He made a grab for her shoulder. As she twisted away, Lucy wrenched forward, pulled out of Jess’s grasp to lunge up at Harwood.

“Shit!”

Harwood scrambled back, lost his balance, and crashed down hard to the floor, Lucy on top of him, faster than Jess had ever seen, jaws clamped on his blue jeans, tearing through denim and the soft flesh underneath.

“God damn it! Get this fucking dog off of me!” Harwood squirmed to get free, but Lucy’s grip was too tight. Jess dashed forward, intercepted the dog. Bodied her off of the deputy and over to the corner.

“Sit,” she said. “You sit down, Lucy. Sit down and stay.”

Lucy sat. Didn’t look off from Harwood, though; kept growling, licking her lips. But she stayed put.

Slowly, Harwood pulled himself up from the floor. The ass of his jeans torn to shreds, striped boxer shorts underneath. Jess couldn’t see any blood; most of it, she figured, was in the deputy’s face. He’d gone red with anger, and he turned around to stare at her, fire in his eyes.

“That was a mistake, Jess,” he said. “That was a real big mistake.”

“They came for her the next morning,” Jess told Burke. “Kirby, Dale Whitmer, and Cole Sweeney, the whole detachment. Said Lucy was a menace and she’d have to be destroyed. Took her away from me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop them.”

“Nobody you could call?” Burke replied. “State police, even? You’d have grounds, the way he came after you.”

Jess laughed. “What would I tell them? The deputy stole my dog? She bit him, Mr. Burke, that’s indisputable. The rest is my word against his.”

Burke took this in. Studied the rug for a while. “And this thing with your old man,” he said. “You don’t know what he’s talking about?”

“The hell if I do,” she said. “They’re looking for something, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. Ty got into all kinds of schemes; that’s just what he did. He was a fisherman—salmon, like his dad—but that’s no way to make a living around here anymore. But he swore he was going to get rich, one way or another. Told me when I came back from overseas, he’d have built me a brand-new life.”

Which he did, she thought. Just not the way either of us intended.

“Sounds like some guys I might used to have known,” Burke said. He let another silence stretch between them, kept looking down at that rug, scratching his chin. “What about the dog?” he asked finally. “You know where they’re keeping her? Didn’t look to me like she was at the detachment.”

“She isn’t,” Jess told him. “They couldn’t keep her there. And she isn’t at animal control on the reservation in Neah Bay, either.”