Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
She entered the room and paused to let her eyes adjust to the dim lighting.
The shag carpet and furniture were as old as the house.
Given the brick fireplace and Coke-bottle windows, a clever decorator might have been able to pull off a mid-century modern theme, but in the absence of any TLC, the place was a dump.
Beer cans littered the floor, and fast-food bags blanketed the coffee table, along with red Solo cups that doubled as ashtrays.
Through the breakfast room window, Leanne spied some people in chairs on the patio.
She crossed the living room, ignoring the blank stares from a pair of glassy-eyed women lounging on the floor. She paused at the back door to look at her brother. He slouched in a plastic deck chair with a cigarette dangling between his fingertips.
Leanne’s heart squeezed. She hadn’t seen Ben since Thanksgiving, when they’d gotten into a fight before the turkey even came out of the oven.
He’d left Boone’s house in a huff, which had put Leanne at the top of her mother’s shit list for weeks.
She didn’t really blame her mom. Leanne had purposely picked the fight with Ben after he’d borrowed money to fix a flat tire so he could drive to work—which had been a lie.
In reality, he’d given the money to Diandra for God only knew what.
After the Thanksgiving dinner fiasco, Leanne had signed up to work Christmas, the least desirable shift of the year. She didn’t want to be around her brother or her mother and sure as hell not Boone.
Leanne opened the back door, and all three men turned around.
“Hey! Officer.” One of them grinned and waved.
She looked straight at Ben. “Can you talk?”
He glared at her a moment, then flicked his cigarette away and stood up. She led him around the side of the house where a rusty Buick was up on cinder blocks.
Ben wore a loose T-shirt that made his bony shoulders look like a clothes hanger. The left half of his face was burned, as though he’d passed out in the sun somewhere.
“What is it, Lee? I’m busy.”
She took a deep breath. “Mom said you missed your drug test.”
“I didn’t.” He crossed his arms. “Anything else?”
She stared at him, gauging his truthfulness. Years of interrogations by their detective father had made them both skilled liars.
“Where have you been?” she asked. “I left you a bunch of messages.”
“I went camping.”
Her bullshit meter fired to life. Ben had hated camping ever since their dad had forced him to do Boy Scouts and dragged the family on trips where they ate charred eggs and slept on the ground.
Their father had wanted Ben to follow in his footsteps and become an Eagle Scout, but Ben wasn’t interested.
“I went by the motel, and they said you quit,” she told him.
“So?”
“So, what are you going to do for work?”
He slipped his hands into his front pockets, hunching his shoulders up around his ears. “I don’t know. I’m looking.”
“You should have looked before you quit. That was a good job.”
His eyes sparked. “That job fucking sucked. Changing sheets and cleaning up puke and condoms? You wouldn’t have lasted two minutes.”
Leanne gritted her teeth. As a rookie in Dallas, she’d been in more squalid apartments than her brother could imagine and done plenty of shit work. But Ben didn’t know that aspect of her life, and she was losing control of this conversation.
“They’re hiring at the campground,” she said. “I can talk to Michelle.”
“I’m done being a janitor.”
“She needs a handyman. You still have Dad’s toolbox, don’t you?”
His eyes turned somber. Ben had spent countless hours in their dad’s workshop as a kid, and he had a knack for carpentry. Was it a guilt trip? Yes. After bailing him out of jail twice and taking him to rehab, she wasn’t above manipulating his grief to help get him back on track.
You need to look out for your brother.
Her dad’s voice came back, and with it a sharp pang. She’d been trying to look out for Ben her whole life—even more so now that her dad was gone—but everything seemed to backfire.
“I can tell her you’re interested,” she said.
“I’m not.” He looked over his shoulder at his friends. When he looked back the spark of resentment had returned to his eyes. “I don’t need you to get me a job. And I sure as shit don’t need you babysitting me.”
She recognized the stubborn set of his jaw. This conversation was over, and the more she pushed the more he’d pull away.
“Fine.” She shrugged.
“Fine.”
“I’ll remind you of that next time you hit me up for money.”
· · ·
Leanne slipped into the evidence room and took a moment to get her bearings.
The space was dim and quiet and smelled of musty paper.
It reminded her of the ghostly top floor of her college library, but instead of endless shelves of books, the room contained endless shelves of cardboard boxes filled with evidence and case files.
