Tony awoke on June 27 to find Casey sitting up in bed looking at the video of Caylee’s visit to her great-grandfather on Father’s Day. At first, he thought she was crying, but there was no trace of tears on her cheeks—not even a glistening of moisture trapped in her lashes. She rubbed her eyes and brushed back her hair. It seemed to Tony that she was going through the motions, but there were no genuine emotions behind them.
Later that morning, Casey left the apartment. Once again, she ran out of gas. First she called Jesse. “My car ran out of gas. Can I borrow a gas can?” she asked, knowing that Jesse kept one in his pick-up truck.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at Fifty and Goldenrod.”
Jesse was at his parents’ house on the other side of town. “There’s just no way I’m going to be able to get over there to help you out.” He asked why she’d run out of gas, but couldn’t get a satisfactory answer.
When Jesse wouldn’t come to her rescue, Casey called Tony for help. “I’m on Goldenrod,” she said. “Somebody helped me push the car into the Amscot lot.”
Casey disconnected the call and texted Amy. “Ran out of gas. Two weeks in a row. How does that work?” Once again, Casey mentioned the nasty odor in her car. “There definitely was part of an animal plastered to the frame of my car,” she said. “I got rid of it.”
Amy called Casey to find out if she was all right, and to see if there was anything she could do. Casey assured her that she was just waiting for Tony to pick her up.
She was still talking to Amy when Tony drove past Amscot on the opposite of the divider in the middle of the street and stopped at the red light before making a U-turn. He spotted Casey standing between her car and a Dumpster in a patch of shade, talking on her cell. The Pontiac Sunfire certainly looked like it had been pushed. It sat cockeyed, straddling two parking slots.
He pulled up and she clutched two bags as she hopped inside. One contained clothing, the other had the booty she’d plundered from her parents’ freezer—a box of Tyson’s fried chicken and another of freezer pops.
Casey abandoned her car in a lot that her mother drove past every day. With the clumsy way it was parked, Cindy couldn’t overlook it for long.
“How?” Tony laughed. “I mean, who runs out of gas?”
She shrugged and blamed her fuel gauge.
“So what do we need to do with your car?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it. You worry about school and packing for your trip to New York. I’ll take care of it while you’re away.”
That afternoon, Casey sent out a big batch of messages, inviting friends to join her at Fusian. She sent one of them to Jesse Grund. He was reluctant to go. He believed the environment there was very drug-friendly and he didn’t care for the music they played. Casey pressed. She was worried about him, she said, insisting that a night partying at Fusian would cheer him up.
“Who’s watching Caylee?” he asked, knowing of the rift between Casey and Cindy.
“She’s at the beach with the nanny for the weekend,” she said.
On Saturday, Casey texted Amy, asking if she could borrow Amy’s gas can. Amy explained that all her stuff was in storage and it might take her some time to locate it.
On Monday, June 30, Casey, driving Tony’s Jeep, dropped him off at the airport for his flight to visit family and friends in New York. At 9:45 A.M., Amy’s phone rang, waking her up. “This is Casey. Come open the door.”
“Are you outside of it?” Amy asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m asleep.”
“Open the door and go back to bed,” Casey insisted.
She came into the apartment chattering away. Amy knew it was senseless to try to stop Casey when she was on a roll. She knew she couldn’t sleep through Casey’s non-stop monologue. She abandoned her plans to get more rest.
Casey asked again about Amy’s gas can. Amy said, “Well, why don’t we go to Target? I’ll buy a can and you can use it and give it back to me. I can always use another one.”
They hopped into Tony’s Jeep and went shopping. Casey complained about not being able to see Caylee. “But it’s better for her. She’s just playing and having fun. They’re going everywhere. They were at Busch Gardens for a while. At least, she’s in a good place and not involved in all this other stuff.” She launched into a repeat performance of one of her stories about her parents’ constant fights.
The two hung out together until Amy had to go to work that evening, and Casey spent the night there. She woke up Jesse Grund the next morning at 10:15. “Please, I need a favor,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Well, I need to take a shower before I go to work. I’ve been staying at Tony’s, but I don’t have a key to get back into his place, and he’s out of town. I can’t go to my parents’ place.”
“Okay, fine. You can come over.”
Jesse was surprised when she arrived. She didn’t look like a woman in desperate need of a shower—she looked neat and clean already. And, to Jesse’s disappointment, Caylee was not with her. After she cleaned up, they sat around watching television and talking for a couple of hours until Casey left for “work.”
She got her nails done that day and arrived at Rico and Amy’s place after 11 P.M. and spent the night. When Rico woke up, he thought that Casey had left—but then she emerged from the garage, where she had been doing laundry.
That night, she and Tony talked on the phone until they fell asleep. “Did you ever get that car taken care of?”
“Yes,” she said. “My dad took it to a dealership.” That was another lie. The car had been towed to an impound lot on the same day Tony flew to New York. Her father thought the car was with Casey in Jacksonville.
Another night, Tony teased her again about staying in New York. “I’m going to have to probably get a job. I have to work to get money, to save it up for school, before I come back down.”
Once again, emotion flooded out of Casey. She was overwrought. Tony was surprised that her reaction was, again, so over the top. The intensity of her commitment made him nervous.
On July 2, Amy said that Casey ripped off her stash of vacation cash. Amy, in a panic, asked Casey if she knew what had happened to her money. Casey made up a story that Amy had been sleepwalking and hidden the money in a safe place somewhere in the apartment.
While Amy searched high and low, Casey visited Cast Iron Tattoos on South Orange Avenue, where she was a regular customer. Her usual artist, Bobby, put a new tat on her shoulder blade. The design proclaimed “Bella Vita,” Italian for “A Beautiful Life”—not exactly the sentiment you’d expect from a woman whose child was nowhere to be found.
That night, Casey posted a poem on her MySpace page:
On the worst of days
Remember the words spoken.
Trust no one,
Only yourself.
With great power,
Comes great consequences.
What is given,
Can be taken away.
Everyone lies.
Everyone Dies.
Life will never be easy.