Innocent Target

by Elisabeth Rees

  “I don’t need to know what it said. It’s fake.”

  Ryan rubbed a hand down his face. There was so much he didn’t know, and he needed Kitty’s total honesty, so he tried to avoid confrontation.

  “I was worried about you, Kitty. Whatever you were trying to do, I could’ve helped you.”

  “I needed to handle it by myself,” she said. “Harvey promised to give me the CCTV footage from the night of the murder, but only if I went there alone. He also knew the true identity of Molly’s killer, but that information has now died with him.”

  This all sounded a little far-fetched. “He said he knew Molly’s real killer?”

  “He told me so on the phone this evening.”

  “You guessed Harvey was the anonymous informant before you talked to him tonight, didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you called him in secret after you went to bed?”

  “Yes.” She rubbed at her temples with her index fingers. “I wish I’d recorded the conversation on my cell phone. I was so focused on pursuing the new lead that I didn’t take the time to plan and prepare.”

  “Can you tell me what Harvey said?”

  She hesitated, seemingly unwilling to divulge the details.

  “I promise to keep an open mind, Kitty,” he said. “I promise.”

  “I think we already established that you’re incapable of keeping an open mind when it comes to my father. You can’t even tell the difference between my dad and the guy that killed your sister. Whatever you say and whatever you do, you’ll always come back to the same conclusion. In your eyes, my father is a murderer and always will be.”

  What could he say to that? It was true. And he didn’t truly see the need for that to change. A fair, honest jury had convicted Harry Linklater, based on the facts of the case. It wasn’t wrong or unfair to view him as a murderer when that’s what the state of Oklahoma had decided. But there was one point where Ryan felt he needed to make a change.

  “You’re right, Kitty,” he admitted. “I have a hard time separating your father and Cody Jones. I kind of see them as one and the same person, and that’s not right or fair. Your father didn’t kill my sister and I’d like to ask you to help me remember that from now on.” He held up his hand. “I’m not saying that I believe your father is innocent, but I want to be more impartial and listen to what you have to say without rushing to judgment. How does that sound?”

  She smiled cautiously. “It sounds like a good start.”

  “So do you feel a little more comfortable telling me about your conversation with Harvey?”

  “Sure, but remember your promise, okay?”

  “I’ll remember.”

  He listened, without interrupting, as she told him the details. Apparently, Harvey had owned up to lying to the police, admitted he had been protecting Molly’s real killer and confessed to an unnamed historic crime that was being used to guarantee his continued silence.

  “Wow,” Ryan said when she’d finished. “That’s a lot to take in.”

  “I know,” she replied, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and leaning closer to him. “Somebody was knocking on the door of the bar while I was on the phone with Harvey and I figure it must’ve been the killer, who overheard our conversation and realized what Harvey was about to do. So he murdered him, took the memory stick, torched the bar, and waited for me to arrive in order to lock me inside and kill me, too.”

  Ryan took his time to respond. A suicide note had been found in Harvey’s car, in which he’d said he was bankrupt, about to lose his business to his creditors and that he was unable to face life without the bar that he’d owned for almost forty years. On the surface, it looked like instead of accepting the situation, he’d set fire to the building and taken his own life. The bullet that killed him almost certainly came from his own gun, and Ryan had seen no defensive wounds on Harvey when he’d laid him out on the parking lot. None of what Kitty was saying matched the evidence, but she clearly wasn’t making it up.

  “I just want to be clear about this,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “You’re absolutely certain of what Harvey said? You don’t think you could’ve misunderstood or misheard him at all?”

  “No. I remember the conversation almost word for word.”

  “And you’re sure that it was Harvey you were speaking to?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” she snapped. “I’ve known Harvey since I was a little girl. Don’t you think that I know his voice?” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re looking for alternate explanations, aren’t you?”

  “It’s my job to look for holes in any theory.”

  “Yeah, well, this theory doesn’t have any holes. It’s watertight.”

  Her story was interesting. It was intriguing. It was even plausible. But it most definitely was not watertight. Harvey might have been maliciously lying, luring Kitty to the bar so that an assailant could kill her. It was looking more likely that Harry had killed Molly with an accomplice, who was now trying his level best to cover his tracks. Harvey could have been used as a pawn in a very dangerous game, one in which he ended up losing his life.

  But could Kitty’s story be entirely true? Could her father be innocent, after all? Ryan had promised to keep an open mind, so he forced himself to consider every possibility.

  As he pondered these things, Shane entered the room, his face somber and downcast.

  “Hey, boss,” he said. “I thought I’d find you here. The fire crew has put out the blaze, but they found something inside the building.”

  “What?”

  “Another body.”

  Ryan jumped to his feet. “Whose body?”

  “We don’t know yet. It was buried beneath the floor. One of the firefighters found it when the boards gave way and he fell through, right on top of it, apparently.”

  “Hold up,” Ryan said. “Did you say it was under the floor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So this person didn’t die in the fire?”

