“I’m on that,” he says, but not very emphatically. I know he can’t keep Keegan from getting to them. “Hannah’s doing well, embracing the suicide story about your dad, going along with the police’s version of it. Not being a threat to them. I know she doesn’t believe any of that, but as long as she convinces Keegan, she’ll be safe. He can’t afford to have another murder to cover up if he can avoid it.”
“He doesn’t care. He’s bloodthirsty. Who will stop him?”
“I will.”
“After the fact. After it’s too late for the people I love.”
“Casey, you need to focus on yourself. Too many eyes are on Hannah right now anyway. The press are camped out at her and your mother’s houses, trying to get statements. I don’t think anything can happen to her right now.”
I get to my feet. “Really? They’re hounding them? Why?”
“Because of what you did in Shady Grove. It’s fascinating to the press. Imagine the questions. Are you a killer or a saint?”
“I’m neither.”
He’s silent for a moment. “Sainthood isn’t what people think. You should check out the Bible’s definition.”
“I don’t know much about the Bible,” I say.
“That can be fixed. You might like it.” I like the gentle sound of his voice. “I really believe God is on this. I’m on your side because of him.”
Tears again. I rub them away.
“Casey, I want you to see where he’s working. Keep looking for it. Start with me.”
I think about that, and if he’s not lying, if he’s really on my side, his very existence in my life today is something of a miracle. I think about my escape from Shady Grove, when he showed up at the most crucial moment, even if it was just to arrest me. But he didn’t.
“I can see,” I whisper, balling the end of my sleeve in my fist and wiping my cheeks, my nose.
“Good.”
I don’t know why this moment with Dylan is a comfort to me. I wish I could see him face-to-face. I wish I could touch his hand.
I wish I didn’t have to break the connection, but it’s possible that he could be tracing the call. If so, I’m probably already sunk, but I don’t think I should drag it out longer. “I have to go now,” I say in a soft voice.
“I’m glad you called. Call back. If I can’t answer right away, I’ll return it.”
I don’t know if I’ll ever call him again. Just in case, I say, “Thank you, Dylan.”
“Be safe,” he says. “I’m praying for you.”
I click the phone off, astonished at the kindness in that statement. That someone, anyone, would be praying for me. It gives me strength, and I don’t feel so weak any longer.
Tonight I will sleep, and tomorrow I’ll do something other than grieve.
9
CASEY
Sunday morning I take a cab to Armstrong, just outside of Durant, and stay there that night. Monday morning, I try to think what my next step should be. I need to contact my sister, but I don’t dare call her on the cell phone I sent her when I was living in Shady Grove. Now that they can trace my steps in Georgia and know the name I was using there, they have probably wiretapped that phone.
I can’t send her a new phone through her in-laws again. They’ll get suspicious.
Afraid to stay in one place too long, I call a cab. While I wait for it, I look in the Dumpster for a box. I find one with an Amazon logo, big enough to hold a toy for my niece. If I send a phone in that, anyone watching the house will think it’s something Hannah ordered herself from Amazon.
By now the cab is pulling up, so I tell the driver to take me to the nearest Walmart. He drives me a couple of miles away, where I find a stuffed animal that plays an annoying song. I find the sound box tucked inside a flap in the back. If I can cut that out, there’s room to hide the new phone there. Then I can close the Velcro flap back over it.
I buy that and two new burner phones and cards to activate them, along with packing tape and scissors. There’s a restaurant with a Wi-Fi signal nearby, so I walk over to have breakfast. While I’m waiting for my food, I put the toy on my lap, partially under the table, and cut the electronic guts out of the stuffed bunny. I stick the phone and charger into the pocket, close the Velcro flap, and examine my work. It looks perfect. I hope Hannah tries to turn it on and realizes that something’s not right. I pack the toy into the box, tape it up, and get it ready to send via FedEx.
“Here you go.” The waitress sets my plate on the table, but before I can thank her, she retreats and runs back across the dining room.
