The man’s hair was in a high and tight, the scalp underneath a little sunburned. He strode up to the driver’s side door with a slight swagger in his step.
Why do they always have to do that? Some of Cassandra’s fear dissipated in her irritation. They walk up to you like they can tell you to do whatever they want, like they own the world.
She suppressed her annoyance; it wouldn’t do her any good to give the man an attitude.
Cassandra rolled down the window and kept her hands in view, tugging the hem of her blouse down just a tiny bit as a kind of instinctive insurance.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” the man said, peering into the window.
She gave him a tense smile, turning to face him. “Officer,” she said, keeping her voice as level as she could manage. “Is something wrong?”
Only a few hours before, she would have begged him to help her—she would have dropped the dime on Jack in a heartbeat if the trooper had come up behind her on the way to Riley’s house. The officer’s gaze trailed over her, and Cassandra briefly regretted showing a little more cleavage at the neck of her blouse.
“Were you aware that your left taillight is out?”
Cassandra felt relief wash through her. “No, officer,” she said, her lips twitching into a nervous smile. “I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry.”
“You should get that fixed, sweetheart,” the leering officer said. He rested his arm against the roof of her car. “It can be pretty dangerous if both go out on you. Normally I’d issue a warning for that, but you seem like you’re pretty much on the up-and-up, so I’ll let you go on your way.”
Cassandra fought back the urge to laugh at his evaluation of her situation; there was only one other person in the car who was less on the up-and-up than she was, and he was an escaped convict.
“I appreciate it, sir,” Cassandra said. She tried to keep her voice as sincere as possible, deeply relieved that he didn’t seem to be asking for her ID. If she could just keep him from having some kind of conscientious twitch, she might just be able to get back on the road and put some distance between herself and the officer before he sensed that something was up.
“Be careful out there,” the officer said, giving her a mock-stern look. “And you get that taillight fixed as soon as possible, all right?”
“As soon as I can get it to the mechanic,” Cassandra assured him, giving him a bright smile.
“All right, then,” the trooper said. He gave her chest one final, lingering look, smirking slightly as he turned away, then starting back towards his patrol car, apparently putting their interaction behind him.
Cassandra took a deep breath and sighed with relief, pressing the brake and shifting the car out of park.
“Thank you, God,” she said, taking her foot off of the brake and starting down the shoulder while the trooper maneuvered around her and onto the highway, leaving her behind. In the back seat, Cassandra heard Jack moving around, pushing the detritus that had covered him off to the sides.
“That wasn’t God, that was you,” Jack said as he pulled himself back up onto the seat.
“The trooper could have asked for my ID and registration,” Cassandra pointed out. “He could have just decided to look around my car a bit. If not God, there was definitely a good bit of luck in what just happened.”
She pulled off of the shoulder and back onto the highway, finding her way into the flow of traffic. For a moment, it was difficult to remember where she had been going. She was so relieved at having not tipped the trooper off that it was difficult to think of anything else.
“I’m a little surprised that you didn’t tell him outright who you are and who was hiding in the back seat,” Jack said.
Cassandra grabbed for her pack of cigarettes and took one out, lighting up as Jack did the same.
“You haven’t figured out by now that I’m not going to snitch?” Cassandra raised an eyebrow, glancing into the back seat. “I’m kind of insulted.”
“You had an out,” Jack said, taking a drag of his cigarette. “You could have gotten help right then and there.” He shook his head, smiling slightly. “I didn’t exactly give you a choice about helping me out—I’d understand if you wanted out of this road trip by now.”
Cassandra shrugged, her cheeks warming slightly at the truth in what Jack had said.
“Why didn’t you out me when you had the chance?”
“I think I might know who murdered Laura,” Cassandra said, looking around to make sure that no other troopers were coming up behind her. “I can’t…I can’t quite call it to mind, but there’s something at her house that I know I’ll see if I go back there.” Cassandra took another drag of her cigarette and coughed slightly as she exhaled. “Besides, the truth needs to come out. I’m partly responsible for you getting thrown in jail, and the courts damn sure aren’t going to help you get to the bottom of it now.”
“It’s not your fault I was convicted,” Jack said, shaking his head. “You were doing your job—reporting on the investigation, passing on the information you found as you tracked the case. You weren’t the one who killed Laura, and you damn sure didn’t frame me for it.”
“I still feel responsible,” Cassandra insisted. “If there was something I missed—something the cops kept out of the record that I should have known about—then I played a part too, even if I didn’t mean to.”
Glancing in the mirror, she caught Jack grinning. “You know, for someone as tough as you are, you’ve still got a pretty strong conscience. Not a common thing in the media—at least not in my experience.”
Cassandra chuckled. The question she had been thinking of before she’d spotted the trooper rose to the surface once more.
“I do have one question for you,” she said, changing lanes to avoid a slowdown. “I feel like I can ask you now—now that you know I’m not going to turn you in.” She caught his eye, looking at Jack in the rearview mirror as he reclined across her backseat.
