It was the day after Christmas when his mother dropped her latest bombshell. They sat at the kitchen table while a furious rainstorm raged outside. His mother explained that she had sold their house and, even more shocking, she was going to marry Tucker Rixby in the spring. Lance thought she was trying to make some sort of joke, but when he looked into her eyes, he saw how serious she was.
“Your boss?” he asked. “The one with the bad breath?”
“Well, he’s not technically my direct supervisor, and anyway, I won’t be working there anymore. I’ll be leaving my job at the end of January.”
His mother had worked as a receptionist at the Rixby plant for as long as he could remember. It was part of her identity. She was his mother, and she was an administrative worker at Rixby. That was something she had always stressed with pride, making an effort to set herself apart from the lowly factory workers in their grubby coveralls.
“Isn’t Tucker Rixby old? Are you in love with him?” Lance asked.
His mother fake laughed. “Tucker’s barely ten years older than me, and he’s a sweet, caring man. He’s going to make a wonderful stepfather.”
He noticed she hadn’t answered his question about being in love with Tucker. He noticed something else as well, something that had escaped his notice before. The earrings and necklace his mother had been wearing were new and looked expensive, and he had never seen any of the clothes she had worn over the past few days. These too appeared to be expensive.
It was possible she had made money from selling their house and treated herself to new clothes and jewelry, but he also knew Tucker Rixby, one of the heirs to the Rixby fortune, was loaded, and Lance suspected that this and not love was his mother’s motivation for marrying the man.
Rain lashed the windows as Lance sat there trying to process all this information. Had this been his mother’s plan all along? Was this why she had sent him away to Ryerson? And where had the money come from to pay for his private education? Had Tucker Rixby paid for that as well? Maybe it was Tucker who had suggested the idea. Maybe he had sent Lance away so he could have Raquel all to himself.
On the surface, it looked like a plausible theory. It was what he had believed for a time, and so he could understand why Caitlin thought his mother had packed him up and shipped him off to school like he was some sort of pesky inconvenience. He knew now that it was love for him and not Tucker that drove her into that marriage and her decision to send him away to school, but there was no way he could easily convey this to his wife.
Lance poked his head into Adam’s room. The boy was sitting with his back to the door in the middle of the floor, surrounded by train tracks and his assorted Thomas toys.
“It’s okay, Ashima, I can help,” Adam said in a quiet voice as he pushed one of the train engines toward another, making chugging train noises along the way. Lance’s heart swelled with pride and love. He would do anything for this boy, and though it wasn’t his fate, if marrying his stinky-breathed old boss was the only way he could have given his son a better life, he would have done it.
He owed it to his mother to set things right with Caitlin, to make her see that sending him away to school had been a selfless act on the part of his mother, not a selfish one. Lance shifted, and a floorboard squeaked. Adam jerked his head up and spun around, then smiled when he saw his dad standing there.
“Daddy!” Adam yelled. He ran over and wrapped his little arms around Lance’s legs. “Want to play Thomas with me?”
“Sure thing, bud,” Lance said, and even though what he really wanted to do was change out of his work clothes, he joined Adam on the floor in the midst of the tracks, where his son brought him up to speed on the doings and antics of the various engines.
By the time Caitlin made her way upstairs twenty or so minutes later, Lance and Adam were embroiled in a massive effort to save poor Thomas from the yeti (a recruit from Adam’s Imaginext toys) who had him trapped in a cave. She smiled at the two of them crawling around on the floor.
“So do either of you two have any ideas what you might feel like for dinner?” she asked. “And keep in mind it’s after seven, so it’s not going to be anything complicated.”
Without looking up from his trains, Adam muttered, “Bananas and olives.”
“Interesting idea there, bud,” Lance said, “but I’ve got a better plan. How about we all go out to Chequers?”
The local burger joint wasn’t a usual weeknight destination for them, but he considered it a bit of a peace offering to Caitlin.
“Can I have curly fries?” Adam jumped up, having forgotten all about poor Thomas and his predicament with the yeti.
“Sure thing,” Lance said, and he raised his eyebrows in Caitlin’s direction. “Curly fries for all!”
“It’s pretty late,” she said. “I could make something quick.”
“You’ve already worked hard enough today.” He untangled himself from Adam’s toys to give his wife another hug. She kissed him on the cheek, and he knew his olive branch had been accepted, which in his opinion was much better than bananas and olives for dinner.
6
The Culver Creek police force had not had a detective on staff at the time of the Lily Esposito murder, and it showed in the case file. The records were a mess and largely incomplete. In an effort to make sense of the chaos, Sage spread the papers out over his desk. Despite being focused on his work, he felt the eyes of his colleagues on him.
Maybe Sage hadn’t gone out of his way to make friends with his coworkers, but it wasn’t as if he had done anything to inspire the animosity the other police officers directed at him. He knew it wasn’t really a personal thing. They resented Sage and the idea that an out-of-towner had joined their ranks and felt the implication was that they were just a bunch of dumb locals not up to the task of solving crimes. Nobody said this, of course, but Sage was pretty good at reading moods.