I stare after her, wondering if she’s recognized me. I’m just about to grab my stuff and leave, when the other waitress says, “Sue’ll be right back, hon. She’s got a little morning sickness.”
Relieved, I start to eat. Sue comes back in a few minutes with a coffeepot. “I’m sorry about that,” she says. “I wasn’t feeling well.”
“She told me,” I say, nodding toward the other server. “Morning sickness?”
“Yeah. I used to like my job, but now every plate kind of brings it on.”
“Maybe you could get someone else to deliver the food to the tables.”
She fills my cup. “That would be helpful, but nobody in the back is willing to do that. It’ll be okay when this first trimester is over, they tell me.”
She looks pretty young, so I ask, “Your first?”
“Yeah.” She doesn’t look that happy about it. Maybe she’s getting sick again.
I eat as she disappears again. When she comes back, I hear the other waitress telling her she’s leaving for a meeting at her kids’ school. Sue will be handling things alone. I feel bad for her.
A couple of people sit at one of the tables near me, and they ask her for more coffee, but she’s dashing to the bathroom again. “Just one second,” she says, and vanishes.
The diners look disgruntled, so I get up and find the coffeepot sitting on a burner near the kitchen. I fill their cups, and they thank me like I’m one of the restaurant employees. Sue comes back out as I’m putting the pot back on the burner.
“I got their coffee,” I say. “You all right?”
“I think so. Thank you. Really. Your food is on the house.”
“No, I couldn’t do that. I didn’t do anything but get them coffee. All I want is to be able to work on my computer for a little while. I’ll keep ordering things if I need to.”
“No, stay as long as you want,” she says. “We’re slow today, thank goodness.”
I go back to my table and spend the next couple of hours going through the files Brent sent me on a thumb drive the morning he died. I’ve been over them all before, and most of them are no longer mysteries. But there’s one that baffles me.
The file is called “Candace Price.” When I open it, it only says, “Dallas, TX.” There’s nothing else there. I can’t imagine why he would name a folder that and have nothing in it. Maybe he was working on it on the day of his murder. But who is she? What did he know about her?
I do a Google search of “Candace Price Dallas Texas,” and after I sort through the people searcher sites trying to make me give them my credit card, I count three Candace Prices. I click through each of them, but nothing about any of them is remarkable. I can’t tell which one Brent was interested in.
I almost give up, thinking he accidentally put a random file on the thumb drive, but Brent never did things randomly. He must have had a reason.
I try Googling “Candace Price Dallas Shreveport.” If Brent was linking a woman in Dallas to the events regarding my father’s murder, then this woman must have some connection.
Up comes only one of the Candace Prices. She’s a real estate agent in Dallas. I look through the rest of the search results and see a .pdf file of her résumé. She used to be a teacher in Shreveport, until five years ago.
Brent was on to something. I find her Facebook profile, which isn’t open to everyone, so I quickly create a fake profile, make it private so s
he can’t see how many “friends” I have, and send her a Friend Request. I refresh every few minutes as I eat, then suddenly, she accepts.
I’m always baffled by how easily people accept Facebook friend requests, especially when they’ve marked their pages private. For all she knows I could be a predator . . . or a fugitive . . .
I quickly go to her profile. She’s proud of her good looks and posts pictures several times a day, mostly selfies, so there could be a lot of material here. I scan through the images, one after another, until I’ve seen dozens, hundreds. I’m clicking them too fast, not sure I’m seeing whatever is there.
Then something stops me.
I spread my fingers on my track pad to enlarge the picture. There he is, posted four years ago, right there next to her at a baseball game, grinning into her selfie. Gordon Keegan.
I go back to more recent ones, clicking more slowly, studying every face in every picture. I find him in the background two more times. In one, they’re wearing leis and floral shirts, and the caption reads, “Chilling in Hawaii. Tough duty, but somebody’s gotta do it.”
And then I know what Brent would have told me. Candace Price from Dallas, Texas, is Gordon Keegan’s mistress.