“What’s that?” Jack’s lips twitched with amusement.
“Were you sleeping with her? Laura, I mean.” Cassandra licked her lips and brought the end of the cigarette up to her mouth, taking a final drag before she flicked it out through the window. She exhaled, feeling her face warm even more as her blush deepened.
“No, I wasn’t,” Jack said, his voice becoming serious once more. “I never had sex with her—I barely knew her, for God’s sake. I kept telling them that, right from the start, but no one believed me.”
He sighed, tossing out the butt of his cigarette. “It was the goddam dog tags. I have no idea how she got her hands on them—how they ended up at her place. I lost them a few weeks before the murder; I woke up after spending the night with some girl I met at a bar, and they were gone.” Jack shook his head, and Cassandra saw the look of bitterness, of tightly controlled rage on his face. “At the time I just figured the girl had snatched them as some kind of souvenir.”
For a moment there was a look of embarrassment on Jack’s face, but it dissolved in the next instant, replaced by a scowl as impenetrable as any Cassandra had ever seen on him. “If I ever find out who put those tags in Laura’s hands, I’ll make them pay.”
Chapter Eighteen
Cassandra felt a low buzz of apprehension as she turned onto the street where Laura Granger’s home stood, memories of the investigation and trial flooding her mind.
She had come to the house more than once while she had been covering the murder, and there was something about the place that her brain associated with a kind of bleak hopelessness, something that made her feel depressed just turning onto the street. It was dark outside—it was starting to get late, and Cassandra’s hands trembled a little on the steering wheel as she made her way down the street.
They had taken a break a few hours before, risking discovery to get some food into their bodies. Cassandra had gone through a drive-thru with Jack hidden in the back seat, doing the best she could to get through the line and order enough food for two starv
ing people without raising suspicion. They’d found a deserted rest station and parked at the far end of it, devouring their over-salted, overcooked meals in near silence. Cassandra had taken another quick nap, for no more than an hour, and then they had gotten back onto the road, taking advantage of the darkness of the advancing night to make their way towards the suburb where Laura had lived.
“We’re here,” Jack said.
Cassandra glanced at him in her mirror. He was shaking his head, peeking out to look through the windows.
“Laura’s neighborhood.” He sighed. “Bad vibes here for years to come.”
“Bounty hunters believe in vibes?” Cassandra raised an eyebrow at the comment.
Jack snorted. “There’s a lot in this world that can’t be explained,” he pointed out. “When you work a job that puts your life in danger, you have to kind of believe in something bigger than yourself. Luck, God, intuition—something that makes you feel like you have some kind of edge over the random chance in the world.”
“So even though you know it’s just a way to psych yourself up, it still works?”
Jack chuckled. “Somehow, it does,” he said.
Cassandra slowed down as she neared Laura Granger’s house, taking a moment to look around. The street was quiet in the late-night hour; a couple of lights were on inside the houses either side of the victim’s home, but there wasn’t much movement, and plenty of the rooms of the houses were dark.
In the months since her murder, Laura house had started to take on the look of the horrific crime that had happened within it. Without a resident inside to take care of it, the lawn had become completely overgrown. It had been months since anyone had done anything about the grass, and it came up high enough to make Cassandra worry fleetingly about snakes. The little house had looked nice before, but now it looked undeniably spooky, standing in the dark, lit only by the automatic security lamps that went on at night and turned off in the morning.
Cassandra wondered who was paying for the electric in the house; she tried to recall if Laura Granger had some kind of estate. If she did, wouldn’t they want to sell the house as soon as possible? Unless the police still have their hands on it, of course.
“I’m not going to park here,” Cassandra said, speeding up slightly as she came to the edge of the property. “I’m going to find a side street.”
“There’s a little community park round here,” Jack said, nodding. “It’d be deserted this time of night.”
“We hope,” Cassandra countered.
Cassandra turned the corner at the end of the block and followed the intersecting road down one street. She found the community park; as Jack had suggested, it was deserted, without even security guards to check for teenagers doing drugs in the playground. Cassandra found a parking spot back from the entrance, shielded from casual observation, and pulled into it, shutting the car off as soon as she was parked.
She hadn’t told Jack her suspicions. On their journey from Lenny’s apartment, Cassandra had slowly pieced together what she knew about the case and how it related to the information that Jack had uncovered that day; she was now even more convinced that the answer to her questions was in Laura’s house.
“You still haven’t told me why we’re here,” Jack said quietly as they stepped out of the car.
“I can’t tell you anything yet; I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for,” she said, repeating the refrain she had been giving Jack ever since they had left Manhattan.
“I think you do know,” Jack said, his voice low and intense in the darkness. “And I think you’re not telling me because you’re not sure how I’d react.”
“I’m not telling you because I don’t know the specifics. Something just started to tug at me back in Lenny’s apartment. When I see it I’ll know.”