  “Oh no,” Shane replied. “This person has been dead a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “I’m guessing at least ten or fifteen years.”

  Ryan locked eyes with Kitty, and she rose from the bed, slipping her hand into his.

  “Things just got really weird,” she said. “You should go take a look.”

  EIGHT

  Kitty wrapped her arms around her torso, shivering in the parking lot of the Starlight Bar. Harvey’s former business had been reduced to little more than ashes. Only the charred timber frame remained upright, like bones that had been stripped of flesh. On the asphalt next to the fire truck were two body bags, one large, one small, both zipped up tight, awaiting transportation to the morgue.

  Several firefighters were carefully inspecting the ruins, seeking the primary source of the blaze. The Bethesda residents had long since returned to their homes, but Kitty was sure this would be the talk of the town in the morning.

  “It’s total annihilation,” she said to Ryan.

  “The fire chief said that an accelerant was probably used. Someone wanted to obliterate everything.”

  “The killer needed to make sure that he destroyed any evidence linking him to Molly’s murder,” she said. “If Harvey kept the CCTV footage from that night, who knows what else he kept?”

  “Okay,” Ryan said, turning to her. “There are two possible theories here. The first is that Harvey set the fire himself and then committed suicide. The second theory involves Harvey being murdered and his killer torching the bar afterward.”

  “It has to be the second one,” she said. “How did I get locked inside? Somebody else was here.”

  Ryan rubbed at his chin deep in thought, and she remembered how grateful she’d been to see his face appear in the doorway of the bathroom. If only he would now b
elieve her, she could let down her defenses and truly trust him. They would finally be able to work as a team.

  “Yes, somebody else was here,” he said after a long pause. “And Harvey was murdered. I believe you, Kitty.”

  She smiled, throwing her arms around his neck and hugging him. “I’ve waited forever to hear you say that.”

  He gently peeled her arms away. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up. I’m still not ready to fully accept that your father is innocent.”

  She took a step back. “You’re kidding.”

  He raked a hand through his hair, its vibrant red color hidden beneath the sooty layer. “This case is really complicated,” he said. “Who knows how your dad might have been mixed up in it?”

  “He wasn’t mixed up in it. He was framed.”

  “Without being able to interview Harvey, I have no way of establishing these facts for myself.”

  “You have me,” she protested. “I’m a witness to what Harvey said.”

  He grasped her by the shoulders. “And I believe you’re being honest with me, but I can’t be sure you have all the facts. Harvey might not have been telling the whole truth, and now that he’s gone, we have to try and piece together the clues for ourselves.”

  “You said you’d keep an open mind. So surely you must accept that my father might be innocent?”

  “Yes,” Ryan replied. “I accept that he might be innocent.”

  She beamed. “That’s a step in the right direction at least. Thank you.”

  A large hearse pulled into the lot, rolling to a stop next to the body bags on the ground.

  Ryan held Kitty’s hand, lacing his fingers through hers. “You okay to do this?”

  She nodded, and together they walked to greet the men exiting the black hearse, which bore the State of Oklahoma Medical Examiner logo.

  “Hey there, guys,” Ryan said, shaking the hands of the uniformed men, clearly familiar with both. “We’re wondering if we could take a look at one of the bodies here.”

  The older man unloaded a gurney from the back of the vehicle. “Sure thing, Lawrence.” He glanced at Kitty. “Is she allowed to look, too?”

  “She’s a potential witness to a crime that occurred here this evening so I’m giving her special permission to view the remains. One of these bodies belongs to Harvey Flynn and the other is unknown. We’d like to take a look at the unknown.”

  “Let me check the tags,” the man said, bending to read the labels attached to the zippers. “Okay, this is the one you want—found under the floor, right? We’ll lift it onto a gurney.”

  As the two men each took an end of the bag, they both expressed surprise at the weight of the person inside.

  “Whoa,” the younger one said. “This feels like just bones.”

  “Let’s take a look,” his colleague said, unzipping the bag and revealing the head inside.

  Kitty put a hand over her mouth and gasped as a skull came into view, dry and white, seeming almost as unreal as a Halloween prop. She felt Ryan’s arm slide around her shoulder and pull her close.

  “How long would you say this person has been dead?” Ryan asked.

  The young man sucked air through his teeth. “It’s impossible to say for sure without doing some tests. I’d estimate at least ten or twelve years, but possibly as many as twenty.”

  “Will you be able to tell the cause of death?” Kitty asked.

  “I can take a good guess just by looking at the head,” the older man interjected, pointing to a large crack in the white dome. “There’s a skull fracture right there.”

  Kitty swallowed away a sudden feeling of sickness. Who was this tragic person? And how had he or she ended up here? Many of Bethesda’s residents had spent evenings in the bar, never knowing they were just a few feet away from a decomposing body. It was a horrifying thought.

  Ryan read her mind. “How did people in the bar not notice the odor? The smell of a dead body is hard to hide.”

