Page 74 of We Are All Guilty Here

Emmy’s office, too. Their desks were pushed together. The lights were off. Her father’s rain jacket was still hanging from the hook on the wall. The folding chair where Cole had sat to talk to him two days ago was still facing in Gerald’s direction.

Her damn leg started shaking again. She opened up a search for the first company on her list, Albright Landscaping. Emmy’s eyes blurred. It wasn’t the exhaustion that was making her feel this way. Myrna’s night terrors had trained her to get by on very little sleep. Her body was turning against her, trying to push out the grief that she kept trying to swallow back down.

Emmy’s cell phone buzzed. She recognized the number. “Brett, did you find her?”

“No, chief.”

Emmy could hear the loud beeps and diesel engines of heavy-duty equipment. Brett was at a landfill in Tallahassee. One of the Walkers’ neighbors was in the middle of a total renovation. The construction dumpster in their driveway had been emptied at seven thirty yesterday morning. Brett had made the four-hour drive down to Florida to go through the landfill in case Paisley’s kidnapper had disposed of her body.

“Chief?” Brett said, his voice concerned.

She felt her foot cramping again. “I’m okay, Brett.”

“I get it,” he said. “But your dad died right in front of you. I know you’ve got that Clifton ice water in your veins, but no one would say a word if you sat this one out.”

Emmy looked at her father’s office. The tidy stacks of folders. His favorite pen. Her laptop was open across from the framed photos he kept on the desk. Cole and Emmy in uniform. Tommy in a porkpie hat. Emmy had started out yesterday morning thinking about how strange it was that her son was a grown man. By mid morning, she was holding him like she hadn’t done since he was a child.

“Emmy,” Brett said. “Think about what the boss would want.”

Emmy knew exactly what her father would want. “The way we honor him is to do our jobs. Get back here as soon as youcan. We need to find somebody who can go down into those sewers and storm drains along the route Paisley took to the backroads. I want Millie’s pond searched again, too.”

“Again?” he asked. “It’d be pretty stupid to get rid of Paisley Walker the same way as Madison and Cheyenne.”

“It’d be pretty stupid to not consider the possibility.”

“All right.” Brett drew out his response. “I’ll call back the divers.”

Emmy put the phone down, then returned to the searches. She was almost finished with the list when Cole walked into the squad room. She had a moment before he noticed her to take a close look at him. His eyes were shot through with red. His skin was pale. Like Emmy, he had wanted to keep working, to push through. Like her, he looked like even the slightest touch would fracture him into millions of pieces. The only thing holding him up was the ice water in his veins.

“Chief, no luck.” Cole had been out on one of the search parties combing the backroads for signs of Paisley. “I got a call from Celia. She said not to bother you, but Grandma’s having another bad night.”

Emmy felt the pressure come back like a noose tightening around her neck. “We’ve got a shitty lead from Elijah on a vehicle in the neighborhood yesterday morning. It might not pan out, but we need to follow it. All he remembered was an ‘older black truck’. Go through registrations and see if you can narrow anything down. He could be undocumented, but keep that part to yourself. We don’t need another vigilante group targeting innocent people.”

“Yes, chief.”

He started to leave, but she grabbed his hand. Emmy felt a tremble, but wasn’t sure if it was coming from her or Cole.

“Mom.” His voice was strained. “My chief gave me an order.”

She felt his fingers slip away from hers. She didn’t know whether to be proud or devastated that she’d raised another Clifton.

“Emmy?” Sherry Robertson, the GBI field agent for south-west Georgia, was waving her toward the back. “Need a minute.”

Emmy took a stuttered breath as she walked across the room. Her vision was jittery. The stop-motion had returned. The GBIhad jurisdiction over all officer-involved shootings. Sherry was investigating the murder of Sheriff Gerald Clifton.

“Paul’s sleeping it off in the cells,” Sherry said. “Hannah asked for a lawyer.”

Emmy wasn’t surprised. She had drilled it into Hannah years ago that you never speak to a cop without a lawyer present. “Anything from the bystander videos on the scene?”

“Nothing useful,” Sherry said. “But you should know the Culpepper woman posted a video online that shows Gerald. CNN blurred out his face, but it’s pretty graphic.”

Emmy told herself that she would think about that later. “Dervla Culpepper wasn’t filming Hannah and Paul when the gun went off?”

“She couldn’t. Gerald put his arm out in front of her. He was trying to protect her.”

Emmy filed that one for later, too. “What about witnesses? There was more than two dozen people there.”

“A third of them say Hannah was holding the gun. Another third say it was Paul. And the remaining third were too panicked to see anything.”

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