“Then what were she and Ricky afraid of?”
Death looked back toward the house and laughed.
“What?” Casey said. “You think they were afraid of Mom?”
Death turned up the volume and spoke loudly, like people do when they have music in their ears. “For the life of me, I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have been.
Chapter Eight
The restaurant where Alicia had worked was called The Slope, and it seemed to be walking a slippery one. Casey took a booth at the back, where she could sit against the far wall and see both the front door and the doors to the kitchen and unisex bathroom. It resembled the restaurant from the day before, where Casey had found the pay phone amidst the competing smells of stale fry oil and dead rats. She could hardly imagine her mother there, trying not to touch anything, and only picking at the food she was served for fear of contracting some deadly—or just gross—disease.
“You know,” Death said. “I think I’m going to leave you to it. I’m feeling all…greasy.” And Death evaporated in a cloud of french-fried mist.
After a few minutes of examining the cover of the not-quite-clean-enough menu, Casey studied the waitress who sauntered over to her table. Her name tag had been made with an old-fashioned Labelmaker; dark green tape with raised white letters, which read simply, “Bailey.” The girl’s brown uniform shirt strained at the seams around her ample breasts, and her jeans were so tight they couldn’t possibly have been easy to move in, let alone allow circulation. Dark circles surrounded her washed out blue eyes, as if she hadn’t had enough sleep in the last year, and her skin would charitably be called pale and pasty. But that could have been the poor lighting.
“Get you something?” Bailey held her order pad and pen at the ready.
Casey pushed the menu away. It wasn’t likely she’d be eating anything out of that. “You know Alicia? The woman who got killed?”
Bailey fumbled with her pen, almost dropping it. She snatched it up and scribbled something on her pad, avoiding Casey’s eyes. “Of course I knew her. We worked together.”
“Here at The Slope?”
Bailey gave a jerky nod. “Where else? She started back a few months ago, in the summer. I’ve been here for, like, ever.”
“What can you tell me about her?”
Bailey’s eyes narrowed. “You a reporter?”
“Do I look like a reporter?”
Bailey checked out the pale blue warm-ups. “Hardly. You look like a soccer mom.”
Casey kept her face neutral. “I’m not that, either. So what was she like?”
“Why do you care?”
Casey refrained from jabbing the girl’s pen in her eye. “Because I want to know what happened to her.”
“Why?”
What was this girl? A four-year old? “I think they have the wrong guy in prison.”
Bailey sucked in a breath, and her eyes went wide. “You do?”
Casey almost laughed. “Why is that such a surprise?”
Bailey looked over her shoulder, then scooted in the opposite bench, leaning forward on the table. “Because nobody else seems to think so. Everybody just wants to think he’s the guy and forget about it.”
“Why?” Now Casey was asking.
“Dunno. Scared, I guess. I mean, if it wasn’t Ricky, who was it?”
Casey felt like she’d been punched in the gut. Hearing this girl use her brother’s name so casually, naming him a scapegoat, was too much. “But you feel differently?”
Bailey’s eyes shot first one way, then the other, before settling on Casey’s. “Look, Leesh and I didn’t get along, okay? I wanted to be friends, but she was all ‘I’m too good for you.’ I didn’t hold it against her, though. We did fine here, but it’s not like we were close.” She messed with the salt shaker. “Ricky was out of her league. I told him so, too, whenever he stopped by and she wasn’t here. Or even if she was, but, like, in the back. He should have found somebody better.”
“Like you?”
Her chin jutted out. “What? You don’t think I’m good enough for him? Not like her?”
“Didn’t say that.”
“Oh, I get it. You want him for yourself. Well, I was the one who was here first, not you, so you can just—”
“He’s my brother.”
She paused, her mouth hanging open. “What? Your brother? Oh, gosh, Sorry. That’s kind of gross, isn’t it? Me thinking you wanted to hook up with him. Anyway, unlike some people, like Alicia, at least I tell the truth. I don’t lie about—” She stopped.
“Don’t lie about what?”
She shook her head again, like it was an automatic reflex. “Look. This restaurant, they don’t ask a lot of questions, okay? People like me, I do all right. I have a real driver’s license, and folks in town actually know me. Other guys, like our dishwasher, or even the janitors, they don’t always have the right stuff. The Slope helps them out. But then Alicia comes along…” She picked at a dried glob of ketchup on the table.
“And?”
“I don’t know. Her story, it’s all wrong. She’s just this white woman from ‘out of town,’ she says. Looking for a job while she ‘gets her head together.’” She rolled her eyes. “Whatever that’s supposed to mean. Says she’s trying to stay under the radar just for a while. So Karl, he’s the manager, he says it’s no problem, she can just fill out what she wants on the application. See, we had another waitress quit—ran off with some ski instructor from up the hill—and Karl was freaking out. Girls don’t want to come work here. They’d rather work across town with all the rich folks.” She went back to picking at the ketchup.
“You don’t want to work up there?”
“Nah. Rich folks can be a real pain in the ass. Anyway, she comes in here all quiet and hot, and Karl signs her up. Just like that. No questions asked.”
