Dying Echo: A Grim Reaper Mystery (Grim Reaper Series) (28 page)

“Well, he hadn’t introduced himself, had he? In fact, he was going out of his way to
not
look like law enforcement. Jeans, sneakers, sweatshirt. If anything, I guess the sunglasses should have given it away, but you can’t blame me for assuming regular Texan citizens might actually use those to block the sun. You can’t charge me for something I wasn’t even aware of.”

“Actually, I can. But the question is, do I want to?”

She had the power. She was the chief. Which meant she’d been on the job when Elizabeth Mann had disappeared.

“What I want to know, Ms.—” The chief made a show of looking over Casey’s license yet again. “—Kaufmann, is it?”

Casey hadn’t corrected the information printed on the license. She was too annoyed.

“—is what you are doing in our little town.”

“You know,” Casey said, “you could’ve just asked, instead of sending a child to spy on me.”

The chief’s mouth twitched, but Casey wasn’t sure if that was from humor or irritation. “Or you might have just come to us.”

“Is that the law now? You visit a town and have to check in with the cops before doing anything else?”

“It’s not the law. But it might make things easier if you’re looking up an old crime. The police do try to protect and
serve
.”

“How do you know what I’m looking up?”

“Little birdies told me.”

Uh-huh. “I had my reasons for doing this on my own.”

“I’m sure you did. Wondering about those reasons was what made me seek you out.” She tapped the computer tablet in front of her on the table, on which Casey could see her own picture. “Detective Watts was very helpful, informing me of your recent brush with the law, as well as your proper name, which seems to have missed getting changed on your ID. An oversight, I’m sure. He was also very interested in what you were doing here in Marshland, since the last he’d seen you was in Colorado, where your brother is in jail for the murder of a young woman who looks remarkably like one of my town’s citizens. When I told him I believed you were checking out a murder and disappearance from more than fifteen years ago that involved that very family, he became
extremely
interested.”

“Look.” Casey passed a hand over her eyes. “I’ve been in here a long time. I’ve answered all your questions. Do I need to call my lawyer? He’ll come if I ask.” Actually, she didn’t know if he would or not, but it sounded better to be confident.

“You
haven’t
answered all my questions, because I haven’t asked them all yet. So far I’ve just been concentrating on the fact that you assaulted one of my officers.” She held up a hand. “I know. You didn’t realize he was a cop. That’s our mistake. Perhaps he should have been in uniform.”

“Or perhaps he shouldn’t have been stalking me in the first place.”

“He wasn’t stalking.”

“You say armadillo, I say…”

Kay leaned on the table and clasped her hands. “Ms.
Kaufmann
, you’re not under arrest. We don’t even suspect you of anything criminal. We just…want to help. And if you can help us solve an open case from a past decade, then, hey, we’ll take it. But you need to do it without any one else’s bodily harm. Or even the threat of it.”

Casey sat back and looked at the ceiling, with its old-fashioned, pock-marked tiles. She was tired, hungry, hot, and they hadn’t let her call Eric. Not that she knew his phone number. Or had any idea where he was. When she’d realized the man following them was a cop, she knew the only option was to cooperate and go with him to the station. She suggested it, and even began walking that direction. The cop was so taken aback he seemed to forget all about Eric, and was going to leave him there at the pharmacy, even when Eric came out onto the sidewalk and tried to accompany her. The cop was surprised to see him, and refused to let him in the car, which had arrived to pick them up and deliver them the whole four blocks to the police station. The cops had not told her anything other than that Eric was fine, and she’d be seeing him soon enough.

Kay was waiting, her gray-blue eyes not moving from Casey’s face.

“Where’s my friend Eric?”

“He’s fine.”

Casey shot up from her chair and paced around the room. She stopped at the far end, her back to Kay. “If I answer your questions, will you let me go?”

“As long as you don’t implicate yourself in anything criminal.”

“So I
should
call my lawyer.”

“If you want to wait till tomorrow for him to get here.”

“Just answer the questions, sweetheart.” Death sat beside Chief Kay, syncing Kay’s computer notes onto an iPad. “She’s got nothing to hold you here, but she really would like to get Cyrus Mann’s murder out of her in-box. It’s been cluttering up the place forever and has gathered a lot of dust.”

“You have Mann’s folder on your desk?” Casey said, spinning around.

“Well, I do now. We had to dig it out of storage when you started nosing around this morning. We’re pretty organized, actually, so it wasn’t that hard to find. It’s like a historical document, though. I thought it might evaporate when I touched it.”

“I’ll go scan whatever’s visible,” Death said, and was gone.

“But now I guess we have something new to add to it,” Kay said. “The missing daughter has now been found.”

Casey thought about that, about Elizabeth Mann lying dead in her Colorado apartment under someone else’s name, with no one to say where she’d been, what she’d seen, or who she had become during the past decade. About all of that lost time. Were those years as empty as they appeared, or had Elizabeth somehow made a life for herself amidst the running?

I was here.

A lonely cry, pressed onto a bathroom mirror. A sentiment she thought no one else would understand. Or even see. Casey sat down and looked Chief Kay in the eye. “All right. What do you want to know?”

Chapter Thirty-one

“What I still don’t understand is how you knew to come to Marshland.”

Casey had already told her everything else she knew, which wasn’t much. She explained about Ricky, and the things he’d said, how he’d figured out Alicia was from Texas. She’d mentioned the way the man had said, “Ya’ll” to the cook at the Slope. And she’d showed her the photos, of both Alicia and Ricky, and Alicia’s dad.

