He tossed her words back at her. “Abuse isn’t always clear-cut.” Then he shook his head. “God. I don’t know, I don’t know.” A pause. “All of this . . . It probably doesn’t have anything to do with the case.”
Maybe it didn’t—maybe he was as opportunistic as anyone else and was using this death to make his point somehow. Maybe he was blinded by his own convictions, a confirmation bias that would be oh so easy to believe. Everyone had an agenda; this might be his.
But from what she could tell, they were dealing with a cultlike group here that used religious protections to suit their purposes. A group that had circumvented local law enforcement when a kid had gone missing.
Yeah, maybe Hicks had his own ulterior motives, but Lucy wasn’t ready to dismiss the importance of this information as unnecessary to her case quite yet.
Hicks laughed, but almost under his breath, as if to himself. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
She smiled faintly, but didn’t have a guess at that, either. Hicks was a web of contradictions, a mess of carefully hidden secrets and straightforward candor, of calm watchfulness and a thrumming tension that was so constant that it was most noticeable when it was absent, of a cop’s cool detachment and the heated interest of someone who had skin in the game.
“It’s good to know anyway,” Lucy finally said, for lack of better reassurance.
Part of her wanted in on this crusade, but the larger part wanted her to focus, to be professional, to not get distracted. This wasn’t her fight. It would never be her fight.
Noah Dawson was her fight. Figuring out why seventeen-year-old Eliza Cook took him into the woods and drove a knife into his skull—that was her fight.
She had to—had to—leave the rest of it to Hicks.
Hicks nodded, just one quick jerk of his head like he’d heard the words she hadn’t just said.
Maybe she was grasping at straws here, but Lucy made a decision. The doubt would gnaw at her otherwise. “I want to talk to him again. Jackson.”
The engine turned over almost before the words left her mouth, like he’d known she was going to demand it.
The coroner’s office was only a few blocks away, and Hicks assured her the man would still be there despite the late hour.
It was a promise that held true. They found Jackson holed up in a broom closet–size office right off the medical lab. He looked up from his paperwork when Hicks knocked on the open door. “Back so soon?”
Lucy dropped into the chair across from him.
“Did you know Noah Dawson?”
Jackson shot an uncertain look toward Hicks, but unlike the two men’s previous silent communication earlier in the day, this seemed more confusion than anything else. “Sure. Most people know each other around here.”
“And the Cooks, right?” Lucy asked. “You knew them well?”
“I don’t know about . . .” Jackson shook his head, sat back, some of the color gone from his cheeks. “I don’t know about ‘well’ per se.”
“You worked with Josiah Cook—”
Jackson interrupted. “On getting him to call me when someone died.” It came in a burst, a hint of panic at the edges. “I was just getting them to follow the law.”
His eyes were big, pleading—a kicked puppy. “I was just trying to help.”
Little did he know that those tactics only served to grate on Lucy’s nerves. “Would you be able to get a list of all the children who have died since you’ve been coroner?”
She didn’t know what that would accomplish, but if nothing else, it would give Hicks something to work from once Lucy left. If he was still on his crusade after this.
“Sure, I’ll . . .” Jackson stumbled. “I’ll see what I can do. It might take—”
“So there have been a lot?” Lucy posed the question as innocently as possible, letting her eyes go a little wide.
“I mean . . . not more . . . than . . .”
“How long have you lived here?” Lucy interrupted. His back was flat up against his chair as his body leaned as far away from them as possible.
“A couple, a couple years,” Jackson said slowly like he knew he was falling into a trap.
Lucy turned to Hicks. “Would you say this town was very big?”
Hicks’s mouth twitched before he answered. “No, ma’am.”
“About how many deaths would you expect to see in a town this size, then?”
“A handful a year, maybe.” Hicks played his part. “At most.”
“A handful a year,” Lucy repeated, shifting her attention back to Jackson. “Do you really expect me to believe it will take you a long time to compile such a list?”
Jackson’s desperate eyes clung to Hicks’s face, but he must have realized he would receive no help from that quarter. He deflated. “No.”
“Wonderful.” Lucy clapped her hands once and then pulled out a card with her email, placing it on the far edge of his desk. “You can send it here.”
She didn’t wait for an answer before standing and moving toward the door, and everything in Jackson exhaled at the obvious sign that they were leaving.
Lucy paused. “Oh, before I forget, I’m going to have a team from Spokane take the body to their ME in the morning. Please be here to let them in.”
And just like that, the strain was back. “The Dawsons only wanted me to look at the body. No one else.”
“I don’t care,” Lucy said. Despite the irritation she’d deliberately telegraphed to him only a second earlier, she wasn’t actually interested in starting a war. All she wanted was a thorough, unbiased report. The FBI agents who had overseen the extraction had deferred to the local coroner because this was the closest lab. That no longer mattered anymore now that they couldn’t trust Jackson with the body. “Eliza crossed state lines”—as she said it, Lucy wondered just how deliberate that had been—“and the case is mine. I’m happy to work with you, but this is my decision. Not his family’s.”
And not yours. That part went unsaid, but she might as well have tacked it on for how blatant it hung in the air between them, neon and flashing.
There was no jaunty salute from him this time when she and Hicks left.
“That was quite the grenade,” Hicks murmured as they headed back into the night, but she thought there might be amusement there. Maybe.
“Was it?” Normally she really didn’t like pissing contests. The rivalry between FBI agents and little police stations was a cliché best saved for TV and movies. It was so much easier to work with local cops when no one felt the need to whip it out and measure it. Sometimes, though, sometimes it was inevitable.
Hicks didn’t say anything, but when she glanced at him, there was the smallest smile hiding in the corners of his lips. A second later shadows fell along his face, obscuring it completely, making her wonder if she’d imagined the softness. “And thanks. For the list.”
She shrugged it off, unwilling to admit she was getting sucked into this fight. “We’ll see if he actually delivers.”
He lifted his brows in cynical agreement. “What’s next?” he asked, nodding toward his pickup.