Carrie stood in the middle of the lot with her husband's people arrayed behind her in a silent line, and she felt the night change its mind about her.
Chapter 8: The Sheriff
Sheriff Laura Beaumont arrived at half past ten, headlights off for the last hundred yards, an old habit of not announcing herself to a scene she hadn't read yet. She read this one from the driver's seat: fifteen bikes in a line, fifteen riders standing easy, one widow on a folding chair with a coffee mug, one roadhouse quiet as a church basement. She got out, hitched her belt, and walked first not to the crowd but to the bike.
"Carrie," she said. "I'm sorry about Frank's motorcycle. I'm sorry about the reason I'm here at all."
"You came," Carrie said. "That's the whole job, near as I can tell."
Beaumont crouched by the Electra Glide with her flashlight and went over it slow, in sections, saying the damage aloud for the recorder on her shoulder: tank defaced with spray paint, mirror snapped, exhaust scoring consistent with a fall onto gravel. Her voice was flat and professional, and it steadied Carrie more than comfort had, because flat and professional meant the night was becoming a record instead of a story β and records could be carried into rooms where stories couldn't.
"The cameras," Beaumont said, standing. "Deb's got two on the lot and one over the register. State law and Deb's own good sense say we look at them together."
Deb led them into the office, which smelled of cigarette smoke from 1987 and honest bookkeeping since. The monitor was older than some of the racers, but the picture was clear, and time-stamped. In its gray-green light they watched it all: the three young men coming out loud and loose at 8:47, Kyle Brennan β the tall one, the one with the laugh β rocking the big Electra Glide on its stand for the fun of it while the others filmed, the bike going over with a slowness that made Carrie put her hand flat on Deb's desk, and Dustin Meyer shaking a can of black paint like a celebration and drawing his stripe while Chase Lindqvist held his phone light steady so he could see to do it.
Beaumont let the recording run to its end. The office was very quiet. On the screen, tiny and gray, the three climbed into a silver sedan and drove out of the lot with the headlights off for fifty yards, which told its own part of the story. Deb, watching beside her, said nothing at all, which for Deb was a kind of shouting.
"Well," Beaumont said at last. "That's the cleanest felony vandalism I've been handed in twenty years. Vehicle's registered to a rental outfit in Reno. The boys are a racing crew in town for the weekend meet β they're all three at the Desert Rose Motel, according to the clerk, who owes me a favor and doesn't like racers. Kyle Brennan, Dustin Meyer, Chase Lindqvist." She looked up. "Chase is Tom Lindqvist's boy. My deputy's nephew."
"I know whose boy he is," Carrie said.
"I figured you might." Beaumont set her hat on Deb's desk, crown down, a small and human gesture. "Hear it from me first: it changes nothing. The arrest will be by the book and then a little more by the book, because everyone's going to be watching me, and I intend to give them nothing to look at."
"I never thought different, Laura."
"Some folks will," the sheriff said. "Let them." She made her calls from the office phone with the door open, on speaker where it counted, and by eleven-thirty two cruisers and an unmarked car had rolled quietly into the Desert Rose Motel lot on the north end of town, where the vending machine hummed and the ice was always empty.
The arrests, Carrie heard later, took four minutes and contained no drama, which was exactly how Beaumont liked them. Kyle Brennan answered the door in a T-shirt that said WINNER across the chest and stopped saying anything at all when he saw the sheriff's face. Dustin Meyer asked if he could call his mother and was told he could, from the station. Chase Lindqvist, the youngest, still sunburned from the lake, cried in the back of the cruiser without making a sound, and Beaumont β who told Carrie this part herself, later, on the porch β found she could not enjoy any of it.
"They're booked," she said on the phone, just after midnight. "All three. Felony vandalism, and the paint and the rental car give us the enhancements. They're not going anywhere tonight, Carrie. You can sleep."
Carrie looked around her dark kitchen, where the phone cord had tangled itself the way it always did.
"Sheriff," she said, "I want to be clear about something, for the record you're building. I didn't call those riders to do anything to anybody."