“The deal with Bo is, there is no deal,” Quinn responded.
“Seriously though. You two haven’t dated for years. He looked like he wanted to tear my head off earlier.”
“I don’t know why he cares. He shouldn’t. You said yourself, he’s seeing someone.”
Kyle cupped his hand around what Quinn considered a heart attack in a bun. A triple-decker, all-beef burger. He lifted the gigantic monstrosity to his mouth, and, realizing there was no way it was ever going to fit inside, he clamped down on both ends of the bun, compressing everything together. Coral-colored juice oozed out the side, dripping onto the table in front of him, but this time when his mouth opened, the burger went in. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Do you still have feelings for Bo?”
First Bo’s father, and now Kyle.
“I’m going through a divorce.”
She assumed the admission would be enough to shift the focus away from Bo. It wasn’t.
“So is half of the population. What difference does that make?”
“I came here to find out what happened to Evie, not to pursue a relationship.”
“And now you’re stayin’ ... in Cody, I mean.”
“Looks like it,” she said.
“Let’s talk hypotheticals. Say Evie’s case gets solved. What then? Stayin’ or goin’?”
Quinn slathered a quarter of a pat of butter over a piece of bread, curious about his interest in her future plans. “Staying.”
“And if it doesn’t get solved?”
“It will, or I’ll never stop looking.”
“You talk like solvin’ Evie’s murder is all you care about.”
“You’re right—it is.”
“I get what you’re trying to do here,” he said. “Seems like you’re trappin’ yourself in the present instead of livin’ your life though.”
She wanted to say: What life?
She wasn’t aware she had one anymore.
“Moving on doesn’t feel right, not until I know what happened to Evie.”
“Don’t get so hung up on this that you can’t see what’s right in front of you.”
He smiled so wide she half expected him to start pointing at himself just in case she wasn’t picking up what he was putting down.
“Right in front of me—meaning, you?”
“If you want to use me as an example, then yes. Why not?”
“Wow. Why not tell me how you really feel?”
He winked. “Thought I just did.”
“I’m sorry, Kyle. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I didn’t say yes to dinner tonight because I’m interested in dating. I said yes because, well, it’s great to see you again, and I hoped you might talk to me about Evie’s case, tell me what you know so far.”
He slid the burger back onto the plate, wiped the juice from his fingers with a thin, one-ply napkin. “Ah, the truth, at last.”
“If it’s any consolation, I’m having a good time tonight. It’s nice to be here with you, as friends.”
Friends.
The word was coming up a lot lately.
“Are you sayin’ you’d never change your mind? Never agree to date me? Cuz if you are, I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t know me anymore, Kyle. I’m not the same naïve girl you hung out with in high school. I’ve been through a lot. It changed me. I’m different now.”
Kyle leaned back, smirked at Quinn like he knew her better than she knew herself. “Who do you think you’re foolin’? The girl sittin’ in front of me is the same girl I remember. Same sparkly eyes, same pouty lips. Still hot as shit. Don’t know why I didn’t hook up with you when I had the chance.”
Quinn’s face felt hot, sweaty. “You didn’t date me because you were too busy dating everyone else.”
“I didn’t date you because you only had eyes for one person,” he said. “And it wasn’t me.”
“Are you ... divorced?”
“Nope. Never married. I was engaged once. Two years after high school.”
“What happened?”
“A few months before the wedding she panicked, said she couldn’t marry me.”
“Did she say why?”
He reached for a plastic glass, tapped a few pieces of ice into his mouth and crunched down. “She never wanted the marriage in the first place. She claimed she loved me, but she loved the idea of a career more. She didn’t want kids. I did. It wasn’t a hard decision.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was for the best. I was young. So was she. If we’d married, I doubt the relationship would have lasted.”
“Do you like being a police officer?”
“It’s a good job. Not too difficult. Most of the time. Except ...” He looked out the window, head shaking. “Findin’ Evie the way we did ... never seen anything like that before. I mean, I knew it could happen one day. I just didn’t know it would happen to someone like her. Someone I knew. I wasn’t prepared for it.”
“No one was.”
He crossed his arms on top of the table, lowered his voice, leaned in. “Wanna know somethin’?”
She bent closer.
“I can’t sleep,” he said. “Been havin’ nightmares almost every night since it happened.”
Quinn placed a hand on his wrist. “Me too.”
“She wasn’t just another girl I knew—she was one of us. This isn’t a big town. Odds are someone we both know did this to her. You ever thought about it like that?”
“Every day. Since I returned, I feel like I don’t look at people the same anymore. It’s not fair, but I can’t help how I feel.”
“Tell me about it. You think it’ll ever go back to the way it was before, and eventually we’ll get over it, move on?”
“I don’t know. This is a good town, filled with good people. It doesn’t seem fair to allow one bad seed to change things. Maybe if we all knew what really happened, if we knew the truth, we’d feel differently.”
“If you want answers so bad, why are you talking to me? Why not ask Bo?”
“I have. I mean, I tried. You saw how he was earlier at Ruby’s. He won’t tell me anything.”
