CHAPTER FIVE
The Balboa County Courthouse occupied a large sandstone building in downtown Neptune, fifteen or so blocks from the Grand. Its front steps were smooth and worn, power-washed daily to keep the city’s grime at bay, though these days the Sheriff’s Department was as dirty as they came.
She’d spent half her life haunting the Sheriff’s Department. Her father had started as a deputy, and when she was nine, he’d been elected sheriff. She and her mom used to visit him on lunch breaks and, in later years, she did her homework in an empty interrogation room while eavesdropping on the dispatch. After Lilly Kane’s murder, when a recall election had ousted Keith from office, when she should never have had to set foot in that cesspool again, some invisible path always seemed to lead her back. Visiting Logan or her friend Weevil Navarro in lockup. Prying information out of the too-adorable-for-words Deputy Leo D’Amato, now a detective down in San Diego.
Reporting her own rape, and then being laughed out of Don Lamb’s office, humiliated and aching.
But that was ancient history, right?
She made her way down the familiar hallway, decorated in shades of terra-cotta and gold, and turned into the Sheriff’s Department. No one manned the tall wooden reception desk. Three or four officers sat at their desks working on computers or talking on the phone. She didn’t recognize any faces. Her father had told her that when Dan Lamb took over, the handful of worthwhile cops left on the force had taken early retirement or transferred elsewhere—along with Inga, the kind-hearted woman who’d been the office manager since Veronica was a little girl.
She stood at the desk and waited. No one appeared to notice her—or maybe they just didn’t care. One guy seemed to be swiveling his chair away from her as he talked on the phone. No surprise there—she was persona non grata around the Sheriff’s Department. The first thing she’d done when she’d gotten back to town was solve Bonnie DeVille’s murder right out from under the sheriff’s nose.
Dan Lamb wasn’t the type to forgive and forget. Then again, neither was she.
She caught sight of a tall man in departmental khaki, walking past with his arms full of files. “Excuse me. Sir? I have an appointment with the sheriff.”
When the officer turned to face her, Veronica blinked.
“Norris Clayton?” Veronica’s voice was breathless, shocked.
The man’s warm brown eyes flickered over her face and his lips curved up. “Veronica Mars. I was wondering when I’d run into you.”
For a moment they eyed each other warily. In middle school Norris had been suspended nearly every other week for fighting. By high school, he’d donned the trench coat and combat boots required for discontented youths—and had a weapons collection to make his scowl this side of terrifying. For a while, he’d been suspected of calling in bomb threats to the school, but Veronica had been able to prove his innocence. Beneath his trench coat and fuck-the-man attitude, Norris was just a regular misfit with a Japanese weapons obsession—and, as it turned out, a crush on Veronica.
Now he was barely recognizable, muscular and clean-cut in his crisp khaki uniform. But something in his eyes was just the same—brittle, both wary and resigned. Like the world was just bullshit, all the way down. Veronica couldn’t imagine that working at the Neptune Sheriff’s Department would help that feeling.
Norris set his paperwork down on the desk and rested his hands on top. “You still working for your dad?”
“Kind of. More like tentatively with. Or perhaps in spite of?”
Norris’s lips curled up into a smirk. “Yeah, well, my dad is just glad I have a job.”
Veronica could only imagine. Norris’s dad was a law-abiding programmer at Kane Software. He’d once bribed his son with a trip to Japan if he’d stay out of trouble and keep his grades up. “I have to admit I never quite imagined you as an upholder of the peace.”
Norris gave a quick snort of laughter. “Yeah, well, we all have to grow up sometime, right?” Then he shrugged, suddenly serious. “I was pissed off about everything for so long. I guess I found a place to put my fight. Anyway, what are you doing here? You out here working a case?”
Veronica gathered herself. “Kind of. I have an appointment with Lamb.”
“Lucky you.”
They looked at each other for a moment, and then, at the same time, both broke into grins.
“This way.” Norris opened the little gate next to the desk and jerked his head back toward Lamb’s office.
In the hallway outside the sheriff’s office, her eyes darted unconsciously at the Fallen Heroes wall. That was where they hung the photos of all the cops who’d been killed in the line of duty. Down at the bottom was the most recent—Deputy Jerry Sacks, his mustache glossy and perfect in immortality. His picture was hung next to Don Lamb’s. She stared at both for a moment, complicated feelings fighting inside her. Lamb had made her life a living hell in high school, but she’d also come to suspect that he’d grown up in an abusive home. It was that same old vicious cycle: the Lamb boys were bullied; they became bullies. And while she’d never thought of Sacks as anything but Lamb’s gofer, his desire to help her dad investigate the Sheriff’s Department is what got him killed in the end. Now Lamb and Sacks were both gone, and something oddly like grief twisted in her gut.
“What’s she doing here?”
She turned to see Sheriff Dan Lamb staring at her through his half-open door. Petra Landros sat across from him, her long legs crossed, an impatient grimace on her face. Veronica exchanged glances with Norris, then stepped inside. Lamb’s office was dim and wood paneled, with a map of the states on one wall and an American flag in the corner.
She smiled sweetly. “Nice press appearance last week. Your hair looked great.”
They stared at each other across the desk. Logan had once told Veronica she didn’t have any flight—just way too much fight for her own good. Now she felt her hackles rising as she looked at Lamb. At his smug leer; at the way he leaned back in his chair like a toad on a choice lily pad, just waiting for nice fat flies to fall in his mouth. He was in his early forties, tall and fit, with the mildly fussy air of a man vain about his looks. His face was boyish, with a wide, sullen mouth and round cheeks, and he wore his hair in a sleek mane around his ears. Most unsettling were his eyes—the same bright blue as his dead younger brother’s.
Don Lamb had been lazy and inept, a bureaucratic tool, and Dan wasn’t much better. He allied himself with the powerful and preyed upon the weak. She had reason to believe he was strategically redistributing evidence—just two months earlier a Glock 9 mm had been planted on her friend Weevil Navarro’s unconscious body after Duncan’s mom, Celeste, shot him, and while she couldn’t prove it yet, she was almost certain the sheriff—or one of his cronies—had planted it on him. And according to public defender Cliff McCormack, Weevil wasn’t alone. If there was a dollar to be made, the Sheriff’s Department happily bent the law for the highest bidder.
“Close the door, please, Ms. Mars.” Petra Landros gestured for her to come in. Veronica shut the door and sat down at a second chair across from Lamb. His eyes tracked her closely. She kept her movements casual, almost dismissive, but she felt the tension in her arms and legs, like bent springs poised to snap.
Petra turned to look at Lamb. “The Chamber of Commerce has decided to hire Ms. Mars to work the Hayley Dewalt case. I’d like for you to catch her up on any details you have so she can get started.”