“Stop saying sorry,” he barked, his calm demeanor splintering for a second. “Don’t say sorry,” he repeated, regaining his earlier tone. “Say thank you. This is where you say, ‘Thank you, Michael.’ ”
Michael?
Ama swallowed hard. Familiarity washed over her. Why did that phrase hit her straight in the gut? Before she could respond, Jonathon brought his cane behind his head and swung hard. The thicker end connected with Ama’s temple. The woods went bright white in front of her eyes, and a dull crunch filled her head. She was unconscious before she hit the ground.
MARTIN Chapter 5 | 4:30 PM, December 1, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
DETECTIVE MARTIN LOCKLEAR SAT AT his desk at the Tarson Police Department and spun a pen between his fingers, swiveling back and forth in his rotating chair like windshield wipers in slow motion. There was one critical difference: windshield wipers were useful. When he’d been considering taking the position as Tarson’s only detective, he’d figured a little mountain town like this would at least have a friendly hum to it. But now, after three months on the job, he’d concluded that Tarson was more like a morgue than it was like Mayberry.
Martin’s old station in Savannah, Georgia, where he’d spent a decade as a detective on the narcotics unit, was a living thing; loud as a freeway at rush hour and just as pissed-off. If there was a spell of quiet, it was understood to be an eye in an ever-present storm, a moment to prepare for battle. But the eye of the storm always passed. He’d been on edge, loaded and ready, for three long months.
He exhaled, planted his feet on the threadbare carpet, and put down the pen. Last night, Martin had pulled up to the one-bedroom brick house he rented and found himself standing in the bathroom, his hand on the medicine cabinet’s mirrored door where sleeping pills and painkillers should’ve been—would’ve been, had he been standing in his old home in Savannah.
The stagnant quiet of this station, of this town, made him feel like he was the storm. His recent track record certainly read like the wake of one.
Martin glanced at his left hand, the fog of memories clearing for just a moment, and the stale, slow drone of the department returned. His thumb was absently gliding over his ring finger, spinning the ghost of his wedding band, his skin still faintly striped from the nine-year shadow. His marriage had almost been a casualty of his old job. Then his addiction had eaten them both, fast and whole.
His wife, Stacy, went first. He came home one night to find her gone, her closet empty. She hadn’t left a note; there wasn’t anything left to say that hadn’t been said a thousand times before. His job had been next. They’d said it wasn’t personal—budget cuts, plain and simple. They’d offered to write him a letter of recommendation anywhere he wanted to go, as long as it was somewhere else.
Martin’s gaze traveled the perimeter of the main room of the Tarson Police Department, the only somewhere else that had even offered him an interview. Gray walls, gray carpet, a black plastic clock ticking away on the front wall, six basic desks arranged in two rows facing forward with a bigger desk by the main door for the receptionist, a woman who had an army of little fluffy dogs she knitted clothes for and absolutely no interest in answering the phone if anyone else was around to take the call. The whole setup reminded him more of an elementary school classroom than the beehive feel of his old precinct. The department chief’s office loomed off to the right like an Orwellian principal.
On the back wall were doors to two incident rooms, then a short hall to a pair of interrogation rooms, a storage room, and a janitor’s closet no one ever seemed to open. Just past the locked door began the second half of the building, where people under arrest were printed, processed, and detained while awaiting bail, arraignment, or transfer. Those arrests generally fell into one of three categories: drunk driving, drugs, and bored teenagers with spray paint. Sometimes an overachieving citizen managed to land in all three categories, which Martin had unofficially coined the Tarson Trifecta.
The main door swung open, lifting Martin’s gaze. Eric Stanton, a baby-faced, second-generation beat cop born and raised in Tarson, walked in with two white plastic bags of Chinese takeout. Stanton dropped one bag on his own desk and then strode to the captain’s office with the other bag tucked under his arm.
Captain James Barrow was visible in stripes through the open blinds that covered the large office window. He was sitting at his desk, the side of his face illuminated by a small lamp, the overhead lights turned off. One hand raked through what was left of his silver hair. The other pressed a phone to his ear. Martin watched Stanton walk into the office and set the bag on Barrow’s desk. Then he retreated from the office and back to his own workstation, Captain Barrow never once looking up.
The white plastic bag slouched down, revealing a slender brown paper bag beneath, the top twisted as if wrapped around the throat of a bottle. Martin narrowed his eyes, entertaining a prick of resentment, but quickly dismissed it. What was the chief of police supposed to do, walk into the liquor store? And how could Stanton—groomed since birth to respect rank and badge—be expected to say no?
Martin had a soft spot for Stanton. The patrol officer had taken Martin out to lunch and on a tour of the jurisdiction his first day on the job, right after the captain had more or less reamed him out in place of a welcome: I know about your record. No one else needs to. This is your second chance, so don’t blow it.
The entire tour lasted less than an hour, and Stanton’s dispatch radio had remained dead. Martin had been tempted to ask him if it was on. Stanton was a talker, especially when it came to telling stories about Tarson’s history. Turns out, the foothills ringing the town weren’t as untouched as they looked. Beneath the earth ran a labyrinth of Cold War–era fallout shelters and abandoned gold mines. Stanton’s favorite anecdote was about an evangelical group that had custom built a tiny underground village, complete with a chapel, and illegally sold sections of the subterranean real estate by the square inch.
Then the recession struck in the eighties, and it hit Tarson and places like it harder than most. What jobs there were dried up, including an old factory that had employed half the population that shuttered its doors overnight. Most of those who had the means to leave left. What remained of Tarson had been on a morphine drip for twenty years.
Martin caught himself staring at the boundary map of the Tarson jurisdiction pinned to the wall by the front door, his gaze roaming the green, unsuspecting range of foothills. Six months ago, when the posting for a detective position in Tarson had shown up on a job board the same day he got out of rehab, he’d decided to pretend that Tarson had been entirely unknown to him, that it would be new, fresh, untainted with any smudge of personal history. Telling himself an outright lie on his first day of freedom probably wasn’t setting himself up for success, but here he was: three months employed, six months sober, and miserable.
The truth was Tarson was the last pushpin marker on a murder case Martin had worked that had gone cold two years prior. The final clue was at a rest stop at the edge of town, the last place a person could take a piss behind a locked door without buying something first before they reached the Tennessee state line: a garbled, seven-second message left by Toni Hargrove, a prostitute-turned-informant, from a parking lot pay phone to Martin’s cell phone. Two years later, he still couldn’t fall asleep without thinking of Toni, terrified and desperate, calling the one person she thought would hear her, help her, and instead of that person answering her call, he’d been adrift on a cloud of diazepam and Xanax.