Kyle huffed. “Figures.”
“I’m restless. I can’t sit around and do nothing. I have to stay active. If I don’t, I’ll lose it.”
He chomped down a few more pieces of ice, stared at his glass for a moment. “I don’t agree with Bo’s decision to keep you out of the loop. I know what Evie meant to you, and I know how I’d feel if it was my friend. But I don’t much like the idea of you runnin’ around tryin’ to solve this on your own either. It’s not smart, Quinn. It’s dangerous.”
Her quest to gather information was going nowhere. She stood. “I’m tired. Let’s call it a night, okay?”
He reached a hand out of the booth, caught her arm. “Oh, hell. Come on now. I didn’t mean to offend you. Sit back down. I’ll answer what I can. Okay?”
He was so different than Bo. The complete opposite. An open book compared to a closed one.
She sank back down in the seat. “I know the basics about what happened to Evie, the things everyone knows. I want to know more—who you’re talking to, who’s a suspect, what leads you have, what’s being done to find her killer.”
Kyle removed the baseball cap he was wearing, scratched the back of his head. “This won’t be what you want to hear, but okay. We’re talking to everyone, looking at everyone, following all leads, even though right now, there aren’t too many. If you’re determined to spend your life finding out what really happened to Evie, you might be waiting a long time.”
He was right. His answer was frustrating. She couldn’t tell whether he was being serious or pacifying her. “I’d like to know more about the scene. The way you found her. What you know about it. What the medical examiner said.”
He shook his head. “Trust me, Quinn. You wouldn’t. You don’t want to know.”
“I need
to know. The more I think about it, the more I recreate it in my mind. Hypotheticals. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. I feel like I’m going crazy.”
“Knowin’ what I know won’t help. It’ll only make it worse.”
“Please, Kyle.”
“I swear, Quinn, if I tell you and you can’t handle it, I’ll—”
“I can handle it.”
He raised a hand in the air, waved the waitress over, a gangly woman with a roundish face and braces who didn’t walk, she waddled. Kyle ordered two coffees, waited for the woman to shuffle back in the opposite direction, and continued. “I arrived on scene a little after nine in the mornin’.”
“Who found her? How did you know Evie was dead?”
“Ruby had stopped by to pick up Jacob. Accordin’ to her, he went to preschool three days a week, and spent the other two days with her while Evie was workin’. Poor kid was sittin’ on the bathroom floor when Ruby found him, his clothes all stained and bloody. From the looks of things, he’d touched Evie several times and then wiped her blood off on himself.”
Quinn covered her mouth with both hands. “I can’t believe he was alone with her all night. No wonder he’s not talking.”
“When Ruby dialed 9-1-1, it took some heavy convincing to keep her from changin’ the boy out of his clothes and leavin’ Evie in the tub where she was found. Somehow the operator managed to do it. I arrived about the same time as Bo, along with a few others.”
“I know Evie was shot more than once.”
“The killer fired three times. Evie took a bullet to the head and two additional bullets, one in her lower abdomen, the other in her neck.” Kyle leaned back, put his ball cap back on. “I’m sorry, Quinn. Just doesn’t seem right tellin’ you this.”
To make it appear she was maintaining composure, Quinn had gripped the bottom of her shirt under the table so tight she could have produced water from it. And while he seemed oblivious, he’d picked up on the tension.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Continue.”
“From what we know, Evie got into the bathtub, and soon after, the perp came in and shot her. Whether he was waitin’ for an opportune moment or she didn’t hear him drive up, we don’t know. There were no signs of a struggle. As far as we can tell, she was taken by surprise.”
“What about the house? Was anything missing or out of place?”
“The house was clean. Nothin’ stolen or removed. We’ve ruled out robbery as a possible motive.”
“Have you come up with any other motives?”
“Our best guess right now? It was personal. We just haven’t figured out why yet.”
“What about suspects?”
“We’re lookin’ at the boyfriend, checkin’ into any grievances she may have had at work. Truth is, we didn’t have a lot of evidence to go on so we decided we’d try a different tactic.”
A different tactic? What was he getting at?
“You didn’t mention Roman, and the rumor going around town is that he’s to blame. True or not?”
“Yes and no. We talked to him a few times. Matched a print we found in the garden to one of his shoes.”
“Matching a shoe print isn’t the same thing as matching a gun. Roman was at Evie’s house all the time.”
“He said during one of his recent visits to her place, they talked outside, while she was weeding her flowerbed. Seemed believable. We still used the print evidence to obtain a warrant and search his house though, just in case.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Nothin’ unusual,” he said, “except the obvious.”
“The obvious?”
“He still loved his wife.”
“Ex-wife,” Quinn corrected. “What makes you think that?”
“Had a couple pictures of her lyin’ around—on the dresser, in a drawer in the kitchen, inside the glove box of his truck. They weren’t creepy or nothin’, just looked like the guy was still in love.”
“I’m sure he was. Before he killed himself, he told me he didn’t have anything to do with what happened. I believe him.”
