Sage spent most of the day dealing with a stolen car case that didn’t require a modicum of actual detective work. The victim already knew her worthless ex had taken the vehicle, and sure enough, when they located it, there he was passed out behind the wheel. Unfortunately for the car’s owner, a large maple tree now resided where the engine should have been. The busted radiator was still steaming when the police arrived on the scene.
By the time they made it back to the station and got all the paperwork completed, it was after four. Sage kept a close eye on the time. Steve Arlo plopped a stack of forms down on his desk for him to sign off on.
“That’s the last of it,” Steve said.
“Thanks,” Sage said as he quickly began to scribble his signature in all the right spots, glancing again at the clock as he did so.
“Not quite quitting time yet,” Steve said with a little bark of a laugh.
“Got a meeting with a witness scheduled,” Sage said.
A worried look passed over Steve’s face as he glanced at the pile of completed paperwork. “About the stolen car?”
“No, not that,” Sage said quickly. “This is about the Lily Esposito murder.”
Steve nodded. “That’s a relief. For a second there, I thought I was going to have to redo all this.”
Culver Coffee was one of the few thriving businesses on the small town’s main street, and so Sage had chosen it as the spot to meet up with Maura Gautner, who had worked at Rixby with Honoree years ago. She smiled when he walked in. Even without a uniform, she made him right away.
“You have very good posture,” was her response when he asked.
All he had told her on the phone was that he had a few questions about her former coworker Honoree. Maura hadn’t been interviewed by police during the original investigation, but as Sage started digging, her name turned up a couple of times. Besides working with Honoree, she had on more than one occasion given Honoree rides to and from work, and possibly had also helped Honoree locate the apartment that she and Jade had moved into a few months after the murder.
Maura still lived in Culver Creek but no longer worked at Rixby. She had a part-time position at the grocery store. “It’s better than the factory, but only just,” she had told him on the phone.
“We worked in different parts of the factory,” Maura said. “I only ever saw her in the break room or at church on Sundays.”
“Did you know her before her daughter was killed, or only after?” Sage asked. He scalded his tongue on the cup of too-hot green tea in front of him.
Maura shuddered a little at the word killed.
“I knew her before too,” Maura said. “That’s when she started coming to St. John’s. My sister taught the girls Sunday school.”
“They attended church regularly?” Sage asked.
“More than just the holidays, if that’s what you’re asking,” Maura said. “It was just Honoree and the girls, though. Rick was never there.”
“That was her husband? The girls’ father?”
Maura nodded. She sipped the coffee in front of her.
“I was under the impression he didn’t live with them,” Sage said.
“Honoree eventually had enough and kicked him out,” Maura said. “I guess that must have been a year or so before the murder. She should have ditched him long ago. He was a drunk and couldn’t hold a job.”
“Did he ever hit her? The girls?”
“Well, you don’t really know what goes on in someone’s house, do you?” Maura asked. “I definitely wouldn’t have put it past him.”
There was almost nothing about Rick Esposito in the case files. Had the police even considered him a suspect?
Sage thought of the morning’s encounter with the drunk ex and the stolen car. People didn’t make the best decisions when inebriated. Could Rick Esposito have gone on a bender and done something to harm his own daughter?
“Do you think he could have murdered Lily?” Sage asked.
“Rick?” Maura frowned. “It’s hard to imagine how anyone could do a thing like that, let alone her own father, but if he was liquored up, not acting like himself . . . I don’t know. Maybe.”
“A neighbor in the apartment building Honoree and Jade moved to said you used to drive her to work,” Sage said.
Maura nodded. “She had car troubles a lot and didn’t always have the money to get it fixed. She missed a lot of work after Lily died, and then those heartless bastards at Rixby laid her off. Really, who does a thing like that?”
“What about Jade?” Sage asked. “Did you know her at all?”
“That poor child,” Maura said with a shake of her head. “That awful night, Honoree really lost both of her daughters. Jade was never the same after that.”
“I guess there were too many memories here for Jade. That must have been why she left.”
“Left where?” Maura asked. Less than a second later, Sage saw a look of regret flash across her face.
“Does Jade still live here in Culver Creek?” Sage asked.
“What, now? Oh, I don’t think so. I mean, I wouldn’t know, would I? I lost touch with Honoree after she was fired. Tried checking in on her when I could, but I got the impression she wanted to be left alone.”
Sage studied Maura. There was something she wasn’t telling him, something about Jade.
“You sure you don’t know where Jade is?” Sage asked.
Maura pushed her coffee cup away even though it was still half full.
“No, like I said, I lost touch after Honoree got fired.” She looked out the window at something. Sage followed her eyes but saw nothing. “I didn’t realize how late it was. I have to get going. I have to get dinner started.”
After she got up, Sage glanced at his phone. It was just after five.
As Sage stood up to leave, he heard someone call his name and turned around to see Steve Arlo at the counter.
“Guess I’m not the only one who can’t stand to drink that swill at the station,” Arlo said.
Sage offered up a half smile as a response. He was pretty sure if he confessed that his to-go cup was filled with green tea and not coffee, he wouldn’t be helping his image any with the rest of the Culver Creek police force. Working with him today had proved that Steve was a nice enough guy, but no way was he going to keep some juicy tidbit like the fact that Sage was the kind of weirdo who drank green tea to himself.
