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

by Clemens, Judy

  “I could make you.” She squeezed harder.

  He winced. “You can’t. And you’ll get in trouble.” Again with the toddler thing.

  “Who are you going to tattle to?”

  His chin trembled. “My boss.”

  “Your boss? Who’s your boss?”

  He pinched his lips together.

  She moved forward so he could see into her eyes. His were unreadable behind his sunglasses. “Look, I’ll let you go, but if I see you reaching for your gun it won’t be pretty. Trust me on that.”

  He hesitated for only a few seconds before nodding.

  She allowed him to yank his arm away, and he rubbed it.

  “Yes, my boss sent me. And now I see why.”

  “Look, I didn’t want to hurt you. But I also didn’t want to get shot, and didn’t want some weirdo catching me at a bad time.”

  “I’m not a weirdo.”

  “So who are you?”

  He made a slight move, and Casey grabbed his arm again.

  “Hey,” he said. “I just want to show you something. Not my gun.”

  She narrowed her eyes, but let him move.

  He pulled up his sweatshirt to show her a badge clipped to his belt.

  Great. “You’re a cop?”

  He nodded, and gave her a very toddler-like smirk. “Which means you are in very big trouble.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “I didn’t know he was a cop,” Casey said for the fiftieth time. “All I knew was he was following us, and I didn’t want to get shot.”

  The woman on the other side of the table, one Chief Roseanne Kay, watched Casey with flat eyes. She wore a police uniform, dark-blue-rimmed glasses, and a hairstyle that could only be described as, well, short. What there was of her hair was salt-and-pepper, with just a little more salt. She finally blinked. Once. “You assaulted a police officer.”

  “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 explain
ed 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.”

  “From a hormonal teenage boy’s perspective he might have been. He put up with Cyrus because he was in love with Elizabeth. Even sixteen-year-old boys get snookered when they’re horny. Or maybe I should say especially sixteen-year-old boys.”

  “But what was Cyrus into? If you had reason to lock him up, why was he still free?”

  “It wasn’t that he was a criminal. But he was living in a car. A lot of us wanted to lock him up for child endangerment.”

  “Betsy said he didn’t want to take charity. And that Elizabeth was the one who chose to live in the car instead of with Betsy.”

  “I’m sure that’s what Betsy’s father told her.” She rested her elbows on the table. “Cyrus was a woodworker. A good one. Just the year before he’d had his own business, making custom furniture, but apparently he was never good with the money end of things, so he ended up selling out right in the middle of his wife’s illness. I’m sure the stress did him in. He got another job right away, over on the Gulf with some people who built luxury houseboats—”


  “As if there’s any other kind,” Death said. “You ever see a poor person with a houseboat?”

  “—and that was a good start, but he lost that job within a few months. It was like something had switched off in his head. His bad business decisions expanded into bad personal decisions, and the next thing we knew, he and Elizabeth were living on the street, and he was working shady jobs.”

  “Couldn’t you do something about their living arrangements? Aren’t there laws—child services, or whatever?”

  “Believe me, we did our best. Chief Zinn, who was here before me, he was friends with Cyrus, with his parents, actually, and he did everything to get him to be sensible, but there was something about it…” She shook her head. “Elizabeth didn’t help. She said she was staying with her dad no matter what, and she didn’t mind living in the car.”

  “So you let a fourteen-year-old make her own housing decisions?”

  “You weren’t here!” Chief Kay clenched her fists, then opened them as she breathed out a steady breath. “It wasn’t cut and dried. They needed each other. What it really boiled down to was taking Elizabeth away from Cyrus, and no one was prepared to make that choice. Not even his brother. So don’t judge us. It’s a small town and we take care of each other. Or at least we try.”

  “Who exactly is she trying to convince?” Death said.

  “So again,” Casey said, “back to the whole no suspects thing. You’re saying no one in town would want him dead, but at the same time you’re questioning what he was into. Makes sense to me that it could have been people from that part of his life.”

  “We checked it out, but as I said, we had no hard evidence of anything he was doing, and nobody was seen here that day. No one knew the names of people he was associated with—including these men—and Elizabeth wasn’t around to ask. Nothing in Cyrus’ car gave us any names, and forensics turned up nothing but locals. That’s why I was interested to hear that Wayne was talking about the men.”

  “He didn’t give us names, and he only mentioned them because we found this photo in the middle of Betsy’s stack of mementos. All he said was that Elizabeth didn’t like them, which I would assume he’d have told you folks back when this all happened.”