2. Lore

TWO

Lore

Rus folded himself in a chair in front of the desk as he watched the sheriff round it.

He was seriously tweaked.

Even so, it penetrated that, from the minute he stepped foot in Fret County Sheriff’s Office, he knew he wasn’t dealing with some Boondocks Let’s Play Cops and Robbers, half-ass operation.

He should have known from the early call.

In Rus’s twenty years in law enforcement, seventeen of those with the FBI, he’d noted some, not all, small-town/low-population counties (and some big-city/high-population as well) had piss-all-over-their-patch chiefs and sheriffs who hired men who were the same.

Men who were more concerned about the size of their balls than serving and protecting.

It was a toxic mixture of the need for status and control, and aggression.

It was about getting spitting mad a man took a knee during the national anthem, but feeling fully justified in defacing the American flag by making it black and gray with a blue stripe and putting that shit on everything from their cars to their backs to their coffee mugs.

It was feeling that their badge and their uniform set them apart in some way from the citizens they served, but when it came down to doing actual policework, they didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.

Rus was relieved the vibe here was not that.

The look of it, the feel of it, was organized, competent and professional.

Including Moran’s office.

This was where Moran did the work of serving a community in order to keep them safe, and when bad things happened anyway, as they always did, finding those who perpetrated those acts and doing what they could to aid the path to justice.

What this was not, was Moran’s home away from home, where he put his boots up on his desk and shot the shit with his deputies, a bottle of scotch in the drawer he felt it was okay to imbibe from, no matter the occasion or time of day.

He continued to study the guy.

His uniform went to a dry cleaner. He got his hair cut at a barber and not a salon, and he did that on a standing appointment, not only so it didn’t get unkempt, but also so he didn’t have to waste time making appointments. He kept fit, but it wasn’t a religion or part of his identity, it happened in the natural course of his life. He was a good-looking man, and he didn’t give two shits that he was.

Right, so maybe there was a bottle of scotch. But that, and the pictures of his wife and what appeared to be his dad and his brother on the credenza behind his desk, was as far as Moran went in putting who he was in his private life in this office.

And that scotch only came out in times of break-glass-when-needed.

This office, and the entire department, was where shit got done.

Moran barely had his ass to the seat of an ergonomic desk chair before he started it.

“You wanna tell me what’s going on?”

“Do you have an ID on the victim?”

Moran gave him a good stare as he came to realize who he was dealing with.

During those three seconds, he made the same deduction Rus just did.

Rus was here to get shit done.

Moran sat back and lifted his chin.

“She’s local. Brittanie Iverson. Twenty-five. Got deputies who went to school with her, knew her. Not well, but they knew her. Though, the family has kind of a reputation. She was born here. Works at Bon Amie.”

“Bon Amie?”

“Burlesque club in the woods.”

Rus had been intent on making it to the scene, but it didn’t escape him that, to get there, he’d driven through terrain that was dense forest and rugged.

There were towns. There were homes. There were businesses.

But for the most part, this was backwoods.

This area was about logging, hunting, hiking, fishing and keeping to yourself.

So, “burlesque club in the woods” was not something he was expecting to hear.

Moran read Rus’s reaction and explained, “We got history. Trapping. Fur trade. Prospecting. Mining. As they had a tendency to do, white men put their stamp on this place a long time ago. And where he went, other things followed. Like the need to get himself some in the wilderness.”

“Right,” Rus murmured.

“There’s a lot of lore around here, what with the lake and all,” Moran continued.

The lake and all?

Rus knew Misted Pines was where Ray Andrews decided he was going to test the skills of retired ace FBI profiler Cade Bohannan. He did this by killing girls. A mess that included Bohannan’s far more famous girlfriend’s contractor getting shot and the exposure of a sex scandal that involved some of the men of the town. And that exposure was perpetrated by those men’s wives.

It was big. It was interesting. It was lurid, shocking and had a double celebrity component with Bohannan and his girlfriend—award-winning, bestselling author Delphine Larue—so he’d followed the case himself. As did all of his colleagues, everyone in law enforcement and most of the globe since it was plastered all over the news.

So again, lore that involved the lake was not what Rus expected to hear.

Rus didn’t like hearing unexpected things.

He also didn’t get the chance to ask, Moran kept telling him about Bon Amie.

“Think it was Cin’s four- or five-times great grandmother who shot her pimp because she was tired of him roughing her and her friends up. The marshal was partial to her, decided it was self-defense. In the clear and to look after women in a place they had nowhere to go and nothing else they could do to put food in their mouths, she took over the bordello. It kept up in that bent until Cin’s great-grandmother decided it was time for the Bonner family legacy to move in a new direction. She took them out of the sex trade and into show business. Bon Amie is in the middle of nowhere, about fifteen miles north of town, not easy to find, not easy to get to, but people make the trek because it’s a helluva show.”

