chapter Thirty-one
“What I still don’t understand is how you knew to come to Marshland.”
Casey had already told her everything else she knew, which wasn’t much. She explained about Ricky, and the things he’d said, how he’d figured out Alicia was from Texas. She’d mentioned the way the man had said, “Ya’ll” to the cook at the Slope. And she’d showed her the photos, of both Alicia and Ricky, and Alicia’s dad.
“That is Cyrus Mann, right?” Casey pointed at the one of him and the car.
“Of course it is. But I don’t see how that—”
“And what about this?” She’d saved the one of the other men talking to Cyrus, for last. “I have a feeling if we showed this to the cook, he might recognize one of them.”
Kay looked at the photo with surprise. “Where did you get this?”
“Betsy.”
“You think these men are somehow responsible for Liz’s death?”
“Could be. She didn’t like them back when she was a teenager; the one guy she avoided at all costs, apparently. They haven’t been seen since Cyrus’ murder, but we know he was into something with them around that time. Wayne seems convinced Cyrus wouldn’t have done anything criminal, but people have been wrong before.”
“Wayne Greer?”
“You know we talked to him. Your officer followed us from the diner where we had lunch with him.”
Kay nodded, with what might have been the beginning of a smile. “Just making sure.” She took the photo. “You know the name of the cook?”
Doofus. “Pasha. Don’t know the last name. Terrible cook, though.”
“Very important information, I’m sure.” Kay took the photo. “Anyone else see this guy?”
“Just the cook.”
“What about Circus Lady?” Death had returned. “You know, Ricky’s neighbor, who saw the guy with the shirt?”
Casey kicked herself. She had forgotten all about the planted shirt.
“See if Watts can ask my brother’s neighbor. Her name is Geraldine, don’t know her last name. She lives across the street.”
“She saw him?”
“Maybe.” Casey explained what Geraldine had told her about the man from “Hometown Interiors,” and how she caught him coming from Ricky’s house. “The cops think he was legit, but my brother said he hadn’t hired anybody to do anything.”
Kay considered it. “All right. I’ll be back.” She left, shutting the door firmly behind her.
“She’s not going to let it go,” Death said, “the question of why you’re here. Not forever. She’s going to keep asking about your source until you tell her something.”
“I guess I’ll have to be creative.”
“Because God knows you wouldn’t want to tell her the truth.”
“And end up in the loony bin? No, thank you.”
“I’m just saying…Anyhow, here’s what I found on her desk. There were stacks of papers I couldn’t go through, but these photos were on top.”
Casey cringed. The first shot was of Cyrus Mann’s body with a hole through his cheek. His eyes stared up, the light gone from them. The second was of the car, blood splattered all across the side panels and windows. Mann lay on the ground, his arms flung out, one of them resting against the front tire. His legs were bent, as if he had collapsed right where he’d been standing when he was shot.
“God, I hope Elizabeth didn’t see this.”
Death pulled the iPad back and looked at it sadly. “Casey, honey, you know she did. She was holding him when he died.”
“Wait. So whoever killed him shot him, then left him for dead—did they realize he was still alive?”
“It didn’t matter. They knew he didn’t have long. You don’t live long when you have a hole in your head.”
“Which really has to mean Elizabeth was there when it happened. There was no time for her to arrive from somewhere else and find him alive. So the question becomes not whether or not she was there, but whether or not they saw her.” She couldn’t believe that. “It seems impossible. If they saw her, how did she possibly get out of there alive?”
Death shrugged. “Fast runner?”
Kay returned without the picture, but with a stack of fat files. “We’re faxing the photo to Detective Watts. He’ll take it over to the restaurant and see if the cook can recognize the man, even though he would have aged a lot by now. And he’ll run over to your brother’s neighbor.” She sat down. “You realize you still haven’t told me how you knew to come to Marshland. Or even what Elizabeth’s real name was.”
“Here we go,” Death sang.
“Lucky, I guess,” Casey said.
Kay nodded. “Um-hmm. And how is that?”
“Ricky had already figured out the Texas part.”