Suddenly things snap into place. I know where I’ll go next. I pay my tab, then grab my duffel bag and call another cab. After I have it take me to FedEx, where I leave the package, I have the driver take me to the train station.
I get to the ticket window, my heart pounding with my decision. “I’d like the next train to Dallas, Texas,” I say.
10
KEEGAN
Casey Cox could be dead by now, but instead she’s a burr abscessing into my skin, reminding me every single minute that it’s there. She’s out there ticking, ticking, ticking like a bomb, ready to go off when I least expect it.
“We have to take action,” I tell Sy, my partner, as he piddles around like an old man in his dated kitchen. “The press she’s getting is turning her into a hero. It’s a nightmare. We have to stop that.”
Sy’s frown ripples like scored leather on his face. The alcohol is aging him. “We should give the press some of the photos of Brent Pace’s body,” he says.
“Too risky,” I say. “Chief won’t like that. He’ll say we’ve compromised the investigation.”
“We could leak it, then rant and rave that it got out. If we’re the ones who are livid, Chief won’t think we did it. We can blame Dylan Roberts.”
I think about that for a minute, taking his suggestion to its logical conclusion in my mind. So the TV news anchors who are so intrigued with the murder suspect who saved a girl and her baby—and would love to break the story that she’s not really a killer—would get a taste of the bloody crime she’s wanted for. It could work to reverse public sympathy for her.
“We both know it wouldn’t compromise anything,” Sy adds. “The evidence is what we wanted it to be.”
I grin. “They’d have to go back to talking about how dangerous she is.” I let out a heavy breath and kick the chair in front of me. “He should have gotten her in Shady Grove. This could all be over.”
“I don’t know.” Sy gets up and walks across the kitchen, his house shaking with his boot steps. He pours three fingers of whiskey into a glass, throws it back with a grimace. “Gotta hand it to that girl. She’s got instincts. And if we go trashing Dylan to Chief Gates, he’s just going to dig in. The Paces helped the chief get his job. If they want Dylan to keep looking for her, Chief’s going to stand by his decision.” He lifts the bottle and offers it to me. “Want some?”
“No,” I say. “Need to keep my head clear. So do you. We can’t be making mistakes.”
Sy puts the bottle down hard, and the liquid sloshes against the sides.
“Okay,” I say, “here’s our strategy. First, we leak the pictures to the press, along with a list of the evidence—her DNA left at the scene, the knife in her car . . . Then we go ballistic all over the department, threatening anybody who had access to the pictures. Indignant, we’re-gonna-get-to-the-bottom-of-this kind of rant.”
“You’ll get it to the press?”
“Yeah, I’ll do that. But then we’ll plant stories about Dylan to the chief. Can’t be blatant. We just put some more bugs in his ear about Dylan’s incompetence. Like he’s had some crazy PTSD episodes that we tried to overlook.”
“That didn’t get any traction when you tried it in Chief’s office. Dylan seems too competent. I think we have to be more subtle.”
“We still have to plant doubts.”
“But what about looking for her?” Sy grabs the bottle again, drops into his recliner, levers the footstool up. “We have to find her. I can’t sleep nights knowing she’s out there, on to us. She could expose us anytime. I wouldn’t fare well in prison.”
“Shut up, you’re not going to prison. And how do you know she’s on to us? She’s running from prosecution. That’s all. It doesn’t mean she knows anything. We’ve gotten this far, haven’t we?”
When Sy drinks out of the bottle, I get up and go to him. I grab his face, give it a light slap, then tilt his chin up. “Haven’t I made you rich? Haven’t I? Don’t tell me it hasn’t been a blast. All the garbage we have to put up with, we should be living like kings. We put our lives on the line every mind-numbing day, and most of us don’t make enough money to drive a new car. They owe us this, and we had the backbone to go after it. We got what was ours.”
Sy jerks his face out of my grip. “Maybe we went too far, Gordon. The Andy Cox thing got us in over our heads . . . and then Brent . . .”
