expression that said exactly that. His response was to lift a shoulder and one eyebrow.
She didn’t know what that meant.
“Did you make any progress on the bread bandit?” West asked.
“No,” she said. “I mean, it’s all the same person. But I don’t know who that person is, and even on the spectrum of small town police work, this feels pretty small.”
“But you have to investigate?”
“No question,” she said. “If I don’t then I’m negligent. And anyway, I want...you know, the police chief thing.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking around. “Everybody knows who you are, don’t they?”
“Yes,” she said. “They do.”
“Must make dating tough.”
He had no idea.
“Doing anything in a small town you grew up in is a whole thing. It was always going to be tough for me because my father was the police chief. But then he was dead, my mother along with him, so I received a fair amount of pity in my life. Then I became a police officer too, and people are a little bit afraid of me. Or, if not afraid then...” She thought about the guy who’d said loudly that the police were here when she walked in. “It’s either that or dumb jokes. And it’s not everyone, obviously, but I’ve always been closer to my family than to any friends. It’s just that they’re the ones that know. You know, they get it.”
“I can understand that. I think that’s one reason I came here. I don’t have anything in common with Gabe or Caleb or Jacob, not on the surface. They grew up with money. With a mom and a dad. But they’re the only people that know what it’s like to be part of this particular ragtag band of half siblings that we are. This thing that we all are.”
“It’s not shared blood for us necessarily. It’s the shared upbringing. The shared loss.” She flicked her eyes back toward Logan. “He’s one of my brothers. You know. More or less.”
West followed her gaze. “I guess I’d better be careful then. He looks like he could put up a pretty good fight.”
“He’d probably beat you up,” she said.
“I doubt it,” West said. “I already knew how to fight, but I honed that in prison pretty well.”
“Oh,” she said. “Were you in a lot of fights in prison?”
“I don’t know what the benchmark is for a lot of prison fights. I mean, on the scale of prison fights.”
“I guess I don’t either. What we have basically amounts to a couple of holding cells.”
“Very different experience doing police work here than it is in a city, I imagine.”
“Yes,” she said. She looked down. “I like to think that we would have done a better job for you. That we wouldn’t have made the same mistakes the police who handled your case did.”
“It’s all complicated,” he said. “It’s not just the failure of a police officer, but the presence of good lawyers and bad lawyers, of bias in the jury. Complicated.”
“I suppose.”
“My ex-wife was one of them. You know, someone with money. Someone like me, someone who got ahead in life, who got ahead of their station naturally look suspicious to those with generational money. That’s the kind of thing that people shouldn’t be able to do. On the one hand, we all say we believe in the American dream, right? But when it actually happens we tend to be a bit suspicious of it, and if it appears to crumble all around somebody then I think we figure that’s about fair enough. If I’m a criminal, then it makes sense that I was able to jump up in station. Nothing else really does. We have our narratives, we don’t like them being disrupted.”
“I’ve never thought about life in terms of money, which I suppose is how you know we’ve always had enough. There was life insurance money from my parents, plus we were well-off in terms of the land. It doesn’t mean we haven’t struggled, we have. It’s definitely not a...not a situation where we never have to work a day in our lives, but we had enough. For a bunch of kids who went through what we did I think we’ve had it surprisingly easy.”
“I didn’t think about anything else but money for most my life. How to get more of it. How to make sure I kept more of it. I was so damned envious of what other people had. I figured I could get myself some security. I could make my problems go away.”