Mariah Stewart - Cold Truth

“I went by your house and saw the cops there and stuff and the yellow tape all around the place and I got scared,” Khaliyah admitted.

“No reason to be scared.”

“I wanted you to know you can come and stay here, with me, if you need a place to stay.”

“That is the nicest offer. Thank you, Khaliyah. But I have a place.”

“Someplace safe?”

“Absolutely safe, yes.” Cass’s throat caught, so touched was she by her young friend’s concern.

“But if anything changes, if you need to…”

“You will be the first person I call. Promise.”

“I guess our one-on-one is off for a while.”

“Nah. I’ll be there.”

“You will?”

“You betcha.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.” Cass hesitated for a moment, then added, “But let’s try to get there a little earlier this week. That way we can wrap up while it’s still light.”

“Okay. Six?”

“Six is good. Unless you hear otherwise from me.”

“Great. I’ll see you then.”

“Khaliyah…”

“What?”

“Ask Jameer if he can drive you this week, okay? Until this is over? I don’t think you want to be walking around town.”

“Okay. I’ll ask him.”

“If he can’t, you’ll call me, right?”

“Right.”

“I’ll see you then. And thanks, Khaliyah.” Cass closed her phone and dropped it into her pocket.

“Sorry,” she said to Annie. “Where were we?”

“We were-” The door opened behind Annie and she turned in time to see Rick and the chief coming back into the room.

“Sorry for the interruption.” Chief Denver nodded at both women.

He took his seat at the head of the table, and Rick sat down next to Cass again as if nothing had happened.

“What else did you want to ask me?” Cass asked Annie.

“Do you remember anything else about that day? Do you have any other images in your mind?”

“Going down the steps for breakfast, behind my mother. Thinking she looked so pretty. That I’d never be as pretty as she was.”

“What was she wearing?”

“A white shirt. Pink-and-white Capri pants,” she answered without hesitation. “She had her hair tied back in a ponytail, like she always did, and it was swinging…”

She demonstrated with one hand.

“I used to untie it whenever I could. It was sort of a silly game between us. That morning as we were going down the steps, I reached out and grabbed hold of the ribbon and pulled it, thinking her hair would fall free, but she had used a rubber band, too, so the ponytail stayed. She laughed, like she’d outsmarted me that day, and she tied the ribbon back into her hair.”

“Maybe we should give Cass a break,” Rick said abruptly, looking directly at Annie. “I think we could all use a little break.”

Cass frowned. “We just had a little break.”

“Oh. Excellent idea.” Annie had noticed his expression, which said, Just trust me. “You know, I sat for several hours in the car on my way over here, and I would dearly love a chance to stretch my legs.”

She turned to Cass and asked, “Is there any place close by where I could get ice cream? I’m dying for an ice-cream cone.”

“There’s a place a few blocks from here.”

“Would you mind showing me? Are you up for a little walk?”

“Sure. Why not? Let me get my purse. I put it in my office.”

After Cass left the room, Annie turned to Rick and asked softly, “How much time do you want?”

“As much time as you can give me.”

Annie nodded, and walked into the hall, closing the door behind her.

Rick turned to the chief and said, “We really need to look at the Burke homicide file, Chief. I’m sorry. I meant what I said back in your office. I’m not trying to step on your toes and I’ll apologize in advance if you think otherwise. But right now, I need to see that file if it’s still around.”

“Of course it’s still around. There are a couple of boxes of stuff that we found at the scene. We’re not total rubes, you know,” Denver snapped. “What exactly are you looking for?”

“Whatever the evidence can tell us. Whatever there is that can tell us something we don’t already know.”

“You’re sure this is everything?” Rick looked up at Denver. He’d just gone through the contents of the three boxes of evidence that they’d lugged in from the department’s storage room at the end of the hall, where they’d been since being moved from the garage of the former chief of police when the new municipal building was dedicated. “These are the only boxes?”

“That’s all we have. Three boxes. I can vouch for that myself. All we ever had.”

“Any chance that another box of evidence was left in the garage when this stuff was moved here? A smaller box, maybe, that could have been overlooked?”

“No. I was one of the officers who cleaned out the chief’s garage after he died and brought the files here and put them in the storage room. I can tell you, every speck of evidence that was put in there came back out. The room is always locked, and Phyllis has the only key. You want something, you have to ask her for it, like we had to do.”

“The chief… what was his name?”

“Wainwright.”

“How was it that all your evidence boxes found their way into Chief Wainwright’s garage, anyway?”

“No other place to store the stuff. The old station was only three small rooms.” Denver shrugged. “Didn’t seem like a big deal back then. We didn’t think about things like chain of control or evidence being tampered with. We didn’t have anyplace else to store the old files, so when he built that big new garage, we took over part of it. Besides, it was a solved case. We had our man. He’d been tried and convicted. You can say what you want now, Agent Cisco, but that jury was convinced. There was no damned reason to think that anyone other than Wayne Fulmer was involved. I’m still not certain there is now.”

“Let’s both keep an open mind, Chief. I’ll allow that the evidence was pretty solid against Wayne and you’ll allow that maybe things weren’t what they seemed at the time. Now, what did Chief Wainwright keep in the other part of the garage?”

“He had an old car he was working on. Restoring. Don’t remember what it was, frankly.”

“So anyone could have gone into the garage and gone through the boxes?”

Denver frowned. “Not likely. Wainwright’s property was all fenced in back there. Top of that, he had the biggest, meanest dog on the Jersey Shore, had the run of that garage. The chief had one of those dog doors and the dog used to come and go. I can tell you from my own experience, that was one unfriendly dog. I can’t imagine a stranger getting past him.”

Rick took one more quick look through the box holding Jenny Burke’s clothing.

“You want to tell me what it is you’re looking for?”

“First thing, I’m looking for the ribbon Jenny had in her hair that morning. Cass said she wore a ribbon in her hair.”

“Yeah, I remember seeing it at the trial. The hair ribbon, her earrings. A thin gold chain she wore around her neck, it had a little heart on it. All those little things were in separate envelopes.”

Denver looked at the inventory.

“Says here there’s a ribbon, look right here. One pink ribbon. ” Denver leaned over the side of the box, pushing Rick aside. “It went in, it’s still here…”

He rooted around in the box for a few minutes, muttering, “Could’a fallen out of the envelope, gotta be in here someplace…” then looked up, puzzled.

“It’s not here.”

“I didn’t see it, either.”

“Where could it be?” Denver frowned. “It would have gone in, right after the trial.”