“True.” He put the cobbler in the kitchen and sat in his favorite chair, across from where Regan sat curled on the sofa, her feet tucked under her butt. “How was your presentation this afternoon?”
“Good. The students seemed interested. They had intelligent questions. After, I went up to Henry’s office. He said to say hi.” Her dad and Henry Clarkson had become friendly over the years. They’d met on campus when Regan was a student, and being from the same generation and loosely in the same field, they’d started playing golf on occasion. They didn’t see eye to eye on everything—Henry had been a criminal-defense lawyer in his day, and her dad was a strict law-and-order guy—but their arguments were good-natured. Her dad had guest-lectured for Henry multiple times.
“Our last two standing golf dates were rained out, but it looks like this Sunday is going to be clear.”
“Cold, but clear. That’s what the meteorologist says.”
“You don’t agree?”
“Ask me Saturday morning.” It could be bright and sunny one day and a storm could brew over the San Francisco peaks overnight and dump inches of water on them in a matter of hours. The local weather was wrong far too often for her to ever trust a forecast more than twenty-four hours in advance.
“Join us. You used to be wicked on the course.”
“Not this time.” She enjoyed golfing occasionally but much preferred more rigorous sports. “Jessie and I are going hiking in Sedona on Saturday, and knowing Jessie, I’ll need Sunday to recoup. Humphreys is still covered in snow, and I’m not in the mood to pull out my snow boots.” Humphreys Peak, the highest point in Arizona, was one of her favorite hikes. It was ten miles, and at the top on a clear day you could see the Grand Canyon. It wasn’t an easy trail and was best to tackle in the late spring or summer.
Jessie Nez had been her best friend since forever. She worked for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. If Regan’s naturalist granddad were still alive, he would have loved her, but he died the year before Jessie moved with her mom to Flagstaff from the Navajo reservation.
“I would love to go up there again, but I don’t think my knee would tolerate it,” her dad said. He’d had knee-replacement surgery shortly after he retired. He’d had problems for years, but her dad never did anything about it, much to her frustration.
“What do you remember about the Candace Swain murder investigation?” she asked.
“Swain—the college student, body found at the public golf course?”
“Yes.”
“Not much. Flagstaff PD handled the investigation, and I’d already retired.” He thought a moment. “Strangled, drowned in a lake, if I recall. I remember them looking for a transient, a homeless guy who had been hanging around the sorority. He disappeared around the same time they found her body.”
“One of Henry’s students has a podcast. He’s retracing Swain’s steps, trying to find out exactly where she was after she disappeared and before her body was found.”
Her dad frowned. “I forgot about that aspect of the case. I assumed that she died shortly after she disappeared.”
“According to Lucas—the kid who’s running this project—no one knows where Candace was or what she was doing for more than a week prior to her murder. He wants to interview me on his podcast, but I made no promises—other than to listen to the first two episodes and see what he has and if it’s interesting. Want to listen with me?”
“Sure, it’s not too late.” Her dad put his feet up on the ottoman and leaned back.
She glanced at the clock. It was eight thirty. Too late by her dad’s standard was ten o’clock. He was the poster child for the Early to bed, early to rise philosophy.
Regan took out her earbuds and turned up the volume on her phone. Living in the mountains didn’t make for speedy internet, even in the twenty-first century, so she’d downloaded the two recordings earlier.
Music, sort of a contemporary combination of The X-Files and America’s Most Wanted with a jazzy beat, filtered in.
Lucas’s voice was smooth, as if he had some experience with radio, even though he sounded nervous at the beginning. As he went on, he gained confidence, and his voice reflected that.
“My name is Lucas Vega, and I’m the host of The Sorority Murder, a podcast about the cold-case homicide of NAU nursing student Candace Swain.
“The Sorority Murder is an eight-episode program that airs twice weekly, live, on Tuesdays and Fridays. I am asking anyone who has information about the case to call in and share.” He gave a phone number. “Tonight, I’m going to tell you about Candace and what we know about the night she disappeared from the Sigma Rho Spring Fling party three years ago.”
Lucas quickly ran through the victim’s background. Candace grew up in Colorado Springs, the older of two girls. She had a strained relationship with her parents after they divorced when she was fourteen but was very close to her younger sister, now a senior at the University of South Carolina.
“Chrissy Swain remembers her sister as the first person to help a friend, the first person to volunteer at school,” Lucas said.
A female voice came on. “Candy was special. Candy—she hated when anyone else called her that name, but she let me.”
John leaned forward and muttered, “Smart move to interview the sister.”