“That is Cyrus Mann, right?” Casey pointed at the one of him and the car.

“Of course it is. But I don’t see how that—”

“And what about this?” She’d saved the one of the other men talking to Cyrus, for last. “I have a feeling if we showed this to the cook, he might recognize one of them.”

Kay looked at the photo with surprise. “Where did you get this?”

“Betsy.”

“You think these men are somehow responsible for Liz’s death?”

“Could be. She didn’t like them back when she was a teenager; the one guy she avoided at all costs, apparently. They haven’t been seen since Cyrus’ murder, but we know he was into something with them around that time. Wayne seems convinced Cyrus wouldn’t have done anything criminal, but people have been wrong before.”

“Wayne Greer?”

“You know we talked to him. Your officer followed us from the diner where we had lunch with him.”

Kay nodded, with what might have been the beginning of a smile. “Just making sure.” She took the photo. “You know the name of the cook?”

Doofus
. “Pasha. Don’t know the last name. Terrible cook, though.”

“Very important information, I’m sure.” Kay took the photo. “Anyone else see this guy?”

“Just the cook.”

“What about Circus Lady?” Death had returned. “You know, Ricky’s neighbor, who saw the guy with the shirt?”

Casey kicked herself. She had forgotten all about the planted shirt.

“See if Watts can ask my brother’s neighbor. Her name is Geraldine, don’t know her last name. She lives across the street.”

“She saw him?”

“Maybe.” Casey explained what Geraldine had told her about the man from “Hometown Interiors,” and how she caught him coming from Ricky’s house. “The cops think he was legit, but my brother said he hadn’t hired anybody to do anything.”

Kay considered it. “All right. I’ll be back.” She left, shutting the door firmly behind her.

“She’s not going to let it go,” Death said, “the question of why you’re here. Not forever. She’s going to keep asking about your source until you tell her something.”

“I guess I’ll have to be creative.”

“Because God knows you wouldn’t want to tell her the truth.”

“And end up in the loony bin? No, thank you.”

“I’m just saying…Anyhow, here’s what I found on her desk. There were stacks of papers I couldn’t go through, but these photos were on top.”

Casey cringed. The first shot was of Cyrus Mann’s body with a hole through his cheek. His eyes stared up, the light gone from them. The second was of the car, blood splattered all across the side panels and windows. Mann lay on the ground, his arms flung out, one of them resting against the front tire. His legs were bent, as if he had collapsed right where he’d been standing when he was shot.

“God, I hope Elizabeth didn’t see this.”

Death pulled the iPad back and looked at it sadly. “Casey, honey, you know she did. She was holding him when he died.”

“Wait. So whoever killed him shot him, then left him for dead—did they realize he was still alive?”

“It didn’t matter. They knew he didn’t have long. You don’t live long when you have a hole in your head.”

“Which really has to mean Elizabeth
was
there when it happened. There was no time for her to arrive from somewhere else and find him alive. So the question becomes not whether or not she was there, but whether or not they
saw
her.” She couldn’t believe that. “It seems impossible. If they saw her, how did she possibly get out of there alive?”

Death shrugged. “Fast runner?”

Kay returned without the picture, but with a stack of fat files. “We’re faxing the photo to Detective Watts. He’ll take it over to the restaurant and see if the cook can recognize the man, even though he would have aged a lot by now. And he’ll run over to your brother’s neighbor.” She sat down. “You realize you still haven’t told me how you knew to come to Marshland. Or even what Elizabeth’s real name was.”

“Here we go,” Death sang.

“Lucky, I guess,” Casey said.

Kay nodded. “Um-hmm. And how is that?”

“Ricky had already figured out the Texas part.”

“Right.”

“We have the photo of Cyrus and his car.”

“Which has nothing on it to indicate it was even in Texas, let alone a specific location.”

“We searched for missing women from Texas.”

“Of which there are thousands if you go back that far.”

“I don’t know, Casey,” Death said. “I think she’s got your number.”

“It was everything together,” Casey said. “And my lawyer and I were talking about how her false name—you can ask the cops, they thought it was a false name, too, since they couldn’t find anything on Alicia McManus—and how people often choose something sort of like their real name. When we saw the name Elizabeth Mann, it sort of stood out.”

“Wow,” Death said. “That’s actually a pretty good argument. But at the same time it’s a bit lame.”

Kay looked steadily at Casey. After a while she said, “Okay. I’ll accept that for now.”

Casey tried not to look too relieved. “So can I ask some questions?”

Kay gestured for her to go ahead.

“Why were there never any suspects, other than Elizabeth?”

“We talked to a lot of people.”

“But no one seriously.”

“Who’s to talk to? People in this town? Nobody here would shoot down someone they know. They aren’t like that.”

“Kay, this is
Texas
. Everybody has a gun. Or two. You telling me they aren’t going to use them?”

“Yes, of course our citizens own guns. But these are law-abiding neighbors. We don’t have gangs or the mafia or even drugs, other than the random weed. Our folks aren’t resolving their differences by shooting each other. They have guns in their houses to protect their homes and families from outsiders.”

“By owning deadly weapons that can be turned just as easily on them?”

“Oh, boy,” Death said. “Are we really going to get into this argument? I don’t think you can win it. Not down here.”

“You were asking about suspects,” Kay said. “And there just weren’t any to be found. The gun forensics didn’t match up with anything we have on file. No one saw strangers that day, certainly not these men on the photo, and there wasn’t anybody in town who wanted Cyrus dead. We may have wanted him locked up, but not dead.”

“Locked up? Why? From how Wayne talked, Cyrus was a straight arrow.”