“Shuffling papers there, eh?” said Rod Smith, one of the more outspoken officers. “Guess, that’s what they pay you the big bucks for.”
He nodded to his cohorts, and they all laughed like a pack of teenage boys. What Sage wanted to say was that if the Culver Creek officer who had handled this murder investigation had done a better job of it, Sage wouldn’t have to waste his time cleaning up the mess, but he knew better than to say anything so provocative.
The Lily Esposito investigation had been headed up by an Officer Bill Brighton. He was long since retired. Sage had looked him up. The state police had also had their own investigation going, and though the two agencies were supposed to be working together, Sage got the impression there had been a bit of friction there. In any case, it seemed to have only added to the chaos of the files.
“Anyone of you know Bill Brighton?” Sage asked.
“I know Bill,” Steve Arlo said. He was one of the oldest members on the force. “What about him?”
“You know where I could find him? There were some questions I wanted to ask him,” Sage said.
“Questions about what?” Steve asked, suspicious.
“The Lily Esposito murder,” Sage said.
“That’s what they got you working on?” Rod said. “Well, damn, way to be current and on top of things.”
This earned him another round of laughter from his cronies, but Steve ignored the hubbub and gave Sage Bill’s contact details.
Brighton’s wife led Sage down the steps of the bi-level home and opened the slider door to the patio. Sage stepped out into a small but well-maintained backyard. Not far from a broken-in Adirondack chair, a gray-haired man carefully refilled a bird feeder with seed. Bill gave him a nod but stayed focused on his task.
On the phone, Bill had not seemed eager to delve back into the old investigation, but he told Sage to come by and pay him a visit. Sage got the feeling Bill saw him as some sort of annoying mosquito bothering him here in his backyard oasis.
“The weather was perfect that morning,” Bill said as he scooped more birdseed from the container by
his feet and poured it into the feeder. “The sun was shining, but it wasn’t hot yet. The air was clean and crisp. That’s what I think of anytime we get a day like that. I think of that awful morning.”
Satisfied the birds would have enough to eat for a while, Bill attached the cap back to the feeder, then put his scoop into the container of seed by his feet. He grunted as he hefted the tub off the ground. Sage offered to carry it for him, but Bill batted his arm away. They walked back to the patio, and after Bill set the tub down, they sat in a couple of aluminum patio chairs.
The call from Honoree Esposito had come in at five minutes to six, shortly after she discovered that her daughters were not in their bedroom or anywhere else in the house. On the 911 recording Sage had listened to at least a dozen times, her voice sounded frantic.
“Goyle and I headed over to the creek,” Bill said. “He’s gone now, Ray Goyle. Had a heart attack a few years ago.” Bill looked out at the backyard, but his eyes looked like they were seeing something much further away, an awful morning nineteen years ago. “Honoree said the girls liked to go down there sometimes to try and catch crayfish.”
Sage was still getting to know Culver Creek’s geography, but he knew the spot along the creek where Lily Esposito had been killed. He had spent several minutes standing there studying the landscape, watching the way the water flowed over the rocks where the creek made a slight jog to the right.
“Goyle spotted her first,” Brighton continued. “It was just a flash of color in the water where there shouldn’t have been anything, part of her pajamas sticking out of the water. We ran in and pulled her out, laid her down on the bank, but nothing could be done. She had been in there for hours.”
The report from the medical examiner listed the official cause of death as drowning but noted that the blow to the head had been severe and might have been enough to kill her even if she had not been dumped into the water.
“It was only after we pulled her out that we saw the other girl, Jade. She was sitting right there, only a few feet away, but she was so still I thought she must be dead too.” Bill shook his head at this. “She was in shock of course. I don’t think she ever really recovered.”
In the notes Sage read through, Jade stopped speaking after her sister’s death. She likely had seen the whole thing. At any rate, there was a very good chance she knew who had murdered her sister, but she hadn’t been able to provide the police with any information.
“Do you think it could have been her?” Sage asked. From what he could tell, the police had been very delicate with the girl. Well, they had to be, but still, had anyone even thought to investigate her? At the very least, her behavior seemed suspicious.
“Jade?” Brighton asked as if Sage had just suggested it was little green space aliens that were responsible for the murder. “No. It wouldn’t have been possible. She was just four years old and small for her age. The blow to the head was pretty severe. It was from someone much bigger and stronger than a tiny four-year-old girl.”
Sage knew Brighton was probably right. He had read the coroner’s report. Whoever had struck Lily Esposito would have likely been standing facing her, bringing the weapon down and striking her where the top of her skull met her forehead. Based on its irregular shape, the weapon was presumed to be a rock, but it had never been found. Sage wasn’t surprised. He had seen that spot of the creek. It was full of rocks. Any one of them could have been the murder weapon.
There was something else in the coroner’s report, not stated but implied. Whoever had killed Lily Esposito had stood there facing her. She had not tried to run away. There were no signs that she had struggled with her attacker. The girl knew her murderer. Sage was sure of it. His mind flashed momentarily to his sister Melodie before he shifted his attention back to the case at hand.
