It’s all my fault. I never should have contacted her. I put her in a terrible position. What if they found the burner phone she’s been hiding? It would give them evidence that we’ve talked, and it might lead them to me. I take the battery out of the phone I’ve been using and break it. When I’m done here, I’ll toss the pieces into separate trash cans. I’ll use the one Dylan gave me instead.
While I’m online, I check the Dallas TV station’s site to see if they have anything else on Cole’s death.
I go back to the list of sites with recent stories about him and see that they’re all reporting his death. There’s a video of one of his cousins I’ve never met. “We’re asking police not to rule this a suicide. We just don’t think he did this on purpose.”
“He didn’t!” I yell. “The Trendalls . . .” I think back over my confrontation with those people. I shouldn’t have told them anything about Cole. But I told them he was suicidal, hoping they had consciences. Now I have a deep gut feeling that they used that information . . . set up his death and knew it would seem as if he’d gone through with suicide. And with Cole dead, there’ll be no one to fight the charges in their lawsuit, and Cole’s testimony about a molester named Fred will never be brought into court. Ava’s fate is sealed.
No, someone has to hold them accountable. Those tire tracks . . . If they match the Trendalls’. . . If there’s evidence on their van or truck . . . These people seem to be drug users. Surely they haven’t been that careful. They must have made mistakes. Maybe I can find the evidence and report them anonymously. For Ava’s sake, I have to at least try. How could good people be crushed this way?
I start the car, but before I drive out of the parking lot, I text Dylan. Change of plans. Have to get closer to Dallas. I’ll let you know where I wind up.
45
DYLAN
When I’m almost to Dallas, I get Casey’s text. It worries me, so I call her.
“Hello?” Her voice sounds cloudy, wet.
“Casey, it’s Dylan.”
“Yeah, you’re the only one who has this number.”
“Right. So what happened? Why would you risk going near Dallas?”
She’s silent for a long moment. “Something happened. I just needed to . . . check on somebody. Nothing to do with my case. I’ll tell you about it when you come.”
“Bad idea,” I say. “You need to get as far from Dallas as you can.”
“It’s a big city. I can stay hidden. This is really important.”
She’s stubborn, and I can see I’m not going to talk her out of it.
“If you can tell me where you’re staying, I’ll get a room there too. Then we can go over what we’ve got on these people and get something ready for the media.”
She tells me she’s staying at the Independence Suites, not part of a chain. I put it in my GPS. When I get there, I see it’s among a cluster of other motels. Her car isn’t in the parking lot. I check in. I would ask them if I can get a room close to hers, but I don’t know what name she’s using. I go toss my bag into my room on the second floor, then I text and ask her room number. She texts it back. She’s only a few rooms away from mine. I go knock on her door. I don’t like that the rooms open to the outside, that people can walk up from the parking lot to any door. I would rather she had picked one that was more secure, but this one’s cheap and I suppose she’s getting short on cash.
She opens the door a couple of inches, looks out into the parking lot for danger, then lets me in.
I feel like a guy who’s crushed on a girl for five years and finally has the chance to talk to her. But of course it’s a paradox—I’m supposed to be dragging her back for a crime. I step into her room and see that it’s a suite. It has a sitting area with a couch and a chair and a little kitchenette. Maybe mine has that too. I didn’t pay attention. Her front drapes are shut except for a ten-inch slit, but there’s still sunlight coming through the back window.
“I’d bet that Keegan and Rollins are here in Dallas by now,” I say. “I could go and try to find them, but I think it’s better if I stay here.”
“Maybe. I can’t think.”
“Where’s your car?”
“I parked it at the Super 8, a block up.” She’s been crying, and her eye makeup is smudged. She looks like the person in the pictures everyone has seen. Her nose is red, her eyes puffy.
“Casey, what’s wrong? Hannah got out, didn’t she?”
“Yeah. It’s not her.” She turns off the TV and goes to her couch, drops down. “A friend of mine died yesterday. Nothing to do with this case . . . just a nice person who had some bad stuff happen to him, and he somehow . . .” She stops and swallows hard, then says, “Drove his car off a cliff.”
I lower to the couch, angle toward her. “Casey, I’m so sorry. Was it someone in Shreveport?”
She shakes her head. “No. Dallas. That’s why I came back. I don’t believe it was suicide. I have to find proof.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Casey, you have to stay focused. I know this is hard, but you can’t get sidetracked . . .”
“A little girl’s future is at stake. This isn’t just grief. But honestly, I don’t want to talk about it.”
She doesn’t entirely trust me yet, and I can see that she’s determined, so I switch gears.
“So . . . do you want to talk about the evidence we’ve each gotten?” I put my computer on the coffee table next to hers. “Maybe between the two of us, we have enough.”
“Hannah’s lost weight,” she says. “I saw her on the news footage, leaving the station. She looks really depressed and pale. Poor little Emma . . . I know my mother probably stepped in, but she’s not a big help. And Jeff has to keep his job. He can’t just take off work every day to take care of Emma, and I don’t know how they’re going to pay for attorneys if this drags on.” She’s distraught and her eyes glisten, though she’s holding back tears.
