expected that to be the end of it. Dave had spent a lifetime getting things wrong. The only question was, at what point did Will tell the man that he was a special agent with the GBI? Technically, nothing that Dave said before that moment, even if he outright confessed to killing Mercy, could be used against him in court. If Will was going to do this right, he had to establish a rapport, then slowly lead Dave into the truth.

He asked, “You got any beer left?”

Dave raised an eyebrow in surprise. The Will he knew from his childhood wasn’t a drinker. “When’d you get hair on your balls?”

Will knew how to play this game. “After your mom sucked them dry.”

Dave laughed, reaching back to twist a beer off the six-pack. “Pull up a chair.”

Will wanted to keep some distance between them. Rather than sitting in front of the fire alongside Dave, he leaned his back against a boulder. He rested his phone beside his bad hand. He bent his knee to keep the bait knife in his boot close to his good hand. He had to be prepared if Dave decided to put up a fight.

Dave didn’t seem like he was thinking about fighting. He was too busy looking for ways to be an asshole. He could’ve tossed the can of beer to Will, but he spiraled it like a football.

Will caught it in one hand. He opened it one-handed, too, making sure the spray hit the fire.

Dave nodded, clearly impressed. “What happened to your hand? You get a little too rough with your lady? She looks like a biter.”

Will held back the response that wanted to come. He had to put it all aside—the sense of betrayal and fury that still festered from their childhoods. The disgust over what kind of man Dave had turned out to be. The brutal way he had murdered his wife. The fact that he had abandoned his son to pick up the pieces.

Instead, Will held up his bandaged hand, saying, “Cut it on a piece of broken glass at dinner.”

“Who patched you up? Was it Papa?” Dave clearly enjoyed the cruelty of the joke. He stared into the fire with a smug grin on his face. His hand went under his shirt as he scratched his belly. Will could see deep gouges where someone had scratched him. There was another scratch on the side of his neck. By all evidence, he had recently been in a violent altercation.

Will placed the can of beer on the ground beside his boot. He rested his hand beside it, making sure the bait knife was in reach. The best-case scenario would leave it tucked inside his sock. A lot of cops thought the way you met violence was with violence. Will wasn’t one of those cops. He wasn’t here to punish Dave. He was going to do far worse than that. He wanted to arrest him. To put him in jail. To make him suffer through the stress and helplessness of being a defendant in a criminal trial. To let him have that boundless sense of hope that he might possibly get away with it. To see the crushing look on his face when he realized that he hadn’t. To know that he would have to scramble and claw every day for the rest of his life because inside the prison walls, men like Dave were always at the bottom of the pyramid.

And none of that took into account the death penalty.

Dave let out a pained sigh to fill the silence. He picked up a stick. Stoked the fire. He kept glancing over at Will, waiting for him to say something.

Will wasn’t going to say something.

Dave waited less than a minute before he let out another pained sigh. “You keep up with anybody from back then?”

Will shook his head, though he knew a lot of their former housemates had ended up in prison or in the ground.

“What happened to Angie?”

“I don’t know.” Will felt his hands wanting to clench into fists, but he kept both of them resting on the ground. “We were married a few years. Didn’t work out.”

“She fuck around on you?”

Will knew Dave already had the answer. “What about you and Mercy?”

“Shit.” Dave poked at the fire until it sparked. “She never ran around on me. Had it too good at home.”

Will forced out a laugh. “Sure.”

“Believe whatever you want, Trashcan. I’m the one what left her. Got tired of her bullshit. All she ever does is complain about this place, then she gets a chance to leave, and …”

Will waited for him to say more, but Dave dropped the stick and grabbed a fresh beer. He didn’t speak again until the can was drained and laying crushed on the ground.

“They had to close this place down. Too many counselors diddling the kiddies.”

Will shouldn’t have been surprised. This wasn’t the first time the idyllic setting he’d imagined as a child had been spoiled by a predator.

Dave asked, “Why’d you come up here, Trashcan? You never wanted to see the camp when we was kids. You were better at memorizing them Bible verses than I ever was.”

Will shrugged. He wasn’t going to tell Dave the truth, but he needed to come up with a believable story. He remembered what Delilah had said about the circle of rocks. “My wife used to come here when she was in the Camp Fire Girls. She wanted to see it again.”