“And you think she lied about herself?”
“I’m sure of it. The first time I called her Alicia I had to say it like five times before she answered me. And another time…” She lowered her voice and leaned forward again. “She was dealing with this old lady who comes in here, who couldn’t hear a bomb go off in her underwear, and it was taking her, like, forever just to take the woman’s order. I went into her locker and looked through her purse. And guess what?”
Casey sighed. “What?”
“No license. No credit cards. Nothing with her name on it. Just cash and chap stick and some lame picture.”
“Picture of what?”
“I don’t know. Some old guy. I didn’t look real close because I heard her coming.”
She looked at Casey all knowingly, like Casey should be able to read her mind.
“What?” Casey said.
“Didn’t you hear me? She had zero papers with her ID. If Alicia McManus was her real name, where was her stuff? Driver’s license? Bank card? Heck, even a note or a frequent customer card or something. She wasn’t only flying under the radar, she’d completely dropped off the map.”
Which Casey happened to understand.
“Bailey!” A man was calling. Karl the Manager, Casey assumed. He leaned over the cook counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the room and was pointing to a couple who had come into the restaurant and stood uncertainly at the front door.
Bailey pushed herself out of the bench seat, her lack of excitement oozing from every pore.
“Bailey…”
Casey sat so Bailey blocked the view of her manager. She lowered her voice.
“You want to help me get Ricky out of jail, right?”
“Sure. Don’t know what I can do, though.”
“Think you can get me a copy of Alicia’s employee file? The fake application and whatever else?”
Bailey’s eyes did the swivel thing, and she gave a little smile. “I’m sure I can. Not right now, though.”
“That’s fine. I’ll come back. It’ll have to be later, though. I’m going to see Ricky this afternoon.”
“Tr
y tomorrow, or later tonight. I get off at eight. Karl will have to leave at some point to go to the store or bank or some other place. I’ll try then. And give Ricky a hug for me, okay?” She went off to put the other customers at a table, leaving Casey in view of the manager. He made no secret of watching her.
Casey decided to go somewhere else to wash her hands, although she really would have preferred a complete shower and a dry cleaner. She stood, and tried very carefully not to touch anything else until she was out in the fresh air.
Chapter Nine
“Did you get some lunch?” Don was eating in his conference room, with papers spread out on the table all around him.
“Wasn’t hungry,” Casey said. “Although now I see that…”
Don waved at the second half of a gigantic turkey sandwich. “Please. Take some. Mel has been killing me with healthy food. What she tends to forget is that healthy food becomes unhealthy when it’s doubled in size.”
Casey took a seat, moving a few papers out of harm’s way, and devoured the sandwich, an apple, and a slice of the cake Don had mentioned the night before.
“Better?” Don looked at her over his glasses.
“Much. Are we ready to go?”
He glanced at his watch. “Fifteen minutes. We’ll give ourselves plenty of time for getting through security, and for the inevitable wait.”
“Not looking forward to all that.”
“No one ever does.”
Forty-five minutes later they were in the parking lot of the jail. It was a huge block of a building about twenty miles out of town, and just looking at it gave Casey a greater understanding of her mother’s state. To think her little brother was behind those walls was enough to make her want to curl up into a ball and cry. But that wouldn’t help Ricky. And it wouldn’t make her feel better for long.
“This,” Death said, “is totally cool.” Red and green images cavorted on the screen of an iPad. “I hacked into the security system. This is showing all the heat signatures behind the walls.”
“Doesn’t look very full,” Casey said.
“Don’t know how you can tell that,” Don said. “But you’re wrong, anyway. Place is packed to the gills. They’ve been paroling people faster than ever, just to make room for the new criminals.”
“Like Ricky,” Death said. “Anyway, this thing just reads through the first layer of these walls. Too much iron and concrete and God knows what else.”
Casey shuddered. “How far in have you gotten in person?”
“All the way,” Death said. “Folks die in there all the time. Some naturally, some…not.”
“I’ve been in pretty deep,” Don said. “Literally and figuratively. Gives me the creeps, getting closed up in there, but I don’t always choose who my clients are, you know. Some of them are buried about as far in as they go.”
“And where’s Ricky?”
“I’ve been assured he’s safe. Although what exactly they mean by that, I’m not sure. The two times I’ve been able to get in to see him, he insisted he’d been treated all right. He’s got a clean record up till now, and the blowback, should he be innocent and something happened to him in there, would be terrible for the facility.”
“Glad to hear they’re so concerned about him as a person.”
“You’ve got to take what you can get, and as long as he’s safe, I don’t care why they’re doing it. We know what he’s like. We’ll just have to be content with that for now. There’s no way the system can know people like their families do.”
“He’s got a point,” Death said. “You can’t expect law enforcement to actually care about the prisoners. It’s not like they’re regular people. Drug dealers, child molesters, murderers…oh. Sorry.”
“I’m not a murderer.”
Don stopped halfway out of the car. “Look, Casey, I understand how you must feel coming here. But you’ve got to put the past few weeks behind you. No one is looking at you for the death of that man anymore. It’s over. Completely forgotten.”
