Chapter Sixteen
Emmy accelerated past an SUV filled with teenagers who dropped their phones when they spotted her cruiser.
She felt like all she’d done for the last twelve hours was chauffeur her sister from one end of the county to the other.
She glanced at Jude in the passenger seat.
She’d turned quiet again, but there was yet another shade to her silence.
Her sunglasses were back on. Her face was turned toward the sun as it flashed through the tree canopies like a disco ball.
She was probably bracing herself for Aunt Millie, who had lately gotten into the habit of not answering the phone if she didn’t feel like talking to anybody.
Emmy was trying to think of something to say when a yawn racked her body.
Jude kept her face to the window. “You really should get some sleep. Even half an hour would help.”
Emmy only responded for the sake of distraction. “I don’t think I’ve really slept since Mom got her diagnosis.”
Jude turned to look at Emmy. She was clearly expecting more. “It might help if you talked about it.”
Emmy chewed her lip. She could feel the distant tremble of fault lines wanting to shift. “What’s the word when something stops being cathartic and starts being traumatizing?”
“Destabilization.”
Emmy nodded. That sounded right. “You told me you sang rock ’n’ roll. Why did you go to Memphis and not New York or Los Angeles?”
Jude was silent, but she must’ve known she owed Emmy a change in subject like the one Emmy had given her in the street. “Followed a bad man to a good city.”
Jude turned her face toward the window again.
Emmy stared at her a beat before taking a left onto the back roads.
Jude had shape-shifted into another version of herself that Emmy hadn’t seen before.
Cautious. Reserved. It made Emmy feel guilty, like she’d done something wrong.
Maybe she had. Her sister had spent the last month and a half reaching out to Emmy, trying to smooth things over, making herself available, acting as a sounding board, calling on her vast understanding of psychology and criminal behavior and investigative experience and doing whatever it took to help Emmy.
And Emmy had been a prickly bitch.
She was saved more navel-gazing by her phone ringing. She tapped the screen. “Gregg, what is it?”
“You were right, boss. The motel manager’s been taking a cut of the trade running through the joint. I couldn’t get him to shake loose the CCTV, though. He says corporate’s got it on their servers. They’d know if he accessed it.”
Emmy couldn’t catch a break in this case. “Okay, thank—”
“Hold on, boss,” Gregg said. “I noticed there’s a key card entry to the guest parking lot. I asked the guy to look up Bill’s number. Get this, Bill left the motel two hours after the fight with Allison. He didn’t come back until ten the next morning.”
“Saturday morning,” Emmy said. The day of Allison’s murder. “What time did he leave?”
“Eleven-thirty. Then he carded back in at eight-twelve that night.”
Emmy glanced at Jude. They’d heard the gunshots at Allison’s around one in the afternoon.
“Good work, Gregg. Go home and get some rest. I need you back at the station by five.”
“Yes, boss.”
Emmy ended the call. “Bill told me he was at the motel until the baseball game started at two.”
Jude said, “You could use this new information to request an interview.”
“His lawyer won’t let me get within ten feet of him.
I need phone records. Allison’s files from her laptop.
Mandy’s records. Some kind of smoking gun to force his hand.
” Emmy swiped through to Gregg’s number.
“I’m going to put a tail on Bill. I don’t want him going near Mandy.
God knows if Brett’s actually guarding her room. ”
“Hold on,” Jude said. “Try to spread the work around. Gregg’s an attractive kid. You don’t want to start rumors.”
Emmy laughed. Gregg was only a few years older than Cole. “Would you say the same thing if he was an attractive woman?”
“Of course not. Everyone would assume you were giving her the work because she’s a woman.”
Emmy didn’t get a chance to respond. Sherry Robertson was calling. Emmy tapped her phone again. “Hey, Sherry. I’m with my sister. What’ve you got?”
“Allison’s fingerprints were on the tracker that was hidden inside the heel of Mandy’s shoe.”
Emmy sighed. Being right on this case never felt like it got them closer to a resolution.
“I’m guessing you’re not surprised,” Sherry said. “How about this? I took the three hundred grand from Allison’s attic to evidence lock-up, and one of our old-timers comes by and points out that the hundreds are all pre-2004 series.”
Emmy felt her brow furrow. “What does that mean?”
“The government periodically redesigns bills to prevent forgeries. All the hundreds in Allison’s attic were printed before October 2003.”
Emmy heard a car pulling alongside her. Cole was trying to wave her down. She pointed him up the road toward Millie’s.
