chapter Thirty
“I didn’t know he was a cop,” Casey said for the fiftieth time. “All I knew was he was following us, and I didn’t want to get shot.”
The woman on the other side of the table, one Chief Roseanne Kay, watched Casey with flat eyes. She wore a police uniform, dark-blue-rimmed glasses, and a hairstyle that could only be described as, well, short. What there was of her hair was salt-and-pepper, with just a little more salt. She finally blinked. Once. “You assaulted a police officer.”
“Well, he hadn’t introduced himself, had he? In fact, he was going out of his way to not look like law enforcement. Jeans, sneakers, sweatshirt. If anything, I guess the sunglasses should have given it away, but you can’t blame me for assuming regular Texan citizens might actually use those to block the sun. You can’t charge me for something I wasn’t even aware of.”
“Actually, I can. But the question is, do I want to?”
She had the power. She was the chief. Which meant she’d been on the job when Elizabeth Mann had disappeared.
“What I want to know, Ms.—” The chief made a show of looking over Casey’s license yet again. “—Kaufmann, is it?”
Casey hadn’t corrected the information printed on the license. She was too annoyed.
“—is what you are doing in our little town.”
“You know,” Casey said, “you could’ve just asked, instead of sending a child to spy on me.”
The chief’s mouth twitched, but Casey wasn’t sure if that was from humor or irritation. “Or you might have just come to us.”
“Is that the law now? You visit a town and have to check in with the cops before doing anything else?”
“It’s not the law. But it might make things easier if you’re looking up an old crime. The police do try to protect and serve.”
“How do you know what I’m looking up?”
“Little birdies told me.”
Uh-huh. “I had my reasons for doing this on my own.”
“I’m sure you did. Wondering about those reasons was what made me seek you out.” She tapped the computer tablet in front of her on the table, on which Casey could see her own picture. “Detective Watts was very helpful, informing me of your recent brush with the law, as well as your proper name, which seems to have missed getting changed on your ID. An oversight, I’m sure. He was also very interested in what you were doing here in Marshland, since the last he’d seen you was in Colorado, where your brother is in jail for the murder of a young woman who looks remarkably like one of my town’s citizens. When I told him I believed you were checking out a murder and disappearance from more than fifteen years ago that involved that very family, he became extremely interested.”
“Look.” Casey passed a hand over her eyes. “I’ve been in here a long time. I’ve answered all your questions. Do I need to call my lawyer? He’ll come if I ask.” Actually, she didn’t know if he would or not, but it sounded better to be confident.
“You haven’t answered all my questions, because I haven’t asked them all yet. So far I’ve just been concentrating on the fact that you assaulted one of my officers.” She held up a hand. “I know. You didn’t realize he was a cop. That’s our mistake. Perhaps he should have been in uniform.”
“Or perhaps he shouldn’t have been stalking me in the first place.”
“He wasn’t stalking.”
“You say armadillo, I say…”
Kay leaned on the table and clasped her hands. “Ms. Kaufmann, you’re not under arrest. We don’t even suspect you of anything criminal. We just…want to help. And if you can help us solve an open case from a past decade, then, hey, we’ll take it. But you need to do it without any one else’s bodily harm. Or even the threat of it.”
Casey sat back and looked at the ceiling, with its old-fashioned, pock-marked tiles. She was tired, hungry, hot, and they hadn’t let her call Eric. Not that she knew his phone number. Or had any idea where he was. When she’d realized the man following them was a cop, she knew the only option was to cooperate and go with him to the station. She suggested it, and even began walking that direction. The cop was so taken aback he seemed to forget all about Eric, and was going to leave him there at the pharmacy, even when Eric came out onto the sidewalk and tried to accompany her. The cop was surprised to see him, and refused to let him in the car, which had arrived to pick them up and deliver them the whole four blocks to the police station. The cops had not told her anything other than that Eric was fine, and she’d be seeing him soon enough.
Kay was waiting, her gray-blue eyes not moving from Casey’s face.
“Where’s my friend Eric?”
“He’s fine.”
Casey shot up from her chair and paced around the room. She stopped at the far end, her back to Kay. “If I answer your questions, will you let me go?”
“As long as you don’t implicate yourself in anything criminal.”
“So I should call my lawyer.”
“If you want to wait till tomorrow for him to get here.”
“Just answer the questions, sweetheart.” Death sat beside Chief Kay, syncing Kay’s computer notes onto an iPad. “She’s got nothing to hold you here, but she really would like to get Cyrus Mann’s murder out of her in-box. It’s been cluttering up the place forever and has gathered a lot of dust.”
“You have Mann’s folder on your desk?” Casey said, spinning around.
“Well, I do now. We had to dig it out of storage when you started nosing around this morning. We’re pretty organized, actually, so it wasn’t that hard to find. It’s like a historical document, though. I thought it might evaporate when I touched it.”
“I’ll go scan whatever’s visible,” Death said, and was gone.
“But now I guess we have something new to add to it,” Kay said. “The missing daughter has now been found.”
Casey thought about that, about Elizabeth Mann lying dead in her Colorado apartment under someone else’s name, with no one to say where she’d been, what she’d seen, or who she had become during the past decade. About all of that lost time. Were those years as empty as they appeared, or had Elizabeth somehow made a life for herself amidst the running?
I was here.
A lonely cry, pressed onto a bathroom mirror. A sentiment she thought no one else would understand. Or even see. Casey sat down and looked Chief Kay in the eye. “All right. What do you want to know?”