“You told Buzz Almond you went back to your apartment.”
“I was twenty, and I’d already had one DUI. Another one and I’d have lost my license and probably my job. I made it back to the apartment, but my roommate said élan and some of the others had come by looking for me, that Kimi was missing. I didn’t like the sound of that, so I left for my mom’s. She lived here on the rez. But I drank too much, and I fell asleep and smashed my truck into a tree.”
Tracy felt another gust of wind and a chill on her neck that ran down her spine. “Was there a police report?”
“I wasn’t about to call the police. I got the truck running enough to get to my mom’s and spent the weekend banging it out so I could get back. I had to work Monday.”
“Did you crack the windshield?”
“Probably. Had to have.”
“Where’d you get it fixed?”
Another shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Columbia Windshield?” Tracy asked, recalling the name on the invoice in the file.
“I don’t remember.”
“How’d you pay?”
“What do you mean?”
“Would you have paid with cash, a credit card, a check?”
He took another drag. “Probably cash. I don’t remember. That was forty years ago.”
“Where’d you get the bodywork done?”
“Friend of mine did it in his garage.”
“So you first heard about Kimi missing from your roommate?”
Moore dropped the cigarette on the ground and crushed it with the toe of his work boot. “Only that he said élan came by saying Kimi didn’t come home and wanted to know if she was with me. I read in the newspaper—Monday, I think—that she’d killed herself.”
“You didn’t sound like you cared much when Buzz Almond interviewed you.”
Moore pinched the bridge of his nose, and Tracy realized he was fighting his emotions. “I’m not proud of the man I was, Detective. I was already on my way to being a drunk, but when I found out what happened to Kimi, that put me over-the-top. I lost my job and had to move home with my mom. I cared, okay? I cared.”
“Your criminal record indicates that wasn’t the end of your problems.”
“No, it wasn’t. Like most drunks, I had a ways to go before I hit bottom.”
“What changed?”
“I met my wife. She wouldn’t go out with a man who drank. Her father drank. If I wanted to marry her, I had to get right. So I started going to AA meetings and taking a hard look at myself. It took a while to get sober. It took longer to stop blaming myself for what happened to Kimi, but like I said, it’s a rare day when I don’t think about her and about what part I might have played in it. It nearly ruined my life, Detective, thinking she killed herself because of me; are you here to tell me she didn’t?”
“I don’t know yet. But you were one of the last people to see her alive. You were angry at her, you have no alibi after you dropped off your date, and your car was damaged.”
“All true,” he said. “But if someone did kill Kimi, it wasn’t me.”
“With forensics we can determine things we couldn’t determine back in 1976.”
“Then I hope you find something.”
“I intend to.”
Moore might no longer look like the fighter Buzz Almond had confronted, but he still had a boxer’s confidence—or a good bluff. Tracy wasn’t going to be able to intimidate him. She ended the interview and got back in her truck, blasting the heat. She drove Moore back to his house and stopped at the curb. Twilight had become night, and light peeked out from behind the curtains. Inside, a woman apparently loved Moore enough to look past his faults, and two girls of his flesh and blood awaited him.
Moore stepped down from the cab. “I have my own daughters now,” he said before closing the door. “I know how Earl must have felt, and it rips me up inside.”
Tracy nodded but did not comment.
“Forty years I thought I killed Kimi, Detective. I thought she jumped in that river because of me,” Moore said. “I hope you do prove me wrong. Not for Kimi—she’s in a better place. Not even for me. I hope you find out for Earl, so he can finally put his daughter to rest.”
CHAPTER 14
Tracy drove back into town and pulled over beside one of the murals, writing down everything she recalled about the interview while it remained fresh in her mind. After, she spent the drive back to the farmhouse going over her conversation with Tommy Moore another time, uncertain what to make of his final request. Moore looked and sounded sincere, but she knew from experience that his sincerity could be due to a lack of remorse, like Bundy and other psychopaths. It was also possible that Moore killed Kimi but over the years had convinced himself he had not; Tracy had seen other criminals do just that. The third option was that Moore was innocent, as he proclaimed, and someone else had killed Kimi, though the evidence seemed to dictate otherwise—notably the damage to his truck and the invoices to the auto repair and windshield companies, which had to be in Buzz Almond’s file for a reason. Moore also had a motive, and usually the person with the motive committed the crime.
Tracy was even more uncertain what to think of élan, a brother who seemed decidedly disinterested in getting answers about what had happened to his sister. Then again, maybe Tracy was just comparing élan to herself, which wasn’t fair. Tracy had admittedly been obsessed with finding out what had happened to Sarah—so obsessed she’d nearly let it ruin her life. She remembered vividly that moment when she’d boxed up all the trial transcripts and witness statements, along with her notes, and shoved them into the closet of her bedroom because she knew she’d go crazy if she didn’t. For months she would glance at the closet door the way, she assumed, a recovering alcoholic like Tommy Moore glanced at a bottle of vodka: with a deep longing for just a small sample.
Maybe élan had long ago slid the memories of his sister’s death into his own mental closet so that he could get on with his life, and he had no desire to go back. If that was the case, he hadn’t gotten far, at least not from the looks of his current living situation. Or maybe élan, too, was trying to forget something he did that night, something born out of animosity and jealousy toward a sister who was everything he was not—smart, athletic, and motivated to do great things.