Mariah Stewart - Last Look

“Right. The money from the carnival was stolen.” His head bobbed up and down. “When I got in to work on Thursday morning, the chief said he’d gotten a call from old Mrs. Randall-Mrs. Randall, senior, I mean-after he got home the night before. Said there’d been some money stolen, but we could wait until the morning to come out to make the report.”

“Is that usual?” Dorsey asked.

“Not un usual. Mrs. Randall said her husband had already locked up the church after choir practice and she didn’t want to disturb him to go back over and open the church back up again. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Do you remember what you did the next morning?” Andrew backed Dorsey off with a glance.

“Sure. We met Mrs. Randall at the church around eight thirty. She showed us around the reverend’s office, showed us the drawer.”

“You take any prints?”

“Yeah. As I recall, they were pretty blurred. Nothing distinct, there were just too many of them. Some were the reverend’s, some were Mrs. Randall’s, we knew that, but if there was someone else’s prints there, we couldn’t have told you back then who they belonged to.”

“What areas did you dust for prints, besides the office?”

“None, that I recall. We were just finishing up on the desk when we heard screeching and yelling from the community center where the senior citizen’s breakfast was taking place. We ran down and there was Mrs. Randall, Shannon’s mom, yelling at her husband that she couldn’t find Shannon anywhere.” Brinkley shook his head. “At first, there was so much screeching, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Then she talked to the chief, and they started searching for her. They searched around the house, the church, all around the town. Mrs. Randall had called all Shannon ’s friends but no one had seen her since the night before.”

“Anyone question Franklin Randall at the time?”

“About what?”

“About the fact that his daughter had gone missing and no one seems to recall seeing him between the time he left the church and eleven thirty or so when his wife arrived home from an evening out with her sister.”

“I’m sure we did question him, we questioned everyone. Did we at any time think Reverend Randall had anything to do with Shannon ’s disappearance? No.” He paused and looked at Andrew long and hard. “Are you saying you think the Reverend had a hand in whatever happened to her?”

“I’m saying someone did and it looks like it wasn’t Eric Beale. I was just wondering if anyone talked to him.”

“Yes, we talked to him.”

“What was his demeanor?”

“His demeanor?” Jeremy repeated sarcastically. “His demeanor was that of a man who’d just found out his daughter was missing and probably had been since the night before and he hadn’t known it. What the hell do you think his demeanor was?”

He continued to glare at Andrew. “Look, we had an eyewitness who placed her in Eric Beale’s car-Eric’s speeding car-on the road out to the lake. We searched the lake, we searched the woods, we searched the park. The FBI had their team out there with us, even had a few divers. We had better’n half the town searching for that girl for two, three days. She was nowhere to be found. The only trace of her was in Eric’s car.”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, and softened just a little.

“Look, not trying to make excuses now, but back then, no one gave more’n a passing thought to the possibility that Shannon might have run away. She just wasn’t the type to do that, you know what I mean? Everyone in town knew her, everyone knew she was a happy kid, a good kid from a good family. She never got into any trouble, she was a good student, she played sports, she didn’t hang with a bad crowd. She was an all-around solid kid. So for a kid like that to be gone, someone had to have taken her. And for her not to be found, we just all figured she had to be dead. And with her blood in Eric’s car and him being seen with her, it just followed that he’d done something really bad to her. No one ever figured it had been any other way than what Chief Taylor said it was.”

“That Eric had killed her and hidden her body in a place where it couldn’t be found?” Andrew stood. There was nothing else to be learned here.

“Even the FBI believed it.” Brinkley stood as well. “That made it so, far as everyone around here was concerned. No one ever doubted that Eric was guilty. The chief said he was. Said he’d all but confessed to him. Why would he have told us that if it wasn’t true?”

“Good question,” Dorsey said.

“Yeah.” Brinkley rocked back and forth on his heels thoughtfully.

“Sure makes you wonder what was at the bottom of all that, don’t it?”

“So, what do you say we stop at the Widow Taylor’s and see if she has any thoughts on where we might find that file?” Andrew made a U-turn and headed back toward Hatton.

“Good idea. We have a few hours before we meet with the sisters. Bowden said Aubrey’s house was about a half hour from Hatton, so there’s time.”

“The more answers we get, the more questions we find,” Andrew said thoughtfully. “It almost seems Chief Taylor deliberately steered the investigation toward Eric Beale, but why would he do that?”

“Would it be a stretch to think it might have something to do with whatever was going on between Eric and Jeff Feeney?”

“Not to my mind.” Andrew slowed to round a bend in the road. “But I don’t expect Feeney to admit to anything.”

“It would have to be something really big for Taylor to have knowingly framed Eric, and let an innocent man be executed.”

“You’d think, but who knows what goes on in these little towns.”

“And who’s going to tell, all these years later?” Dorsey wondered aloud.

“So far, maybe only Jeremy Brinkley and Chief Bowden. Unfortunately, neither of them seem to know. And I think Brinkley was really rattled by this.”

“I think so, too. I think he was a good cop, and I think he liked to think Taylor was, too.” She gazed thoughtfully out the window. “But I also think that if he believed his chief pulled something back then, he’d be shocked, but he’d do what he could to make it right.”

“Well, I gave him my card. I hope he uses it.”

The drive back to Hatton proper took less than ten minutes. They drove along the main street where the renovated houses stood like newly polished jewels.

“Oh. Taylor.” Dorsey turned in her seat to look back at the mailbox they’d just driven past. “Slow down. Back two houses.”

Andrew checked his rearview mirror, then pulled to the side of the road.

“Shall we make a cold call?” he asked.

“Why not?”

They walked up the neatly trimmed sidewalks to the house where the pale blue mailbox announced the Taylor home.

“What a place.” Dorsey stood at the end of the driveway. “It looks like something out of a magazine.”

“Is there a magazine called Antebellum ?” Andrew observed the house and the grounds. “It’s not all that big compared to some of the plantation houses you see in this area, but it’s clearly the same era and the same style. Interesting, don’t you think, this whole row of mini-mansions, all renovated?”

“It takes a lot of money to do this kind of restoration,” Dorsey told him as they walked the length of the drive.

“Brinkley said she’d inherited a lot of money from her father,” Andrew reminded her. “Her money. Her nephew…”

“So maybe Miz Taylor might have been holding a lot of the cards back then.” Dorsey stepped onto the flagstone walk that led to the front door and Andrew followed.

“Hold onto that thought.” He reached past her and rang the doorbell.