Not everything fit neatly into a box, though, and along the far wall was a floor-to-ceiling steel cage for storing oversize items: a rusty wheelbarrow, a cattle brand, a double-bladed paddle that had once been used to bludgeon someone.
Leanne walked past the cage, eyeing the large gray safe in the corner.
The three-by-three-foot cube had been ripped out of a nearby home after a couple was hog-tied and robbed at gunpoint by a gang of masked intruders.
The safe was later recovered at a crack house and still had black smudges on it from where CSIs had lifted fingerprints, including one that belonged to the couple’s teenage son.
Leanne walked past the shelves. Empty spaces outlined in dust showed where boxes had once been.
A year ago, the department had started digitizing paper files.
The process was a time-consuming slog, and anything that went farther back than ten years had yet to be touched.
Leanne went row by row, perusing the shelves and reading labels until she found the shelf she needed.
The Hannah Rawls case file comprised four bankers boxes that occupied the bottom level of a metal shelving unit.
Of the four total boxes, only one was there now.
The others, presumably, were in the hands of the DA, who would have had to provide copies of much of the material to Sean Moriarty’s attorney during discovery.
Leanne glanced over her shoulder at the door, which she’d left ajar so as not to arouse suspicion. As a detective, she had access to this room, but if someone came in and saw her rummaging through the Rawls case, they might have a few questions.
Leanne crouched down in front of the one remaining box, which was labeled with a case number.
She lifted the dusty lid and was relieved to immediately see the item she was after, the murder book.
In the Hannah Rawls case—the most extensive investigation in department history—the murder book was actually three separate binders, each marked with a roman numeral.
Leanne tugged out the binder marked “I.”
The murder book was meant to be a summary, so investigators could locate key facts of the case without having to comb through dozens and sometimes hundreds of individual folders.
At the front of the binder was a table of contents, followed by material from the investigation’s early days.
Leanne scanned the sections, which included police interviews and transcripts of 911 calls.
Tucked behind a batch of clear sleeves containing key crime scene photos was a section marked “Autopsy.” Behind that were more police interviews, along with follow-up reports, all labeled and categorized.
A sour ball formed in Leanne’s stomach as she recognized her father’s handwriting on many of the police forms. His fingerprints were, quite literally, all over this investigation.
I’ve had fifteen years to think about all the people who wronged me.
She pictured Sean Moriarty’s flat gray eyes again. She didn’t like that he’d shown up at her house. She liked even less that his first stop had been her mother’s. It was a bold move for someone fresh out of prison. To Leanne, it signaled a don’t-give-a-fuck attitude that she found unnerving.
Shoving aside thoughts of Sean Moriarty, Leanne thumbed through the entire binder.
Then she clicked open the rings and removed several reports.
She took them to the bullpen, which was nearly empty right now because it was after five.
A lone patrol officer sat in a cubicle, and Leanne traded nods with him on the way to the copier.
She fed the reports into the machine in one big stack.
“Leanne.”
She whirled around. Nadine stood behind her in a green barn jacket, a set of car keys in her hand.
“You’re back?” Nadine asked. “I thought you left already.”
“Just finishing up.” The machine behind her spit out pages, and Leanne resisted the urge to move sideways to block the view.
“That lady who was here earlier? She called while you were out,” Nadine said. “I left a note on your desk.”
“I saw it, thanks. I called her back.”
Nadine tipped her head to the side. “She’s the one whose daughter ran off a while back?”
“Her daughter’s missing, yes.”
“What’s it been now?”
“Six years.”
“Lord.” Nadine shook her head. “That’s awful. I can’t even imagine.”
The copier made a loud chirp, and Leanne’s heart lurched.
“Here.” Nadine stepped forward as Leanne reached for the paper drawer.
“I can—”
“You have to feed it just right.” Nadine set her keys down and jerked open the drawer. She grabbed a chunk of printer paper from the shelf and slid it into the tray, then gave the drawer a little shake before slamming it shut. “There.”
“Thanks.”
Nadine grabbed her keys and her gaze landed on the stack of printouts. Leanne held her breath. She didn’t want to lie to Nadine, but she didn’t want to explain herself, either. Nadine was friendly with everyone, but her first loyalty was to her boss.
Nadine lifted an eyebrow and looked at her. “Don’t stay too late.”
“I won’t.”
“You know how the chief is about overtime.”