Jack snorted. “You make fun of me for paying attention to vibes but you expect to ‘just know’ when you see whatever it is?”
Cassandra crossed her arms over her chest as they walked along the sidewalk, backtracking the path they had taken past Laura’s house.
“It was something he said; made me think back to something I’d seen before,” Cassandra admitted. “I can’t for the life of me think what it was. I just hope it’s still in there.”
Cassandra wasn’t sure whether she was right about her half-remembered clue, and her concern that she might have it wrong had led her to keep Jack in the dark about the errand she was bringing him on. She didn’t want to get his hopes up by telling him about the theory that had slowly started to coalesce in her brain.
After a few minutes, they approached the house once more. Cassandra looked around, suddenly apprehensive that the neighbors might be on the lookout for people interested in investigating the house unofficially, and uninvited.
Up close, the house looked even more sinister; the security lamps bleached out the paint on the exterior walls, and the garden had gone to seed, weeds springing up amidst volunteer starts from the planned plantings.
They came to the door and Jack tried the knob. Cassandra was unsurprised to find that it was locked.
“It’s one of the cheap ones,” Jack told her after a moment’s inspection. “Whoever was here last, they didn’t think to do the deadbolt, either.”
He began kicking at the door around the knob and Cassandra cringed. He’s more frustrated than he let on, she thought, peering over at the houses that surrounded Laura Granger’s residence.
“There are still people living all around,” she told him in a hiss.
Cassandra could understand Jack’s irritation: they had spent all day tracking down two of the people on his list, as yet to no avail—and there was no guarantee that their luck would hold out much longer. At any time, they could have been pulled over again, and the next cop to talk to Cassandra about her busted taillight might not have been as interested in her cleavage. Even if she found what she was looking for at Laura’s place, and made it out without any of the neighbors raising the alarm, they could still get busted driving to wherever it was they needed to go next.
“One…more…kick…”
The door swung forward, the sound of groaning wood and creaking hinges cutting through the night. Cassandra looked around quickly, but no lights flicked on in the neighboring houses and it seemed that for the moment at least, they were still safe. By the time she had assessed that they had somehow managed not to alert anyone to their presence, Jack had already entered the house. Cassandra hurried to follow him, pushing the door closed behind her.
Jack looked around for a long moment, and Cassandra saw a slight shudder work its way through the man’s body. She took a deep breath to push down the sense of revulsion and fear that rose up inside of her and looked around. The forensics team had given the house a thorough combing over, that much was clear. She heard a crash and started.
Turning around, her gaze fell on Jack. He was throwing around the few items left in the living room, pulling up the couch cushions and letting them thump to the floor.
“Keep it down!” Cassandra hissed.
Jack turned and looked at her, irritation and confusion forming lines across his face.
“It’s the middle of the night in the suburbs,” Cassandra reminded him. “We just broke into a pretty damned famous ‘murder house’. Do you want the neighbors to call the cops?”
Jack scowled. “So tell me what we’re looking for then,” he said, setting the cushions down on the couch.
Cassandra licked her lips, peering around the room.
“We’re looking for something small,” she said, consulting the impulse she’d felt at Lenny’s apartment hours before. “Something the cops would have ignored, or just decided was insignificant.”
“You can’t give me anything more to go on than that?” Jack gave her an exasperated look.
“I told you before,” Cassandra said, defensive. “I’ll know it when I see it. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but there was something.” She rolled her head around on her ne
ck, fighting the tension she felt at the base of her skull. “But if we end up with the cops coming here, we’re going to have no chance of finding it,” she told him firmly.
“Fine,” Jack said, looking faintly sulky. “Take a look around, then.”
As she wandered around the living room, Cassandra tried to remember how it had looked when she had first gone through the house as part of her investigation; there were so many things missing that she couldn’t quite begin to place the significance of the things that remained.
She moved into the bedroom, careful not to touch anything. Of course, months after the trial of Jack Hardy, it wasn’t likely that she could disrupt the forensics team; they had come and gone already, clearing out everything they thought could have been remotely relevant to the case at hand. The bed had been stripped, but the mattress remained. Cassandra looked around, wishing she had an inventory at her disposal as she had done when she’d been here before. She couldn’t remember everything that the police and scientists had taken, much less compare it to what had remained behind.
She sighed, her gaze scanning the ransacked room. There was something deeply unpleasant about being inside a bedroom that had become the scene of a murder. She frowned, trying to decide whether she could still smell something of a scent of death in the room.
There were marks on the walls indicating some of the things that forensics technicians had taken pictures of, notations that would have appeared in the crime scene photos. Fingerprint dust covered everything in the bedroom in a way it hadn’t in the living room, and Cassandra kept her hands carefully to herself as she made her way around the room, lost in thought. What was it that she’d almost called to mind? What was the detail that had slipped her conscious notice but nonetheless lodged itself in the back of her mind to plague her when she needed it most?
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