Up to now, Kyle had held her gaze. When his eyes flashed to his coffee cup, it was unusual, like he was hiding something. “I never believed Roman had anything to do with Evie’s death either.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve known Roman a long time, frequented his bar once or twice a week. I’ve seen him at his best, seen him at his worst. He may not have been much of a talker, but he never struck me as the violent type. Definitely not the kind of guy who’d murder his wife.”
“What about the rumors then? How did they get started?”
“Rumors are funny,” he said. “They have a way of leadin’ people in a general direction, kind of like cattle. You know the sayin’—the one about barkin’ up the wrong tree? Sometimes it’s the only option.”
“What are you getting at, Kyle?”
He hesitated. “Say you need a diversion, somethin’ to make people think one thing while you concentrate on another.”
“Concentrate how? Whatever you’re trying to say ... say it.”
“We wanted the public to believe we had a suspect, someone we were looking at for Evie’s murder.”
“Why?”
“Like I said before, the crime scene was clean. There were no unjustifiable prints or hair fibers. When we couldn’t get Evie’s boy to talk, and no one came forward sayin’ they saw anything, heard anything, or knew of any reason why someone would want to harm her, we were at a dead end. We sat down, came up with a new strategy.”
She couldn’t believe what he was saying. “Your strategy was to make everyone believe Roman did it?”
“Not entirely. We wanted to point the public in the wrong direction. We wanted to throw the real killer off in the hopes he’d get careless, think he was safe, had nothin’ to worry about.”
“Except your plan backfired. You used Roman, pawned him out to the public like he was a vicious killer.”
“In a way,” he said. “You don’t—”
“He’s dead, Kyle.”
“It was an accident, Quinn. The guy was overwhelmed. What he did, he did on his own. It’s not our fault he’s dead.”
“He didn’t deserve to die thinking everyone in town had already strung him up, decided he was a murderer. What you all did, it was wrong.” She slid out of her seat, this time refusing to slip back in. “I can’t do this. I need to get out of here.”
Quinn fled the restaurant with one thought in mind, she’d misjudged herself. Prodding for answers, for the truth. Kyle was right. She didn’t feel any better. She felt nauseous.
Kyle shoved the front door open, sprinted after her. On his way out, an elderly woman walking toward the restaurant tripped over a rock in the parking lot. Kyle caught the woman’s wrist as she went down. The contents of her purse spilled all over the pavement.
“Here, let me help you,” Kyle said. “Are you all right?”
The woman nodded. Quinn walked over and bent down, gathering the items from the woman’s purse into her hands.
“Ma’am, can I help you inside?” Kyle asked.
The woman flicked her hand in his direction. “No, no. I can manage. I don’t want to put you out.”
“Please, I’d be happy to.”
Quinn placed the items she’d retrieved back into the woman’s handbag, watched Kyle escort her inside the restaurant. He walked her to one of the tables, pulled a chair out, guided her into it. When he came back outside, he looked around as if he hadn’t expected Quinn to still be there. He saw her and smiled. “At least let me take you home.”
“I can get my own ride. I just can’t be with you right now. Please, I need you to go.”
“I’ll do whatever you like, but you need to hear one thing first.”
She pushed a button, and her phone dialed. “I don’t need to hear anything. It won’t make a difference. Not now.”
Kyle snatched the phone from her hand. “Listen to me, Quinn. I’m not hav
in’ you leave here tonight thinkin’ I’m ... thinkin’ we’re nothin’ but a bunch of heartless assholes who set Roman up.”
“I just heard you defend your actions. You looked right at me and blamed Roman for everything.”
“I’d give you a simple explanation if you’d just pipe down. Listen, Roman was in on the whole thing. It was his idea.”
CHAPTER 24
Twenty minutes later, Quinn stepped out of Kyle’s car, the wind’s evening chill stinging her cheeks as she embraced the cool night air. She clutched what minimal warmth her slim jean jacket offered, pulling it closed. A noise rang out into the night. It was close by. Quinn passed it off as nothing more than a piece of litter clanging down the empty street. At first. On second thought, she decided it had to be something else. The sound occurred a single time and never replicated. It was distinct, a jangle, like dropped keys.
She surveyed the area. Her parents’ house was dark. So were most of the others in the immediate vicinity. Aside from Kyle and herself, no one else was around.
Or were they?
Moments earlier, when Kyle turned down her street, they passed a truck parked a few houses down. It looked like one she’d seen before. Now she was sure it was the same truck.
She stood for a brief moment. Still. Waiting. Maybe even hoping she’d hear something again—hone in on the exact location the noise came from. But the night’s wind had softened, quieted again. A feeling erupted inside her, an irritated festering that conjured up her inner alter-ego, an untapped side of herself she’d never explored.
Although the cold permeated her to the core, she took her time walking around to the other side of Kyle’s car. He was already outside, leaning against the driver’s-side door.
He smiled as she approached. “Are we good?”
She nodded. “I’m sorry for snapping at you earlier.”
He swished a hand through the air. “Nah, don’t be. You’re on edge about Evie. I understand.”
A View to a Kill Page 10