“You see any new faces in the bar last night?” Davis asked. “Guys from the camp or anything?”
The “man camp,” as they called it, was a Quonset-hut-like building on the north side of town that housed the fracking workers who’d come to Hagen when the drilling had started. The building contained tiny single bedrooms and communal showers where the men who worked the drilling could live on the cheap. Drilling in Hagen wasn’t a huge operation, nothing like the Bakken area. In Hagen, drilling jobs were more highly prized and scarce, so the camp residents tended to keep to themselves and stay out of trouble. But Iver hadn’t noticed anyone new last night.
“Don’t think so,” he said.
“Me neither,” Mike agreed.
“Doesn’t mean there wasn’t someone from up there in the bar,” Iver added, thinking it would be good to have another suspect. A suspect, he corrected. There was no suspect here. Not unless he was one.
Davis was still watching Iver. “Mike said he and Nate, Wyatt, and Kevin all left at the same time, around one forty-five,” Davis said.
Iver shrugged. “Last call is twelve forty-five, bar closes at one, so that’s about right.”
“But no wife at home?” Davis asked Mike, and Iver could see from his friend’s expression that it wasn’t the first time he’d asked.
“No wife.” Mike’s gaze was nailed to the floor, as though not having a wife were deeply shameful.
“He lives in an apartment above his parents’ garage,” Iver said.
Mike shot him a look of surprise.
“Your mother still a light sleeper?” Iver asked, remembering how hard it used to be for Mike to sneak out. His mother woke if he hiccupped in the night. “She would have heard you come home.”
Mike shifted in his seat. “True. She does sleep pretty light.”
Davis looked like he was about to say something but closed his mouth.
The pain swelled in Iver’s brain until his head threatened to explode. He bent over and gripped his temples between his palms.
“Can I ask what you have?” the detective asked.
“A headache,” he said, holding his breath and trying to sit back up.
“Migraine?” Her gaze shifted to his pill bottle.
She was definitely like one of those head doctors. He tucked the pills in his pocket. “Something like that,” he told her.
“You okay?” Davis asked.
“Yeah. Sure,” he said.
“What happened to your hand?”
Iver looked down at his knuckles. He’d forgotten about the cut. There had been blood on his jeans, too. How the hell had he hurt himself? “Cut it on a piece of metal.”
Davis looked around. “Here?”
“No. At home. Garage,” he added in an attempt to sound more confident. But it was a lie. Why would he lie? Because they were acting like he’d done something. He hadn’t done anything, had he?
The room was still and silent again. Cal rose, shuffled in a circle, and settled back down.
Jack Davis motioned to the picture of the dead woman. “And you’re positive that she doesn’t look familiar to you? To either of you?”
“Nope,” Mike said.
Iver took another look at the woman’s photo. When he shifted the image under his fingers, he noticed a line of fringe stitched along the front of her top. Suddenly hot, he enlarged the photo with two fingers, his eyes watering, until the silver threads came into focus. The pain chose that moment to whip its metal tip against the flesh behind his eye. He pressed on the eye, fighting against the sense that he was about to black out.
Shaking his head, he passed the phone back to Davis. “I’ve never seen her before,” he said, and it felt like the truth.
His vision throbbed in and out as he recalled the thread he’d pulled off his watchband an hour earlier. He’d assumed the sparkly string had come from one of the waitresses.
Only now he wasn’t sure.
Because the thread in his watch looked a whole hell of a lot like the ones that lined the dead woman’s top.
CHAPTER 9
KYLIE
The noon sun cast long shadows as Kylie Milliard walked toward the wooded area beyond Skål bar. It was well past noon but still dark among the trees. The morning had vanished in a series of unending interviews with the bartenders and waitstaff. Kylie had personally spoken to the five waitresses who had worked last night.
A smarter bunch than she’d been expecting, the women had arrived at the police station in jeans and sweatshirts, carrying book bags on their way to or from class. None of them had stepped outside the bar between the start of their shift at four p.m. and closing time at one a.m. They carpooled for safety—three in one car, two in another—so they’d left together as well. None had any complaints about the job, which paid well, or about management. They thought Mike, who managed the bar, was awkward but harmless, and Iver was generous if aloof.
None of the women had ever been assaulted by any of the customers. There were always two or three male employees who kept an eye out for rowdy guests and escorted them from the bar when they drank too much. Although sex was always a consideration in a death investigation, nothing so far indicated that sex had been the primary motive for this particular murder.
None of the bar patrons who’d been interviewed recognized the dead woman. If the victim hadn’t been in that bar, the next logical place she might have been killed was the adjacent woods. Wet, frozen weather and snow would make it tough—maybe impossible—to locate the scene of the killing, and that was if the crime had actually happened outside.
But Kylie wasn’t convinced that the crime hadn’t involved the bar itself. An army brat, Kylie had learned to do two things exceptionally well: lie and know who else was lying. Iver Larson had been lying this morning—maybe not about all of it but about something. And in a murder investigation, something could well be everything.
According to Sheriff Davis, Larson was a responsible citizen—a veteran who’d been handed a raw deal, blown up, sent home, and then abandoned by his wife. Maybe that was all true, but there was something about him that itched a spot Kylie couldn’t scratch.
She wanted a warrant to search that bar, but for now, she had to settle for looking in the neighboring woods. Pausing at the edge of the trees, Kylie cracked her knuckles through her gloves and aimed her flashlight at the snowy ground. The surface of the snow was dimpled—spots where ice had fallen from the trees or small animals had traversed the snow. Or perhaps larger animals.
When she was four or five steps into the woods, the sunlight faded from view. The shadows and snow were grayer; the temperature dropped. It wasn’t much lighter here than it had been at five in the morning.
She scanned left to right, trying to measure the width of the woods. It was a small area, she knew from driving. From inside, it felt larger. No new snow in Hagen in the past twenty-four hours meant it should be easier to spot any evidence the perp might have dropped. Not easy but easier. She crept along, searching for a clue that she had no idea even existed. Still, she made her way, gaze tracking. She found a set of boot prints heading from the bar. She followed them until they seemed to make a circle and go nowhere else.
Instinctively, she looked up and studied the trees overhead. “Right. Like the killer just up and flew away,” she muttered to herself.