In his head, he heard Honoree Esposito’s frantic voice on the 911 call. It sounded exactly like what you would expect a mother who had just found out her children were missing would sound like. It was almost too perfect.
The police report indicated that the girls had climbed out their first-floor bedroom window sometime after ten that night. It was not the first time they had done so. Once, a neighbor had called after seeing the girls escape, and Honoree had gone outside to apprehend them. Another night, she heard a noise from their room and caught them in the act. Why were the kids so determined to escape their home?
And another thing. The girls could have been missing for as much as eight hours before their disappearance was reported.
“Why did it take the mother until six in the morning to report them missing?” Sage asked.
Bill acted like he hadn’t heard the question. He pointed out at the recently filled feeder, where a finch was now perched.
“That’s Pete,” Bill said. “He likes to keep all the other birds in line, make sure everyone takes their turn and behaves nicely. He’s like a bird cop.”
Sage was not interested in avian members of law enforcement.
“Wouldn’t she have heard the window open?” Sage asked.
“Honoree had just come home from working a double shift at Rixby,” Bill said. “She crashed pretty early.”
“And she didn’t hear the kids leaving? She was only in the next room over, right?”
“There was a bathroom in between,” Bill said, watching the birds at the feeder.
“Still, you would think—” Sage began before Bill cut him off.
“It was hot that night, so she had an old box fan going in her bedroom window. You ever sleep next to a box fan?”
Sage acknowledged that he had.
“Well, then you know how loud those things are,” Bill said. “You can’t hear a television blaring in the next room, let alone two little girls sneaking out a window.”
“But why were those kids so determined to run away from that house?” Sage asked.
“They weren’t running away.” Bill turned away from the bird feeder to give Sage his full attention. “They were just kids having fun. I did the same sort of thing when I was a kid.”
Sage felt like the family angle hadn’t been explored closely enough by the police. He couldn’t be sure that Honoree was guilty, but the fact that the police hadn’t really treated her as a suspect bothered him.
“It’s just—” he began, but Bill cut him off again.
“She had been having trouble sleeping.” Bill let out a sigh that it seemed he had been holding in for twenty years.
“What do you mean? After the murder?” Sage asked.
Bill waved away his question. “She was working some extra shifts at Rixby, trying to bring in enough money to keep up with the mortgage. Her schedule was all messed up, and she wasn’t sleeping well.”
“So then she would have been awake when the girls left,” Sage said. His annoyance had crept into his voice.
“She had started taking some sleeping pills. Some over-the-counter stuff,” Bill explained. “I don’t remember the name. It’s in the case notes somewhere. Anyway, that stuff really knocked her out. She probably could have slept through an earthquake, let alone a window opening two rooms away.”
“And can anyone corroborate this? Did her doctor prescribe it?” Sage asked.
“It was over-the-counter,” Bill said. “She blamed herself for what happened. She never forgave herself for taking those pills, for sleeping through everything.”
“Yeah, but—”
“She didn’t do it,” Bill said in a clipped, angry tone.
“Well, then who was it?” Sage had been trying his best to keep his frustration in check. He came out to Brighton’s place prepared to give the retired cop the benefit of the doubt. The files were a mess, but Sage realized that Bill had been in over his head with the murder investigation. Plus, there was the confusion with the state police taking things over. He wanted to give Bill a chance to prove he wasn’t completely incompetent. Instead, retired Officer Brighton seemed to be confirming every bad opinion Sage had of him.
Bill
had the chance to catch the killer when all the leads were fresh, and instead he had botched everything up. But did this frustration he was feeling have anything to do with Lily Esposito? Wasn’t it possible he was thinking of another police investigation, another dead girl, another unsolved murder? He shook off the thought. Now was not the time.
Bill had turned back to watching the feeder, where a few more birds now joined the finch, but Sage could see that faraway look in his eyes again. He was back there, back in 2001. There was sadness in Bill’s eyes, a certain way his face sagged. Sage got the impression he wasn’t alone in his frustration. It was a long time before he spoke, and when he finally did, his voice was so quiet it was almost a whisper.
“It was someone we missed, someone who must have been right there under our noses the whole time, but he slipped by us,” Bill said.
“I saw a police sketch of a suspect in the file,” Sage said. “Who was that?”
Bill glanced back toward the house, and Sage’s eyes followed. A curtain in the kitchen window fluttered. The retired cop turned back to him, but there was a strange look in his eyes.
“That was our only lead,” Bill said.
Sage couldn’t say what it was, but he got the distinct impression that there was something Bill was keeping from him.
“It was a psychic who provided us with the description.”
“A psychic?” Sage tried to keep his tone level, but there was no disguising his disappointment.
To have made crucial mistakes in the investigation was one thing, but for Bill to actually waste time with some purported psychic was more than Sage could stomach.
Bill nodded, and there was something in his expression that Sage did not like. This man was hiding something. He was sure of it.
Up the Creek Page 4