Casey got out of the car.
The process to see Ricky was as involved and time-consuming as she’d feared. Every moment, from when they first stepped into the building until they were left alone in a room, she expected someone to realize who she was, and to have old paperwork saying she was a wanted criminal. But they got through without incident, and within the hour she and Don were waiting for her little brother in a cold, off-white box of a room, with a bolted-down table and three chairs, much like the room where she’d met with Detective Watts that morning. Only this one smelled a lot worse.
Death had taken off during the screening process—“Waaay too boring, and the technology is so yesterday”—but was now back, holding up the iPad and checking out heat signatures again. “Someone’s coming.”
When the door opened, Casey jumped up. Don grabbed her wrist. “Stay behind the table until the guards tell you it’s okay.”
She shook him off, but stayed where she was, even when Ricky appeared.
The first sight of him took her breath away. Pale, blotchy skin, sunken, dull eyes, and a buzz cut. His prison-issued clothes hung loosely on him, and the slump of his shoulders turned him into an old man. But what really got her were the handcuffs. They held his arms stiffly behind him, in a posture Casey had never seen, or even imagined, on her little brother.
Two guards followed him in, one staying by the door, the other with a hand on Ricky’s elbow. “Okay,” the one touching Ricky said. “Hold still.”
Ricky waited, his eyes averted from Casey’s, as the guard unlocked the cuffs. When he was free he shrugged, then pulled his arms forward to rub his wrists.
“Call if you need anything,” the guard said, “or bang on the door. We’ll be waiting outside.” The guard gave a little salute and let himself out.
Casey walked around the table. “Ricky—”
He ducked, hands up, as if expecting to get hit.
Casey froze. “Ricky, it’s me. Casey. Your sister.” She felt almost like she had at her mother’s, except her mother hadn’t acted afraid of her. Casey walked slowly toward him, hands out, as if she were approaching a nervous dog. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you. But I’m here now. I’ll get you out of here, I promise.”
He lowered his hands and peered up at her with wide eyes.
She couldn’t manage a smile, but she tried to look confident and loving. “It will be okay.”
His eyes filled. “It will never be okay.”
“Look, whatever has happened to you in here, we’ll deal with it together. I’ll get you any help you need. I’ll stay with you.”
His eyes flashed. “I don’t care about what’s happened to me. I’m fine. It’s what they did to her. What they did. They…” He closed his eyes and swayed on his feet.
Casey grabbed him, and Don hopped up from behind the table. Together they lowered Ricky onto a chair. When they were sure he wasn’t going to fall over, Don went back to his seat.
“He means it, you know,” Death said. “What they did to her is far worse in his mind than what’s been done to him in here.”
Casey knelt beside her brother. “I know what they did to her. I’m sorry about that, too. It was terrible.”
“Terrible?” He gave a manic laugh. “It was…more than that.”
Casey dragged another chair around the table so she could sit next to him. “I want to help find out who did this, Ricky. You don’t deserve to be in here. And she deserves the truth.”
He looked away. “She doesn’t care about the truth anymore.”
“No, but you do, don’t you?”
“The truth won’t bring her back.”
Casey had way more experience with going after “truth” than she ever wanted. Courtrooms, test drives, payoffs. All of them were designed to “bring closure,” but in reality brought nothing other than wasted time and money. She was more alone after all the legal crap than she’d ever been. Which was why she’d given up on the “truth” of her famil
y’s accident long ago. But this situation was different. No innocent person had ever been charged with killing her family, not like Ricky was being blamed now. Not even Pegasus, the guilty car company, had paid very many consequences for the accident. No matter what sort of “closure” there was supposed to have been, Casey—and her husband and son—had paid all there was to pay.
“Listen, Ricky, I didn’t know this girl—”
“Alicia.”
Casey hesitated.
“He thinks it’s her real name,” Death said. “You going to tell him, or should I?”
Casey let it go. “I didn’t know Alicia, but it sounds like you knew her pretty well. What can you tell me about her?”
His eyes went soft. “She was sweet. And quiet. And kind of…mysterious.”
“Secretive?”
“No! Just…” He sat for a few moments. “She wasn’t the kind to go blabbing about herself everywhere. She was…private.”
“But she talked to you?”
“Of course. We talked all the time.”
“About what?”
“What do you think? Normal stuff. Work. Food. I don’t know.”
“Where was she from?”
“All over, I guess. She moved around a lot. Oregon. California. Lots of places. But I told her this should be her final stop. I’d convinced her, I’m sure of it. She liked it here better than anywhere else.” A little color stole into his cheeks, indicating his hope that he was the reason for her contentment.
“What about her past?”
“What about it?”
“Did she talk about it, other than just where she’d lived? Houses, friends, jobs? You know. Actual details?”
His eyes slid away.
“Ricky? What is it?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“But—”
“Forget it, all right, Casey? Please?”
Casey watched as his face went through a change from sad and depressed to stubborn, his mouth a thin line.
“Okay,” she said. “Fine. What about her childhood?”
“Her childhood?”
Dying Echo: A Grim Reaper Mystery (Grim Reaper Series) Page 5