Jude asked, “How long is the average hundred in circulation?”
“Eight to eleven years, but Allison’s money is crisp.
Like brand new from the bank—never circulated.
I talked to a contact of mine who’s a currency dealer.
He told me to look on the backs for the name of the Secretary of Treasury.
They’re all signed by Paul H. O’Neill. But get this, O’Neill didn’t serve a full term.
Bush forced him to resign because he opposed the war in Iraq.
O’Neill’s signature is predominantly on the 2001 series notes. ”
Emmy shook her head like that might clear it. “Can you break that down into language an idiot can understand?”
“The money could’ve only been printed from late 2001 until early 2003. It was never circulated, so it must have been withdrawn from the bank during that window, then stored somewhere safe, like a sealed, blue plastic bin with a red top.”
Emmy looked at Jude. They were both doing the same math. “So it’s very likely Allison got the money some time in 2002.”
“I don’t know about the likelihood, but the timeframe works.”
Emmy turned onto Millie’s meandering driveway. She didn’t know what to make of this information. “Anything else?”
“I’ve got my A/V techs analyzing that doorbell camera footage Cole sent.
You should have that back in a few hours.
We’re almost finished at Allison’s house.
We still haven’t found the fifth shell casing or the bullet from Mandy’s exit wound.
I’ll keep overseeing the work, but I’m being pulled onto a priority case in North Georgia.
Biker gang brought in some bad fentanyl and they’ve got bodies piling up in the morgue. ”
Emmy winced. She knew what that felt like. “Good luck. Thanks.”
Jude didn’t speak after the call ended. Neither did Emmy. This wasn’t companionable silence or viselike tension. They both clearly needed a minute to consider the implications of what they’d just heard.
Emmy parked between Cole’s cruiser and a dark red golf cart. She pushed the gear into park. She was still too stunned to get out. “Allison’s been sitting on that cash for longer than Cole’s been alive.”
“Does she have family money?”
“She was broke when I met her. We both brown-bagged it on patrol.” Emmy was baffled.
“All those years, she was sitting on three hundred thousand dollars in cash. She had it before she met Bill. She had it every time she told me she couldn’t leave him because she couldn’t afford a divorce, or that she was worried Mandy wouldn’t have a roof over her head. ”
“Not to venture into a lecture, but the psychologist in me would tell you that victim pathologies are complicated.”
“The investigator in me would tell you Allison didn’t spend the money because it didn’t belong to her.”
Jude started to nod. “Who was she holding it for?”
“Someone who scared the shit out of her.”
“Someone so bad that she needed witness protection.”
“Yoo-hoo!” Taybee opened the door to the cruiser before Emmy could. “Kaitlynn agreed to try Aunt Millie’s Overdue Stew. She’s gonna lose her mind if the baby doesn’t come soon. Poor thing’s hurting from her hooter to her tooter.”
Emmy felt like she’d been sucked into a tornado. She tried to identify the debris swirling around her. Taybee’s daughter was a week from her due date. She hadn’t been able to attend Myrna’s funeral.
Taybee asked, “The stew worked when you were pregnant with Cole, right?”
“Yep.” Emmy left out the twelve hours of screaming shits. “He was born the next day.”
“Why’re all y’all in my front yard?” Millie had lurched onto her front porch in a faded housedress with rollers in her hair. Cole held on to her arm to keep her from teetering. “I didn’t ask for visitors. Especially you.”
Jude had been walking toward the steps, but she froze when Millie singled her out.
“Hush up, you old cranky pants.” Taybee started up the stairs. “I need your recipe for Kaitlynn. Bless her heart, she’d slap the Pope and ride the Devil if it got that baby delivered.”
Millie scowled at Jude before retreating into the house. Cole slowly came down the stairs. He asked Jude, “What’s Millie’s problem with you?”
Emmy saved Jude the deflection. “She was in a car accident that was so bad the entire town banned dancing and rock ’n’ roll music.”
“Seriously?” Cole looked at Jude. “If it helps, they’re both allowed now.”
Jude laughed. “Sweetheart, we’re going to watch Footloose next weekend. You’re going to love it.”
Emmy watched Jude squeeze his arm as she passed him on the stairs. Emmy guessed this was what it was really like having an older sister—not Hannah’s version with ropes clenched between their teeth, but holding on to a pendulum and waiting for it to swing.
“Okay.” Emmy turned her attention to her son, whose collar was sticking out from his duty vest. “What’s happening here? I put you on patrol.”
Cole walked around to the back of his cruiser. He popped the trunk.