When things got busy, he typically settled in his office and blasted Springsteen or Zeppelin or, when he was really amped up, Nirvana or old AC/DC and dealt with the paperwork—orders and payroll and taxes, the mindless shit of running his father’s bar.
He remembered the bottle of Jack on the floor in his living room. He must have brought it home from the bar. God, he hoped that bottle hadn’t been full last night. But it couldn’t have been. That much alcohol would have killed him. He’d probably grabbed a half-empty one from behind the bar on his way out. For the drive home . . . he had driven home. That was an asshole move. He’d been doing that a fair amount lately.
Not that lately, he thought. He’d been doing it since Debbie had left him. A year.
“Iver?” Davis asked.
Iver rubbed his face in an attempt to force his brain to focus. “Sorry. What were you asking?”
Davis glanced at the detective, then back at Iver. The message between them was clear. Iver was a shit show. But so what? He hadn’t done anything wrong. Well, there was the driving. Shit, had he hit something? He opened his mouth to ask but snapped it shut.
“Sheriff Davis was asking what time you left the bar,” the woman said, that gaze of hers like a laser into his brain.
“Like I said, I think it was about ten thirty, but I didn’t think to check my watch.” Iver swallowed what little spit he had. “What is this all about?”
“We need to get a sense for what happened in this bar last night,” the woman said.
“A sense,” Iver repeated.
The detective added nothing, and her piercing stare intensified Iver’s returning nausea. What had he done? Nothing. He hadn’t done anything. No one spoke for a minute. Iver looked back at Mike. “Kevin and Wyatt were with you last night, right? And Nate?”
Mike nodded. “And Donnie helping on the door. We were busy, so if any of the guys had gone missing for more than the time it took to piss—” Mike looked over at the lady and cringed. “Excuse me, ma’am. Any longer than a bathroom break, I’d have noticed.”
Iver ran a hand through his hair, the strands bent and fanned out from sleep under his fingers.
“We’ve talked to them already,” Davis said and turned to Iver. “You got any cameras in here? Any monitoring of any kind?”
Iver shook his head. “No. Whoever’s at the door keeps an eye on the lot, and we’ve always got a couple guys inside. We haven’t had any issues.” As he said the words, he wondered why, then, Sheriff Davis was here at this hour of the morning. He glanced at the detective, who studied him with a furrow between her brows. She reminded him of those head doctors, the psychiatrists. “You going to tell me what’s going on?” he asked Davis.
The sheriff’s jaw worked a moment before he spoke. “A woman was murdered last night.”
The rush of memory made Iver flinch. His neck taut, his voice hoarse from screaming. The cut on his hand. He’d been angry. Shouting. He glanced over at Mike, but his best friend was doing a damn good job of not meeting his eye.
“Murdered?” he said. “Where?”
“We have yet to find the crime scene,” the detective said. “But her body was found in your dumpster.”
Your dumpster.
Your anger. Your violence. Off your meds.
“Something bad is going to happen, Iver,” Debbie had told him the day she’d moved out. “I can’t be here when it happens.” His ex-wife’s parting words.
Iver shook his head. “I don’t—” He had to cough the words out. “I don’t know anything about a dead woman.”
And he didn’t.
Or maybe he did, and he couldn’t remember it.
CHAPTER 7
LILY
Lily lasted ten minutes down a dirt road before the pain in her ankle was too debilitating for her to continue. She was about to sit down on the shoulder when she heard the spit and crunch of tires on the icy gravel road coming up behind her. She scanned the area for a place to hide but found only low grasses, nothing higher than her ankle. The driver slowed, and adrenaline washed through her belly. As the pickup stopped, Lily adjusted her hair to hang across the right side of her face, unsure if there was bruising at her temple.
The window was down. The driver, an older man in a flannel shirt and a trucker hat with a gas-pump logo on the front, was alone in the cab. His hat read Hills Drilling, North Dakota. His face was stern, but something about it was reassuring. “Where you heading?”
“Town,” she said, pulling her gaze from the hat. North Dakota. Had his license plates said North Dakota, too? She hadn’t thought to look. Her identification card was from Arizona, but Brent Nolan’s license was from North Dakota. How the hell had she ended up in North Dakota?
“You’re in luck,” he said. “Hop in.”
She pried the door open and used her arms to lift herself so that she didn’t have to put weight on her ankle.
“Name’s Jim,” he said. “And what’s your name?”
Never tell anyone your name. She searched her mind for another name.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he continued before she could respond. “You’re little Lily Baker.”
Lily felt her lips part in a rush of breath, as though she’d been punched in the gut. She looked outside. Surely this wasn’t Arizona, so how did this man know her?
“Wow,” he said, staring alternately between her and the dirt road. “Look how grown up you are. I remember when you were knee high to a grasshopper.”
Still, she said nothing. Questions swirled in her mind, but how could she ask? Where did she start?
The truck idled loudly as Jim removed his hat as though to give her a better look at his face. “You probably don’t remember me. It’s Jim Hill. I was a friend of your parents.”
The word parents made her chest swell. Tears burned in her eyes. She did live here. She searched the landscape for something familiar, but it was low hills and grasses in every direction.
“You look just like your mom did at your age—you’re, what, twenty-five, twenty-six?” Jim grinned, and Lily felt her own angst lessen. This was home. “The trouble your dad and I used to get in. We were the same class, did you know?” Jim glanced over conspiratorially. “We used to ride our bicycles right down the main hallway of school, and your father would leave these huge skid marks. He could stop that bike on a dime.”
Lily smiled. Her father was funny, a clown.
“Another time, your dad loosened the joints on the math teacher’s chair. Mrs. Penderson, she was a fussy, uptight thing who liked to slam herself into her chair when we misbehaved. Sure enough, your dad got her all frustrated, and she slammed down, and her chair just collapsed.” Jim laughed.
Lily looked out the window as Jim told stories about her father, and she found herself smiling at the antics. Even the pain in her ankle seemed to abate. Within ten minutes, they arrived in a small residential area and then a single street of businesses. As Jim turned onto Main Street, a sign welcomed them to Hagen, North Dakota. Population 864. She read the numbers again. Eight hundred and sixty-four people.
“Don’t know when they’ll fix that sign,” Jim said. “Got to be near fourteen or fifteen hundred by now, don’t you think?”