“You can imagine how thrilled his parents are,” I said. “Did he tell you what he planned to do with it?”
“I assumed he’d decided to pay the blackmailer, which I thought was a mistake.”
“How’d he get over here when he doesn’t have a driver’s license?”
“He’d taken his mother’s car, so he must have been driving without one. Ask me, he should have kept right on going.”
“Why is that?”
“Because Austin vowed to get even. That came out at the trial. He swore he’d kill anybody who ratted him out. Fritz was the one who snitched on him. Ergo, Austin was out to kill Fritz.”
“Ten years seems like a long time to wait.”
“What choice did he have? Fritz was in prison until four weeks ago. How’s anybody going to get to him there? Unless Austin had a pal at CYA who’d do the job for him, he’d have to postpone his satisfaction until Fritz was free.”
“True. So why did he come to see you?”
“He wanted me to go with him when he went to meet the guy. I had already turned him down by phone, so he was trying the personal approach. I didn’t think he should go at all and I certainly wasn’t going to make it easier.”
“How did you leave it? Did he intend to meet Austin alone?”
“I guess. Unless he managed to con someone else into going with him.”
? ? ?
When I got home, I took copious notes, which did little to relieve my stress. This business was getting to me and I needed a change of pace. First thing the next morning, I went into the office, where I called Diana Alvarez and invited her to lunch. I’d decided to take her to the Edgewater Hotel, which I hoped would intimidate her sufficiently to put a dent in her glossy fa?ade. I had an idea I was hoping to sell her and I wanted to take control. Before I could finish voicing my proposal, she cut in, saying, “I have a better idea. We’ll go Dutch. I have a standing date on Thursdays and you’re welcome to join me. You pay your way and I’ll pay mine.”
“I know what going Dutch means, Diana,” I said. “If you have a date, I wouldn’t want to interfere.”
“No danger of that. I’ll meet you in the parking lot at Ludlow Beach, right there at the end by the picnic tables. Make it eleven thirty. Any later and we’ll be out of luck.”
“Sounds fine,” I said.
How had she managed to get the upper hand?
I had an awkward history with Diana Alvarez. Her brother, Michael Sutton, had walked into my office some months before, hoping to hire me. He’d read an article in the paper written on the anniversary of a kidnapping in Santa Teresa many years before. A three-year-old named Mary Claire Fitzhugh had been snatched from her backyard in Horton Ravine and he’d had a sudden memory pertaining to her fate. He was convinced that, when he was six, he’d stumbled across the two kidnappers burying Mary Claire’s body in the woods. The two men were, in fact, the pair who’d demanded fifteen thousand in ransom, which I thought marked them as amateurs. Granted, the twenty-five grand the McCabes’ extortionist was asking was more, but the principle seemed the same.
I’d managed to track down the location Michael remembered, but then his estranged sister, Dee—a.k.a. Diana Alvarez—had come into my office bearing proof that he was wrong about the date and therefore couldn’t have seen what he claimed to have seen. What he’d actually witnessed was the two men burying marked bills from a “practice” kidnapping that went off as planned, but netted them money they couldn’t spend. When the kidnappers tried again, the crime hadn’t gone well and the second little girl had died.
Prior to that, Michael Sutton had come under the influence of a therapist who worked on repressed memories of sexual abuse. She’d convinced him that he’d been victimized by his father and his brother. In the end, he’d recanted, but the family had been destroyed by his accusations and thereafter he was radioactive, at least where Diana Alvarez was concerned. That early encounter with her had set the tone for our relationship, which got off to a bad start and was just now beginning to right itself. From my perspective, her one redeeming quality was her fashion sense, which I’m embarrassed to admit I mimicked from the first. Now I wore flats and black tights, miniskirts, and turtlenecks when I wasn’t decked out in the usual jeans and boots. As a badass private investigator, I was never going to admit this to a living soul, but fair is fair.
When I pulled in and parked in the picnic area at Ludlow Beach, I discovered that Diana’s standing date was with a guy who ran a food truck, selling the nastiest, finest, most succulent, and decadent hot dogs you ever ate. The line of avid customers was already halfway around the parking lot and it was only because she was pushy that we managed to find a spot near the front of the line. I insisted on paying and then the two of us discussed the virtues of Coneys versus corn dogs, beef versus pork, New York–style versus Chicago, half-smokes versus bratwurst, and organic versus nothing, as we were both morally opposed to the notion of organic foods of any kind.
We sat across from each other at a picnic table, variously moaning and exclaiming as we bolted down our weenies loaded with mustard, ketchup, onions, pickles, and hot peppers. It took us three paper napkins apiece to clean up afterward. My choice would have been to stretch out on the grass and nap, but it seemed unprofessional. By the time I broached the subject of the Sloan Stevens shooting, I was surprisingly nervous. I barely got the first sentence out when she cut in.
“I told you my editor’s not interested,” she said.
“Pitch the idea somewhere else,” I said. “I’m not talking about a news story. This is feature-length, maybe two or three parts. Listen to this. The kids involved haven’t turned out well. It’s like Sloan’s death tainted their lives. Go back and tell the story from the beginning, when Iris Lehmann stole the test. That act set everything in motion and the consequences are still reverberating all these years later. You know Margaret Seay will give you all the help you need. She’s got the transcripts from both the grand jury and the trial, and those contain a wealth of detail.”
She stared at me for a moment.
I could see she wasn’t buying it. I didn’t realize it mattered to me until I studied her face and realized she wasn’t sparking to the notion of taking up the cause. I said, “You’re the one who said it has all the elements. Youth, sex, money, betrayal.”
“Well, that’s true,” she said. How could she disagree with something she herself had said?
“The repercussions of a crime like this go on and on. Look at the lives it’s already touched, and it’s not over yet.”
Her expression shifted. “Oooh, I think I’m getting this. When you first called about Fritz McCabe, you didn’t mention why you were so interested in the facts of the case.”
“Yes, I did. I told you I wanted to talk to the players.”
“Because you’d been hired to investigate something, right?”
“Maybe.”