“Every single time you get drunk you start wailing about Cox. It was thirteen years ago. We did get away with it.” I grip his face again and set my jaw as I stare into his eyes. “Are we in over our heads? Have we been caught? Has anything happened to us, ever?”
Sy jerks his face away.
“No,” I say, “we’re still living the good life, and Casey Cox is just some kid out there trying to keep her head down. She’s not talking to anybody. We’ll find her soon enough, and when we do, we end it. That’s all. She can join her Honest Abe of a dad in the grave he’s rotting in.”
“But even if he finds her, or if we do, if anything happens to her, the press will be all over it. It’s got their attention now.”
“If we leak the right things, none of that will matter.” I slap the top of his head, point my finger at him. “You keep your head straight, you hear me? That whiskey is making a coward out of you. We control this story, and nobody else. You’ve trusted me this far, and I haven’t let you down. Everything we’ve done is because we had to. We’ve done good, Sy.”
“Okay, Gordon. I get it.”
“No, you don’t. Look at me.” I tip his face up again. His eyes are bloodshot. “Look at me, Sy. Do you trust me?”
“Things get out of control, Gordon.”
“Do you trust me?” I say louder.
He jerks away from me again and wipes his mouth with the back of his arm. “Yes, I trust you!”
“Then we do it this way, and we keep our heads clear, and we follow our strategy. And when Casey Cox is dead, we’re home free.”
“What about Dylan?”
“Dylan’s head’s so twisted that he’ll move on too. Especially if we get him a job at the department. That’s what he really wants. He’ll be fine.”
When I finally get Sy under control, I drive home, my mind racing with the strategy. Adrenaline pumps through my veins as I think of the steps involved in ruining what’s left of Casey Cox’s name. I’m good at this. I’ve done it for years. I even like it.
Unlike Sy, I sleep fine at night.
11
DYLAN
I have another restless night, my attempts at sleep broken up by times on the Internet. Finally, I give up and make coffee, then turn on the TV. The local news is on, and when they flash Brent Pace’s picture on the screen, I step toward the TV.
Local authorities are still trying to find Pace’s a
lleged killer, who surfaced in Georgia after rescuing a girl and her baby from kidnapping. Today, an anonymous source gave us pictures of the Brent Pace crime scene, which puts this crime back into perspective. The brutal murder happened months ago . . .
As the anchor reads off the story, they show the picture that even I wasn’t allowed to have, of Brent’s bloody body at the foot of his stairs.
The pictures are not shown for very long and a lot is pixelated, but the anchor says that if you want to see more you can go to their website. I dash to my computer and open it, go to that site. The unpixelated pictures are right there, gory and brutal.
I feel the heat in my ears, burning in the back of my throat, my heart racing as I think of Brent’s mother seeing these pictures, feeling violated as all of her friends discuss them over lunch. Without a doubt, I know why they were released. It is Keegan’s way of reminding the public that Casey Cox is not a hero, but a killer. And I know who will be blamed for the leak.
I leave the TV running and storm out of my apartment, race down the stairs to my car. My hands are shaking as I drive to the department.
When I get there I speed walk across the lawn and up the steps into the building. I start to go to the detectives’ floor, to confront Keegan myself, but then I change my mind. It’s useless confronting him and Rollins. Instead, I go to Chief Gates’s office at the back corner of the building, hoping he’s there. His secretary is on the phone and another line is ringing, and in his office I can hear him talking.
He’s already heard about the pictures and he’s talking his way out of it. I slide my shaking fists into my pockets. “I need to see him,” I tell the secretary. “Tell him it’s Dylan Roberts.” She looks alarmed at the sound of my name and puts her call on hold, then goes to his door. “It’s him,” she says. “Dylan Roberts.”
“Dylan, get in here!” he yells, and she motions for me to go in. As I walk in I see that Chief Gates is just as livid as I am. He’s standing, pacing behind his chair, holding the phone to his ear as he rants on. “No, I don’t know what he was thinking, but I’m about to find out. Let me call you back.”