I touch Casey’s shoulder and look into her face. “Casey, you can do this. You’ve come this far. You’re smart. You can’t panic now.”
“I just want it to be over. I think I was a little relieved when it seemed like I was ending it.”
“He would pay a prisoner to beat you to death,” I say. “Or hang you with your sheet.”
She shivers.
“You did the right thing. If we have enough evidence, we can end it soon.”
She sighs. “I sent you everything I have.”
“But you haven’t seen what I have. And I need to talk to you about the crime scene photos.”
“What about them?”
“Have you looked at the ones of Brent’s body that were released to the press?”
Her face drains of color before my eyes. “I saw the ones on TV that were blurred out. I couldn’t stand to look at the unedited ones online.”
“You need to,” I say. “I want to know if the way they photographed him is the way you saw him. If anything at the crime scene was moved or changed. If we can point out inconsistencies, make them question the evidence as Keegan and Rollins left it, then we might be able to tie them to the murder.”
I hate doing it to her, but she finally takes my phone and looks down at the photo. I can feel her trembling next to me.
“It was such a blur,” she whispers, then goes silent for a long moment. “Those footprints are mine. I stumbled all over the place. I grabbed him, tried to revive him. I kept thinking he would wake up, but he was cold . . . But . . . he’s a lot taller than me. This slash across his neck . . . How could I have done that?”
“If you had, there would have to be a downward angle—like you reached up, then slashed back down—but there wasn’t, according to the autopsy report. This was very deliberate. It cut the carotid artery. The person who did this was his height.”
“They left the front door unlocked for me,” she adds. “When he didn’t answer, I went in, and there he was. Maybe their prints are on the doorknob or the lock.”
“The problem wit
h the crime scene is that even if there were fibers or prints from Keegan and Rollins—or whoever actually carried their plan out—they can explain why their DNA was there. They can say it was from their investigation of the scene.”
She nods. “And the knife they planted in my car is pretty condemning. No reason anyone should believe they put it there when they found my car.” She thrusts my phone back at me. “How could anyone think I could stab my friend? Or any human being, anywhere?”
She’s staring straight ahead, and I know she’s there . . . at the scene. As much as I want her to give me something I can use, I don’t want her to stay there. I show her the list of things I’ve compiled against Keegan, get her talking about it, gently pulling her back. Slowly, the color returns to her face.
“The key here,” I say, “is going to be the press. If we can give them the evidence they need, then Keegan can’t ride in and do something to stop you from talking. It’ll be too late. But it has to be enough.”
She pulls her feet up onto the couch, hugs her knees, and looks out through the gap in the drapes, toward the parking lot below. The strip of light from the afternoon sun has illuminated one side of her face, but the other side is shaded. “Best case scenario, I probably will have to go to jail anyway, even if Keegan’s group is exposed and I’m somehow protected from them. I’ve been thinking about it. If my sister can handle it, I can. It’s probably not as bad as it sounds. Nothing ever is.”
I turn to her on the couch, set my elbow on the back of it, leaning on my hand. “Why do you think you’ll have to go to jail if we can get people to listen to the truth?”
“A lot of broken laws,” she says. “I’ve used dead people’s identities. I’ve stolen license plates. I’ve fled prosecution. Those things have consequences.”
“You were trying to survive,” I say. Her eyes fix on something outside and I know she’s thinking about what’s in store for her.
“Casey, look at me,” I say. She does, and again I have that feeling that I could fall into her eyes and disappear and never be heard from again. Those blue eyes are so deep, so full of things I can’t express. I swallow the knot in my throat. “You didn’t kill Brent Pace. You don’t deserve to be charged with murder.”
“I know,” she says. “But I’m scared.” Her words are a whisper, almost inaudible. “My dad used to call me his brave girl, but I think it was to bolster me because I wasn’t brave. I waited a year after I was allowed to get my driver’s license before I took the test, because I didn’t want to fail. My mother had a terrible time getting me to drive for the first time.”
“Casey, your dad was right. You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.”
She gets tears in her eyes, and her mouth twists as she tries to hold them back. She doesn’t answer, and I can see as she looks away that she doesn’t have any words.
“You know,” I say, “God has been watching over you all this time. I know he has. I told you before, he’s the one who’s given me the gut certainty that you aren’t guilty.”
She nods and turns her gaze back to me. “I see that,” she says. “But it confuses me.” She wipes her face, then dries her hands on her jeans. “I went to church a couple of times here. There were things I didn’t understand. Like they kept talking about being washed by the blood of Christ, and that didn’t make any sense to me. I don’t know if I’m up to speed enough to ever be a Christian.”
“Washed in the blood means that Jesus shed his blood to take our punishment. It wiped our slates clean, as far as he’s concerned. Without that blood, we wouldn’t be clean.”
She nods slowly. “Yeah, I thought it was something like that.”
“You don’t have to get up to speed to be a Christ follower,” I say. “There isn’t a test. There’s only talking to God and telling him you believe.”
“But believe what?” she asks. “Sometimes I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to believe.”
“Forget supposed to,” I say. “What do you believe?”
