I could tell she believed that. But her question about God made me think that faith came easy to her. “What does that have to do with God?”
“I don’t know what really went down or where she’s been,” Danielle said. “Believe me, the police tried to find her, the investigator for Brad’s lawyer tried to find her—she was gone. But then, all this time later, two days after they scheduled Brad’s execution I see her? It had to be for a reason.”
I raised my eyebrows. She’d buried the lede a little bit on that one. “What’s the date?” I said.
“January twentieth.” She wrapped both hands around her mug.
Just over two months away. It was hard to imagine facing that down. I shifted in my chair. “Could she have done it?” I said. “Killed her parents?”
Danielle pressed her lips together. “I’ve thought so much about that. Brad acted like there was no way—he wouldn’t even let the lawyer bring it up at the trial.”
“That’s love for you.”
She shrugged.
“What about you, though, what do you think?”
Danielle said, “I wasn’t close friends with her, but she was in my grade so I knew her. She seemed like a nice, exuberant person. Her family was religious, pretty straitlaced, and she was one of those girls who, you know, developed early. Boy-crazy. In high school, she was really into writing. Slam poetry—that’s how she and Brad got to know each other, he’s a writer too. And I didn’t see how she was with her family, only how she was with ours. But I got the feeling they weren’t thrilled about her seeing Brad.”
I thought about what Danielle had said at the beginning of our conversation. Nice white family. “Weren’t thrilled because Brad was older, or because he was black?” Then I added, “Or because he was a poet?”
Danielle gave me a slight smile. “All of the above? I don’t know. I overheard them in our basement talking, a week or so before it happened. Brad and Sarah. There was some kind of regional poetry slam in Michigan that they both wanted to go to. Sarah was saying that her parents wouldn’t let her go with him, but maybe if she went with someone else, they could meet up—that’s the extent of it, as far as I know, it’s not like her parents ever forbade her to see him. But then at the trial, Mrs. Cook’s sister testified that the Cooks had a very contentious relationship with Brad, that they were afraid of him. She’s in there, in the back.”
I flipped to the last page in the binder. “Stockton: Guilty in Belmont Murders.” A grainy photo of an attractive woman in a tweed jacket crying in a courtroom, a tissue clutched halfway to her face. The caption read “Justice for my big sister: Elizabeth Troyan celebrates the verdict.” If Sarah was seventeen when all of this had happened, then that meant Danielle had been too. I tried to picture a younger version of her calmly cutting out these newspaper articles and slipping them into plastic sheet protectors and carrying them around for her entire adult life.
“She never even met Brad,” Danielle said, shaking her head. “They painted a picture of my brother that just wasn’t true.”
“And you think Sarah could help with that. Set the record straight, in the eleventh hour.”
“I do.”
I flipped the scrapbook closed. “You have to be prepared for the possibility that she won’t want to.”
“I know.”
“That she might have her reasons, whatever they may be, for not sticking around.”
“I know.”
“That you might not like what you find out.” I didn’t bother to say that what she might find out was that she was wrong. That Sarah was dead, that her brother was guilty anyway. Or that we might find nothing at all.
“That’s what Brad’s new lawyer said. That I should just move on with my life because nothing good comes of diving back into this stuff.” Danielle shrugged. “He inherited the case from his uncle. He doesn’t care.”
I felt my eyebrows go up. Everybody, innocent or not, at least deserves a lawyer who won’t tell family to move on. “Sounds like what you really need is a new lawyer, not a detective,” I said. “I can give you some names if you want.”
Danielle shook her head. “What I want is to find Sarah. Matt said you’d try to talk me out of it.” She grinned. “That it’s how you get people to trust you.”
I did do that. I almost laughed. “What else did he tell you?”
“That you’re very determined. And smart.” She stopped then, like she wasn’t sure if she should tell me the whole truth. But I nodded at her and she continued. “And that you’re kind of a mess, since your dad died. But nothing gets past you.”
I finished my tea and set my mug down on the coffee table. It was true, what I’d told her about my brother not liking me much. But he sure as hell knew me. “So you want to do this?”
“I do,” Danielle said. She reached into her handbag and pulled out her checkbook. My bank account was going to be thrilled.
TWO
It was after one o’clock when Danielle left. I sat for a while in the armchair and flipped through her scrapbook again, pausing on a description of the murder weapon. Three-and-a-quarter-inch blade, available in any hunting-supply store. I didn’t need to see crime-scene photos to know that these murders were brutal, that Garrett and Elaine Cook had not died quickly. I tried to imagine their seventeen-year-old daughter doing it, but my head still hurt too much from last night to imagine much of anything. Besides, the bloody knife had been found in Brad’s trunk, wrapped in Sarah’s shirt.
That was pretty persuasive.
I figured he was guilty.
But Danielle hadn’t hired me for my opinion on the merits of the case. In fact, Danielle had written me a check for twenty-five hundred reasons to assume that Brad was innocent.
I swallowed two more aspirins and called Kenny Brayfield at the number Danielle had given me. He was too busy to see me, but he told me I could stop by the office of the event-promotion agency he ran later that afternoon. Then, I spoke with Brad’s new lawyer, who didn’t give me much besides the contact info for the private investigator who had assisted with the trial. I tried him next.
“Yeah,” an old, gruff voice answered on the third ring.
“Peter Novotny?” I said.
“Maybe. Who’s this?”
“My name is Roxane Weary. You worked a case a long time ago, Brad Stockton?”
“Oh, that,” he said. “Look, I’m retired, I’m not going to chase a ghost all over Ohio anymore. Wait a second. Did you say Weary? Any relation to Frank Weary?”
It had been nine months since my father died. But it still felt, as it always did, like a punch to the stomach. “I’m his daughter.”
“Well, shit!” Peter Novotny said. The growl was gone. “Great guy, what a goddamn shame. Sure I’ll talk to you, honey. Are you a whiskey drinker like your old man?”
“I am.”
“Good, because I’ve been waiting all afternoon for a beautiful woman to walk into this bar and sit down beside me,” Novotny said.
“Good luck with that,” I said, “but I’d like to talk to you. Where can I meet you?”