The Bramble and the Rose by Tom Bouman

Author:Tom Bouman [Bouman, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

TWO PSP detectives called the sheriff, and set a meeting to take possession of the Dentry murder investigation. One morning we gathered around a whiteboard in the sheriff’s department to share impressions and the files we’d been able to build on our own. The detectives, Collyer and Garcia, were narrow, gym-strong men who exchanged looks and often seemed to know things they didn’t share with us. I was more than happy to hand off to them, curious as I was about the dead man.

In the meantime, let nobody accuse me of not doing my job. I spent a couple afternoons and evenings parked in my personal truck in Hallstead, near Kyle Mylnarz’s apartment. Hallstead was like Fitzmorris, but smaller, and the next county over. A little river town with farms in the hills and a bright oasis of fastfood joints and gas stations near the highway. Kyle lived in a third-floor apartment on Main Street, above a closed Chinese restaurant. Out behind in a dirt lot was a rusty Dodge Neon registered to his mother. I parked in an alley to watch the lot exit and a set of wooden stairs down the back of the building. I took license plate numbers of visitors. Kyle drove everywhere; the chain restaurants down the way, the vape shop, and a gym called Pure Power, where I couldn’t follow him in or see inside. Once at night I saw Mylnarz leaving his home to find a haggard man waiting by the stairs, seeming like he might be asking for money. From a distance I couldn’t tell. The man reached out and took Mylnarz’s sleeve. Mylnarz shook him off, cocked a fist back, and the stranger crouched into the shadows. I chose to let Kyle drive away that time, got out and looked for the beggar, but he’d disappeared.

And Mylnarz still worked at the HO Marts, of course, second and third shifts. Nate Hancock had given me his schedule. In the darkness, I stayed close to my radio and kept one eye on the bright squares of gas station interiors with my scope, one eye on the road, waiting for a strange car with no business in the township, or for any vehicle I’d come to associate with Mylnarz. If Kyle knew he was being watched, he gave no sign. He just stood at the counter, drinking a soda big as his head, not a care in the world.

I also haunted the valley between the Moores and the Ceallaighs, not really working the case anymore, mostly waiting and listening to normal life righting itself. Goldie and Puffball carried on long, echoing conversations from their yards, and early evening dirt bike engines scrounged for speed around the Ceallaighs’ track. I didn’t expect to find anyone out there, not with my truck parked on the shoulder for all to see.

Days passed with no word, and I began to wonder whether the death of Carl Dentry was getting the attention it deserved.

Andy Swales, a lawyer based in

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