She gets up and walks across the room, crosses her arms, and turns back to me. “I believe there is a God. I believe he’s been watching over me and that he hears my prayers sometimes. And when I was in church, I felt . . . something. I don’t know what to call it.”
“It’s the Holy Spirit,” I say. “He sometimes moves in you when you worship. I think you’re feeling his prodding.”
She comes back to the couch. “I just don’t understand how God works. I was gonna read the Bible one day, and I reached for the hotel Bible in the drawer, and I found someone else’s Bible. It had a suicide note. It derailed me.”
“A suicide note?”
“Yeah,” she says. “And I found out the guy was alive, then I looked him up and returned the Bible to him. I found out all this stuff about what would make him want to kill himself.” She pauses and sniffs, and tears rim her eyes. “He’d been accused of child molestation, and it was all bogus. I found out the accusing family was a bunch of liars, that they accuse people all the time and live on the settlements. Their daughter had been abused, but not by him. Things were turning around for him, and then he just . . . ran his car off a cliff. I think it was like with my dad, when someone made it look like a suicide but it wasn’t. And I think it was those people. The ones who accused him. I just . . . I don’t understand how God keeps letting things like that happen. Evil winning.” With the last few words, she crumples into tears, and I watch her bury her head in her knees. I move closer, not sure what she would want me to do.
“I don’t either,” I say, touching her back. “I don’t understand why lots of things happen. But evil has a name. We live in a world where Satan has a lot of power, and he works overtime to wreak havoc, especially when people are moving closer to God. I’m sorry that guy died.”
“I just feel like I might have had something to do with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“That couple, the accusers, they cornered me and were trying to intimidate me—that’s where I got all these scrapes from—and I told them they were ruining a decent man’s life, that he was suicidal. I think they used that. They got the idea from me and then they made it look like that happened. Then they could sue the school for all the money they wanted and he couldn’t defend himself. He died with that allegation hanging over his head.”
It’s a knee-jerk reaction, but I pull her into my arms and hold her as she cries against my shirt.
“This guy and his wife were Christians,” she says. “I don’t know why God lets things like that happen to people who are devoted to him. There’s so much evil. It just never stops.”
“And the only thing in this world that beats that darkness back is the light.”
She pulls upright, wiping her face. “But that’s another one of those clichés I don’t get. The light. I feel it sometimes. It makes sense that you have to beat back the darkness, but I just don’t understand why there’s darkness in the first place. Sometimes I feel like the world has fractured into a million pieces and they’re closing in on me, and I have to push each piece back with my hands and my feet and my head to keep it from squeezing me to death.”
“I’ve felt that way myself,” I say. “But . . . Satan doesn’t get the final word. I really believe there’s more to this life than just living and dying. We each have an eternity somewhere.”
“Heaven’s a hard thing to grasp too. My dad . . . He never said anything about Jesus or religion or God. He was a good man, but that wasn’t one of our things. If you believe he had to be a Christian to go to heaven, then he’s probably not there, and I’ll never see him again.”
“Casey, for all you know, your dad is in heaven because he cried out to Jesus in those last minutes. God doesn’t make it complicated. It’s very simple. And don’t you think your dad would want you to know the truth about God?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then don’t let that be one of your obstacles. Casey, this world can be a really terrible place. I’ve expe
rienced it myself. But Jesus died on the cross to overcome it. We only make it into heaven because of him. He died so that we don’t have to smother in the darkness. He made it so if we simply call out to him, we’re his.”
“But there is repentance.”
“Yes, there’s repentance. We all have to repent.”
“If I repent, then it’s over. I’d have to turn myself in immediately, no matter what.”
“You can’t turn yourself in until we get all our ducks in a row. Not until we’ve contacted every media person who’s interested in this story. Not until we make sure that Keegan and Rollins are going to face justice for murdering your father and Brent, and Sara Meadows, and the cop who was on to him, and whoever else they’ve killed, and for all the money they’ve gotten from innocent people to finance their toys. You’re not just doing this for yourself, Casey, you’re doing it for a lot of other people. You’re doing it for your father. You’re doing it for Hannah and for Emma and for Jeff and your mom.”
She’s staring at me now, so intently that my heart breaks.
“You can get forgiveness from God and still make sure that you help bring about justice. It’s going to be all right,” I tell her. “This is only the beginning.”
“What if all hell breaks loose?”
“Then I’ll keep picking up the pieces,” I say. “I’ll keep putting them back together. I’ll keep beating back the darkness. But we can do this.”
We’re closer to each other now, no longer separated by awkwardness or nerves. We work together at the same pace on the same project, getting our paperwork done to give to the press. And for the first time since before I was deployed, I feel as though my life has clicked into place.
46
CASEY
When we get hungry, Dylan goes out to get us something to eat, and I’m left there alone in my motel room. I sit on the couch for a while, savoring the thought of him. I’ve never felt so attached to another human being. I was almost this way with Brent, and he was attracted to me, but I always held him at arm’s length. It seemed that whenever I let someone in, something bad happened. When people are ripped out of your life often enough, you find ways to avoid that pain again.