  The man shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe the owner closed the bar for a while. Maybe he said that a possum died in the crawl space underneath. That happened in my house one time and it stunk up the place. Nobody would assume that a human corpse was under the floor, right?”

  Kitty shook her head. “We’d never have suspected Harvey of anything like that.”

  The man zipped up the bag. “We all done?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Ryan said. “I appreciate your help.”

  Kitty watched the two bodies being loaded into the hearse and driven away for autopsy. All the while, Ryan’s arm remained around her shoulder, squeezing her reassuringly.

  “Do you have any idea who that person might be?” he asked.

  “None at all, but Harvey said he did a bad thing many years ago. That must’ve been what he was talking about.” She turned to him. “He murdered someone and buried the body under the floor of his bar, and he got away with it.”

  Ryan looked into the distance where the hearse was disappearing off down Main Street. “I think he paid a high price in the end.”

  “Can we go home now?” she asked. “I really need to rest.”

  “Sure,” he said, bringing her in close for a hug. “I’ll keep watch while you sleep.”

  * * *

  Ryan stood on the porch deck, coffee in hand, listening to the Canada geese honking over the lake. Kitty had been asleep for almost four hours and he was keeping guard, running on little more than coffee and adrenaline. He simply didn’t know what to make of this latest news. Kitty fervently believed that Harvey had been protecting the real killer of Molly Thomas, but Ryan was determined to give the matter thoughtful consideration before arriving at a conclusion. Harry Linklater had been convicted by a jury on clear evidence. He couldn’t just ignore that fact, no matter what protest Kitty put up.

  “Hi.”

  He turned around and saw her coming through the door. Wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater, she appeared thin and drawn, her thick hair tied loosely in a topknot to reveal her slender neck. He wondered if she’d been losing weight through stress.

  “It’s nice and peaceful out here,” she said. “But those Canada geese sure are noisy sometimes.”

  He gazed across the water. “I like the sound. It’s like they’re talking to each other.”

  “Yeah,” she laughed. “In a really angry way.”

  “How are you feeling? Did you get much sleep?”

  “I drifted in and out,” she said. “But I kept seeing Harvey’s face and all that blood on the floor.” She shook her head and tendrils of hair fell down to her cheeks, brushing the ultrafine wound made by her attacker’s knife. “I’m so mad at Harvey for what he’s done but I’m sad he’s dead. I just don’t know how to feel.”

  “It’s normal to be conflicted in a situation like this,” Ryan said. “You probably want to yell at Harvey but you also want to mourn his passing.”

  She leaned against the porch railing next to him. “That’s exactly it.”

  “Harvey obviously made some bad choices that eventually caught up with him. I just wish he was still alive to answer some questions. We sure could use a good lead.”

  “Is there any news on the body that was found under the floor?”

  “All we know at the moment is that the bones belong to a young woman and she was wearing a blue homemade dress. The forensics team is doing their best to extract some DNA from a bloodstain on the fabric, but it’s degraded over time so it might take a while. In the meantime, I’ve got Shane trawling through the missing persons records from ten to twenty years back to see if we can get a list of possible names together. Whoever she is, I want to make sure she gets home. It’s not right that she’s been lying under those dirty floorboards all these years. She deserves a proper and dignified resting place for her family to visit.”

  He turned his head toward the br
eeze blowing off the lake in order to dry the moisture in his eyes. The discovery of that woman’s body had taken an unexpected toll on him, stirring his sympathies and giving him cause to worry for her family. At least his family had been able to bury Gina properly and begin the grieving process. There was a grave to visit where flowers could be laid on the anniversary of her death, and where balloons could be tied on her birthday. He was thankful for that, at least. Gina hadn’t been entombed beneath the floor of a seedy bar, wrapped in a filthy sheet and long forgotten.

  Kitty rested her palm on his back, right between his shoulder blades, and made small circular movements with the heel of her hand.

  “This is hard for you, isn’t it?”

  He could only nod.

  “Has it brought back some memories?”

  “Yes, it has,” he said, focusing on the smooth, clear water. “But it’s also made me realize that there’s a family out there who’ve been waiting years to learn what happened to their daughter or sister or mom. I should be grateful that Gina has a headstone and a plot of her own—that my parents and I were able to get closure.” He broke off and glanced skyward. “How crazy does that sound? I’m grateful that my little sister has a grave.”

  “You’re grateful for the small things that keep you going in grief,” Kitty said. “That’s how we all get through tough times.”

  “For a long time, I assumed that God had abandoned us. That’s why I joined the sheriff’s department. I thought that if God couldn’t keep people safe, then I’d have to do it on my own.”

  “And do you still feel that way?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” he admitted. “I have good days and bad days. I still believe in keeping people safe—it’s why it’s always been my dream to be sheriff, the one in charge of protecting the whole community. But it’s harder than I thought it would be when I was a kid, to know what to do.”

  She continued to rub his back, her closeness giving him goose bumps.

  “‘And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not,’” she said. “That’s what you told me, wasn’t it?”