“Right.”
“We have the photo of Cyrus and his car.”
“Which has nothing on it to indicate it was even in Texas, let alone a specific location.”
“We searched for missing women from Texas.”
“Of which there are thousands if you go back that far.”
“I don’t know, Casey,” Death said. “I think she’s got your number.”
“It was everything together,” Casey said. “And my lawyer and I were talking about how her false name—you can ask the cops, they thought it was a false name, too, since they couldn’t find anything on Alicia McManus—and how people often choose something sort of like their real name. When we saw the name Elizabeth Mann, it sort of stood out.”
“Wow,” Death said. “That’s actually a pretty good argument. But at the same time it’s a bit lame.”
Kay looked steadily at Casey. After a while she said, “Okay. I’ll accept that for now.”
Casey tried not to look too relieved. “So can I ask some questions?”
Kay gestured for her to go ahead.
“Why were there never any suspects, other than Elizabeth?”
“We talked to a lot of people.”
“But no one seriously.”
“Who’s to talk to? People in this town? Nobody here would shoot down someone they know. They aren’t like that.”
“Kay, this is Texas. Everybody has a gun. Or two. You telling me they aren’t going to use them?”
“Yes, of course our citizens own guns. But these are law-abiding neighbors. We don’t have gangs or the mafia or even drugs, other than the random weed. Our folks aren’t resolving their differences by shooting each other. They have guns in their houses to protect their homes and families from outsiders.”
“By owning deadly weapons that can be turned just as easily on them?”
“Oh, boy,” Death said. “Are we really going to get into this argument? I don’t think you can win it. Not down here.”
“You were asking about suspects,” Kay said. “And there just weren’t any to be found. The gun forensics didn’t match up with anything we have on file. No one saw strangers that day, certainly not these men on the photo, and there wasn’t anybody in town who wanted Cyrus dead. We may have wanted him locked up, but not dead.”
“Locked up? Why? From how Wayne talked, Cyrus was a straight arrow.”
“From a hormonal teenage boy’s perspective he might have been. He put up with Cyrus because he was in love with Elizabeth. Even sixteen-year-old boys get snookered when they’re horny. Or maybe I should say especially sixteen-year-old boys.”
“But what was Cyrus into? If you had reason to lock him up, why was he still free?”
“It wasn’t that he was a criminal. But he was living in a car. A lot of us wanted to lock him up for child endangerment.”
“Betsy said he didn’t want to take charity. And that Elizabeth was the one who chose to live in the car instead of with Betsy.”
“I’m sure that’s what Betsy’s father told her.” She rested her elbows on the table. “Cyrus was a woodworker. A good one. Just the year before he’d had his own business, making custom furniture, but apparently he was never good with the money end of things, so he ended up selling out right in the middle of his wife’s illness. I’m sure the stress did him in. He got another job right away, over on the Gulf with some people who built luxury houseboats—”
“As if there’s any other kind,” Death said. “You ever see a poor person with a houseboat?”
“—and that was a good start, but he lost that job within a few months. It was like something had switched off in his head. His bad business decisions expanded into bad personal decisions, and the next thing we knew, he and Elizabeth were living on the street, and he was working shady jobs.”
“Couldn’t you do something about their living arrangements? Aren’t there laws—child services, or whatever?”
“Believe me, we did our best. Chief Zinn, who was here before me, he was friends with Cyrus, with his parents, actually, and he did everything to get him to be sensible, but there was something about it…” She shook her head. “Elizabeth didn’t help. She said she was staying with her dad no matter what, and she didn’t mind living in the car.”
“So you let a fourteen-year-old make her own housing decisions?”
“You weren’t here!” Chief Kay clenched her fists, then opened them as she breathed out a steady breath. “It wasn’t cut and dried. They needed each other. What it really boiled down to was taking Elizabeth away from Cyrus, and no one was prepared to make that choice. Not even his brother. So don’t judge us. It’s a small town and we take care of each other. Or at least we try.”
“Who exactly is she trying to convince?” Death said.
