Chapter Fifty-Five
“You’re in luck, kid. That case is my white whale,” the old lawman says.
He gestures for Quinn to take a seat on a worn lounge chair, one probably brought in from the sheriff’s house before they stuck him in the home.
“My firm, we do cold cases pro bono, and I’ve been assigned to this one,” Quinn says. The lies are flowing freely tonight. Though it’s true—he is working the case for free, even if his company hasn’t authorized it.
“Good luck with that.”
Quinn doesn’t reply.
“What is it you want to know?”
“The police haven’t shared the file with the public so I wondered if you could tell me about your investigation?”
“Not much to tell you. The girl, Megan, was from a rougher family. We’d arrested her brothers more than once for odds and ends. Fighting. Drugs. Her old man was one of Cheyenne County’s biggest cookers and her brothers were destined to continue the family business.”
“I met the brothers. They threatened me,” Quinn says.
“You’re lucky you came out of that in one piece,” Rupert says. “So, as you can imagine, we didn’t get much help from the family when Megan first disappeared. They didn’t trust us, weren’t forthcoming.”
“You think Megan’s murder had something to do with her family? Their drug business?”
“Possible. But I never thought so. If a rival dealer was behind Megan’s murder, we would’ve seen some retaliation. Dead bodies. But we didn’t.”
“So, do you have a theory?” Quinn doesn’t mention his father. He wants to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
“We arrested a kid. A classmate of Megan’s—the last person seen with her.”
Quinn fights showing any reaction.
“I leaned on the kid hard. Probably harder than I should’ve. But we had a missing girl, at first. I’m not proud to say I got pretty rough with him.”
Quinn imagines a young version of his father in an interrogation room.
A phone book slammed against his head. It’s funny, we know our parents in one way only—the way they raised us, spent time with us—and forget that they were people before we ever existed.
People with pasts. People who made mistakes. People with secrets.
“What did he say?”
“He denied having any involvement. Said he was just helping her because some of the kids were picking on her at a party.”
“Picking on her?”
“Yeah, they said she slept with another girl’s boyfriend or something. Teenage crap.”
“Did you believe him? The suspect.” Neither of them has said his father’s name.
He thinks on this. “Hard to say. The rumor mill was in high gear. You know small towns.”
“What were the rumors?”
“That the suspect—last name was Riley, I recall—he and the girl may have had a dalliance. That Riley’s girlfriend was furious and told him to take care of the problem.”
Quinn feels the hairs on his neck rise. “You mean Riley’s girlfriend told him to kill Megan Tucker simply for cheating?”
The former sheriff exhales. “We never had anything to back it up. Then we found Megan’s body in an abandoned property on the outskirts of town. The ME placed time of death during the same period we had Riley in custody. The perp had kept her for days, did some unspeakable things to that poor girl.”
“So you ruled him out?”
Rupert shakes his head. “Could’ve had a partner.”
Quinn’s mouth is suddenly very dry. “You mean the girlfriend?” My mother.
The ex-sheriff shrugs again. “Or someone else.”
“Was there any evidence at the murder scene?” The newspaper reports claimed police had evidence but were withholding it.
Rupert hesitates like he’s debating whether to share more and decides what the hell.
“Before we found the body, we had investigators tailing Riley’s girlfriend and his friends just in case the rumors were true.”
“Do you remember their names?”
“You’re taxing an old-timer’s memory.” He looks at the ceiling. “The girl’s name was Nadine something. She moved away that summer. Riley hung out with Nadine’s brother, a local troublemaker.”
Uncle Pat. “You ruled them out?”
“Yeah, neither were near the abandoned ramshackle house at the estimated time of death.”
“Any blood or other—”
“Don’t I wish. After I retired, I actually called my old office to double-check whether we possibly collected something from the scene that could have DNA—you know, now that there’s that technology.
But things were different back then. We lifted for prints and stuff, but no one was saving skin or hair or other samples. ”
“Did you have any other suspects?”
He hesitates again. “There was a kid who other witnesses claimed was bothering Megan. John Smith. But we never had anything to connect him with the crime.”
“But you liked him for it?”
“That’s going too far. He was a good-looking guy, a charmer. But when I questioned him, he was, I don’t know, too smooth. And I learned he’d been in foster care in Hitchcock County. I knew some of the social services folks from the county and they told me something interesting.”
“What was that?”
“That John Smith’s mother had been a prostitute, which is why he was in the system.
That he’d been moved around to different families because of some issues with his foster siblings—teenage girls.
” Rupert shakes his head. “He apparently never touched the girls, but got caught spying on them, peepholes and that kind of thing…”
“Gross. But what’s it have to do with Megan?”
“The scene with Megan was devastating. The girl violated in the worst kind of ways. Strangled after he did those vile things.”
Quinn swallows down the image.
“But there was something unusual. We found a chair in the closet in the bedroom.”
He doesn’t understand at first.
“My theory has always been that there was more than one perp. One of them was an animal who loved to inflict pain.” The sheriff looks out the window now. “The other liked to watch.”