And with that, Rus knew Moran had made that trek to watch the show. Though he wondered if the man did it before or after that gold band hit his left finger.

Rus’s mind filled with the image of Brittanie Iverson in plastic.

“You sure they’re out of the sex trade?” he asked.

Moran was all about eye contact when he answered, “Absolutely.”

Right.

He was sure.

Next.

“Cin?” he queried.

“Lucinda Bonner,” Moran told him. “Owner of Bon Amie.”

“I’m gonna need to talk to her,” Rus told him.

“You want her to have that heads up now?”

First things first.

“Has notification been made to the family?”

Moran shook his head, but said, “Of a sort.”

“What does that mean?”

“Brittanie’s father is a piece of shit. No idea where the man is, but he’s not in Misted Pines or Fret County. And this is a good thing. He drank a lot. Cheated on his wife a lot. Got into a lot of fights with anyone who might piss him off, and that was a lot of people, including his wife. And Brittanie’s mom was all about those ‘a lots’ too. She’d get fed up and skip town a lot, leaving her kids with a dad who didn’t give a shit. Once they were divorced, she had a lot of boyfriends, and she had a lot of good times. So yes, she’s been notified. But since she was so hungover when I spoke to her, she was mostly still drunk, I’m not sure she processed her daughter was murdered.”

Rus understood he was telling Moran something he already knew when he said, “I’m gonna have to talk to her too.”

“My advice?”

Rus nodded.

“Go to Cin first. She’s not family, but I’ll lay money down she knows more about Brittanie than her mother or her brother put together. And I’m not a gambling man.”

So there was a brother as well.

And it was interesting Moran referred to this Bonner woman as “Cin.”

“But we’ve got that info for you,” Moran went on. “Polly’s already put it together.”

He didn’t know who Polly was yet, but good.

Next.

“Let’s talk about this town,” Rus said.

He could see Moran was getting impatient, but he didn’t give into it.

“You want more lore, or do you want to talk about Ray Andrews?” Moran asked, and Rus knew he was fishing.

“We can get to the lore later, when we figure this out and we’re sharing a beer. I want to talk about Ray Andrews.”

Moran leaned onto his forearms on the desk and shared, “Probably won’t surprise you, that shit hasn’t died down. I’m not sure it’s going to. Case like that lives forever. We get tourists. And then there’s the women.”

The women?

He knew about true-crime tourists. People so fascinated with famous cases, they had to go to the place it happened, immerse themselves in it.

Rus thought that was fucked up, but one thing he’d learned in his business, there was no end to the kind of people there were and the jacked-up shit they were into.

And Moran was right, what Ray Andrews did in that town would live forever.

So Rus was interested in “the women.”

“What do you mean, ‘the women?’”

“Misted Pines has become a mecca for women who are done with being screwed over by men and want to live around those who are like minded. They’ve shut down their lives and homes wherever they were, took what money they got, and created a space up here. Some call it a neighborhood. Some who don’t like it much call it a commune. Some who don’t like it at all call it a coven.”

Well…

Shit.

“Can’t say I blame them,” Rus noted carefully, watching Moran closely, wondering which camp Moran was in.

He shrugged, sat back and said, “If they don’t cause trouble, it’s not my business. They don’t cause trouble. But they’re an entity in this town, and some aren’t real happy about it.”

Rus could get that, and he couldn’t.

He was with Moran. If you don’t cause trouble, he didn’t give a shit what you did or why you did it.

But the people of Misted Pines weren’t responsible for what Ray Andrews did. They also weren’t responsible for what several wives did to punish their husbands for breaking their marriage vows.

Rus knew a thing or two about women whose hearts were broken when their man’s mind wandered from their marriage and fixed on something else.

It was just that, in Rus’s case, it wasn’t another woman.

“Brittanie or her mother have anything to do with this, for lack of a better word to describe it, coven?”

Moran shook his head.

Since this had no bearing on Brittanie Iverson, he had interviews to do, he had an investigation to conduct, so it was time to get down to how they were going to work together in doing those things.

Before he could start, Moran asked a question that had been preying on Rus’s mind since he got the call.

“Do you think this is about Bohannan?”

These words came out of his mouth just as a knock came at the door.

Rus twisted that way, but before Moran could call out, the head of a woman poked through.

Rus’s guess from the efficient appearance of her helmet of hair and the low-key makeup, this was Polly.

Though, from where that head was located, it was clear the woman was petite.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said to Moran. “But I know you’d want to know, Cade is here.”

Speak of the devil.

Rus sat straighter in his chair.

Cade being Cade Bohannan, a man who had his own lore, and deserved it. Rus knew this from more than the stories, he’d gone to a class Bohannan taught.

This could mean a number of things, perhaps good, because Bohannan won his reputation by being one of the best in the business, or bad, because sometimes a retired agent who felt the need to meddle could fuck shit up.

Rus knew he was going to find out which way that would swing when Moran said, “Send him in.”