“So again,” Casey said, “back to the whole no suspects thing. You’re saying no one in town would want him dead, but at the same time you’re questioning what he was into. Makes sense to me that it could have been people from that part of his life.”
“We checked it out, but as I said, we had no hard evidence of anything he was doing, and nobody was seen here that day. No one knew the names of people he was associated with—including these men—and Elizabeth wasn’t around to ask. Nothing in Cyrus’ car gave us any names, and forensics turned up nothing but locals. That’s why I was interested to hear that Wayne was talking about the men.”
“He didn’t give us names, and he only mentioned them because we found this photo in the middle of Betsy’s stack of mementos. All he said was that Elizabeth didn’t like them, which I would assume he’d have told you folks back when this all happened.”
Kay flipped through some pages. Each time she turned one over, Death snapped a picture.
“Just because Elizabeth didn’t like them didn’t mean they were killers,” Kay said.
“True. But it could have been a clue.”
Kay’s nostrils flared, but she kept looking through the pages. “We aren’t complete idiots, you know. The papers aren’t always right.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Is there any chance Elizabeth contacted anyone over the years and they didn’t tell?”
“Can’t imagine who that would have been. Betsy would have been the one, and if not her, Wayne. Either one of them would have told someone.”
“Unless they had something to do with it all, and they didn’t want Elizabeth to bring it all back up again.”
“Her cousin and her boyfriend? Please.”
“Betsy says he wasn’t her boyfriend.”
“Maybe not officially. But they were together all the time. He spent a lot of time in that car.”
“So his fingerprints would have been all over, and no one would have questioned it.”
Kay stopped with the pages and looked up. “You think Wayne Greer killed Cyrus?”
“It could explain a lot.”
“Like?”
“Like why Elizabeth was at the crime scene but didn’t get killed. Why she ran away and didn’t tell. Why he’s only now telling about these men.”
“But what reason would Wayne have had to murder his girlfriend’s—or even just a good friend’s—father? And why on earth would Elizabeth let him get away with it?”
“She’s too close to it,” Death said. “She can’t see the forest for the very prominent trees.”
“I think everyone in this town is overlooking what could be a huge issue,” Casey said.
“And I suppose you are going to enlighten us?”
“What if something really did switch off in Cyrus Mann’s mind? What if he really had gone over to the dark side one way or another? Maybe Elizabeth was ready to take charge of her own life.”
“By killing her own father?”
“No, I don’t see that. What I do see is her talking to her boyfriend about it. He could see how it would bother her, living in a car, or seeing her father fall apart. You called him a hormonal teenager. You don’t think he’d do whatever he could to protect her? Or at least get in her pants?”
Death tsked. “We’re getting a little crude, aren’t we?”
Casey leaned forward. “It could have been an accident. Did Cyrus own a gun?”
“No.”
“You sound very certain.”
“I am. When he died he had no guns registered to his name. And no unregistered ones in his car.”
“So being a completely sane and law-abiding citizen there would be no way for him to have one that was off the record.”
“You think he had a gun?”
Casey threw up her hands. “How do I know? I’m just throwing out possibilities which apparently you people were afraid to look at all those years ago. Or too blind to look at.”
Kay stood up so suddenly her chair tipped backward and fell onto the floor with a crack. “I think we’ve talked enough for today.”
“Thank God.” Casey stood, too.
“You think you’re leaving?”
“I know I’m leaving. Unless you’re going to arrest me.”
It was obvious that the thought wasn’t an unpleasant one, and for a moment, Casey was afraid the chief was actually going to do it.
Instead, Kay said, “Rules.” She held up a finger. “No more assaults.”
“Fine.”
Second finger. “I want to be kept informed. If you find out anything new, no matter how small, I want to be told.”
“Okay.” How was Kay going to know? Easy promise to not keep.
Third finger. “No harassing the citizens. If I find out you’re bothering people I will put an end to it.”
Casey held up her hand, as if she were swearing in. “I promise to be a good tourist.”
Kay shook her head. “Now get out of my house before I change my mind.”
So Casey fled.
With dignity.