“I love it when you flounder,” I say. “It’s adorable.”
He makes a face. I reach up to push his hair back. It’s just long enough to show a cowlick in the front, which is also adorable, but I refrain from saying so.
“I’m not talking about what I’m investigating because I’m still working it through,” I say. “And, admittedly, also because it’s a subject you don’t seem keen to talk about, so I want to work it through first. Get it straight in my head, before I bring it to you.”
He frowns. “What is it?”
“Hostiles. I know, you don’t think the perpetrator could be one of them.”
The frown grows. “When did I say that?”
“I got the message when I brought them up and you wanted to move on.”
He props onto one arm. “That seemed like I was dismissing the idea? Hell, no. I just didn’t know what else to say. It’s the same as when we considered the hostiles for Powys’s death. It doesn’t get us anywhere. With residents and settlers, we can consider individuals, interview them, question others about them. With hostiles, it’s like saying we think a bear did it. Only way we can stop it is to stop it. Trap it. Kill it.”
“Is that what the hostiles are to you?”
He rubs his cheek, fingers skritching against his beard. “You mean would I kill one if I found out he did something like this? Not unless I had to. Bad analogy, then. I’d trap and relocate. Same as I’d prefer to do with an animal. If I seemed to be avoiding the possibility, it’s because this case is a helluva lot easier if we’re dealing with a settler.”
“Jacob says it can’t be a hostile.”
“Can’t?”
“He was adamant about that. A hostile doesn’t have the mental capacity to pull this off.”
That frown again. “I don’t know why he’d say that. Sure, I don’t have as much experience with them, but of course some could do this. Jacob knows that.”
“I think it’s because of what Beth did to him. He’s equating that with hostiles. He looks back and thinks he couldn’t have held Nicole captive for a year when he was in that mental state, so therefore hostiles couldn’t either.”
“I guess so.”
Dalton goes pensive, and I can tell he doesn’t like that explanation. After a moment, he says, “Yeah, there are hostiles who could do it. I remember this one time, maybe twelve years back, we had a group that left town. Four people. The sheriff … my, uh, father…”
Dalton doesn’t talk about the former sheriff much, and when he does, there’s a discomfort with the language. Sheriff, father, adopted father … kidnapper. What exactly is Gene Dalton to him? I don’t think Dalton knows himself. I don’t blame him.
“My father,” he says, firmer. “He used to be less understanding of runners than the sheriff before him.”
“Ty Cypher?”
“Right. Cypher didn’t give a damn if people left, and my father thought that was just Cypher being an asshole, but I think it was more…” He shrugs. “If you want to go, go. Cypher saw it as a valid alternative. I disagree, but only because people don’t know what they’re getting into. It’s not Little House on the Fucking Prairie.”
“First, there’s no prairie.”
“Exactly.”
“Second, you’ve read Little House on the Prairie?”
His eyes narrow in a mock glare. “You got a problem with that?”
“Not at all, Sheriff. Continue, please.”
“People have idealized views of the wilderness. That it’s some kind of natural paradise. If they want to become settlers, I try to disabuse them of that notion. But if they insist? It’s not as bad as my father…” He clears his throat. Shifts. “It’s not what he thought.”
Because Gene Dalton really had seen all outsiders as savages. He’d “rescued” Dalton from his birth parents, which is like “rescuing” a kid from a family voluntarily living off the grid.
“Anyway,” Dalton says, “these four snuck off, and the hostiles got them.”
“Killed them?”
“Took them. I found their camp. It was a week later, and it’d been long abandoned, but there was stuff there, from their packs. Personal stuff. Photos and mementos they’d brought from down south.”
“Things no one else would have wanted. And things they wouldn’t have left behind.”
He nods. “I found evidence of a struggle, too. Marks in the dirt. Blood. I followed the trail for a while; at some point, though, their captors realized they were leaving a trail and took steps to cover it. I lost it in a stream.”