Chapter 1 - THE DRAWING HE TRIED TO TAKE
Deputy Brock Timmons ripped the crayon drawing from six-year-old Lydia Mercer’s hands hard enough to fold one corner.
The paper crackled through the quiet surgical corridor.
Lydia flinched and buried herself against her grandfather’s charcoal work jacket, one arm squeezing her battered gray stuffed elephant.
“Scared kids draw things that never happened,” Brock said.
Frank Mercer stared at him.
For nearly three hours, Frank had been sitting outside the operating room at Gallatin Regional Medical Center in Bozeman, waiting for somebody to tell him whether his thirty-four-year-old daughter, Cassidy, would be all right.
Now a uniformed deputy was bullying Cassidy’s little girl over a picture drawn in crayon.
Frank took the paper from Brock.
“She watched Trent hurt her mother.”
“I know what she says she saw.”
“She’s six. She doesn’t have a reason to lie.”
Brock inhaled to answer.
Lydia tugged Frank’s sleeve.
“Papa.”
She pointed.
The picture showed Cassidy’s cedar-sided house outside Belgrade. Lydia had drawn the porch crooked and made the mountains enormous behind it.
Beside the house sat a boxy tan vehicle with a brown stripe.
A sheriff’s cruiser.
Lydia touched it with one finger.
“His car was already there.”
Frank looked at Brock’s tan uniform.
Something in Brock’s face closed.
Then Brock reached for the picture.
“Give me that.”
Frank pulled it against his chest.
Lydia pointed again, this time toward the front door.
“Before Daddy left.”
For the first time that night, Brock looked frightened.
The surgical doors behind them began to separate, flooding the polished floor with white light.
Frank barely noticed.
He kept his eyes on Brock.
“You were there?”
Brock opened his mouth.
May you like
No answer came.
And Frank understood immediately that whatever had happened inside Cassidy’s house had started before the call that brought deputies there the second time.