“Nice work today,” Sage said.
“Hey,” Steve said. “It’s Cubberson’s birthday today. The guys were going to head over to the Creek Tavern to have a few rounds of beer in his honor. Why don’t you join us?”
Sage appreciated the olive branch Steve was offering. He had a pretty good idea Steve hadn’t cleared this with Rodney or the others, and he could already picture the looks of disgust on their faces when he sauntered in to spoil their fun night out. In the interest of diplomacy, he considered accepting, but he knew it would be suicide. If he was worried how green tea would go over, he couldn’t imagine how his colleagues would react when he ordered a Coke instead of a Budweiser.
“Thanks,” Sage said. “Another time maybe. I’ve got some things I need to take care of tonight.”
He hoped his excuse didn’t sound too hollow.
“Sure,” Steve said.
As he walked out of the coffee shop, Sage felt Steve’s eyes on him.
Sage parked in the little pull-off near the creek, then followed a path worn smooth by the feet of fishermen who came down to this spot to do some angling. The sun was getting low in the sky, and he imagined this would be a scenic spot to watch the sunset, but for him the natural beauty was eclipsed by the knowledge he was only feet away from the spot where a little girl had gasped her last desperate breaths, only to fill her lungs with creek water.
They found Jade in a catatonic state only a short distance from where her sister lay dead in the water. Had she seen the whole thing? By all accounts she became non-verbal after the incident, but Sage had checked the school records, and Jade had continued to attend school up until her mother died in her junior year of high school. After that, the girl seemed to drop off the map.
She must have eventually started speaking again. Why hadn’t the police ever gone back and interviewed her? Surely she must have remembered something from that night. Those he had talked to said Jade was never the same after Lily’s murder, that it had left her irreparably damaged.
Well, murder could do that, couldn’t it? What would he be doing right now if Melodie had never been murdered? He imagined himself living in some swanky apartment driving a luxury car with some bigwig corporate career, but somehow he didn’t think that would have been his destiny. Maybe he wouldn’t have become a cop, but something told him he wouldn’t have been living a substantially different life.
And his parents? Would they still be together if Melodie hadn’t been killed? Their relationship had always been strained. As far back as his middle school years, Sage could remember lying awake in bed as he listened to them arguing from the other side of his wall. He had wondered then if they would get a divorce, and if they did, which one he would have to live with. Had he and Melodie been the glue holding their parents together, and once she was gone the bond became too brittle? Or maybe it was the stress of the whole thing—the murder investigation, that constant feeling of expectation. He could recall the three of them sitting around in that house waiting for the phone to ring and deliver the answers they all so desperately craved.
The murder was the worst part, but the not knowing was its own special hell. That sort of thing might have been enough to destroy a perfectly happy marriage, let alone one that was on the rocks.
Was it that much worse for Jade, who had been with her sister the night she was killed? Surely she must have felt helpless and even partly responsible. Then there was the fact that she was most likely an eyewitness. Did she have no recollection of that night? Or was there another reason she had never spoken to the police?
Bill was sure Jade had not killed her sister, and Sage was inclined to agree, but what if the medical examiner had gotten things wrong? Could Lily have been sitting or squatting in the water when she was attacked. If so, her younger sister might have then been able to strike her from above. Maybe it was an accident. Jade could have been carrying a rock that was too heavy for her tiny arms, and as she struggled to hold onto it, the wet rock slipped through her hands and hit her sister in the head. But the autopsy report made it clear that Lily had been hit with force, a rock dropped from just a few inches above her wouldn’t have been capable of causing the sort of injury she sustained.
Did he want it to be Jade because it would have fit so neatly? It would explain all of Jade’s strange behavior, but so would watching your older sister have her skull bashed in right before your eyes. Murder could have a devastating impact on families, but it didn’t make those relatives murderers.
He thought of a post on the web sleuth forum by someone who used the handle DaddysLilGirl. She was the first to suggest Sage Dorian had murdered his sister. His diminished academic performance, in her opinion, indicated his guilt. And why, she wanted to know, had he decided to go into law enforcement? He had been tempted to respond to the post and refute her various points, but that would have meant outing himself and revealing his identity. So he had kept quiet.
But what DaddysLilGirl and those who agreed with her conclusions failed to understand was the day that unknown person killed his sister, they had murdered part of him as well. How could he possibly go on living the same life when he wasn’t the same person anymore?
He might be one of the few people out there who could relate to and understand Jade. He wanted so desperately to talk to her.
It was his assumption that when Jade disappeared after her mother’s death, she had left town. With no surviving family members here, she would have wanted to put as much space between herself and this awful town as she could. That made perfect sense to Sage, but Maura’s reaction made him wonder if he had gotten this wrong.
Maybe Jade hadn’t left town right away. How long had she hung around for? Could she still be here? He doubted this. Culver Creek was not so large a town, and he hadn’t been able to turn up anything on Jade since after her mother died. He should have pressed Maura. She knew something about Jade. Maybe at the very least she could give him some hint of where Jade had gone after she left Culver Creek.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and called her. It rang but went to voicemail. He did his best to sound kind but firm in his message, but he didn’t think it mattered. She wasn’t going to return his call.
Sage stood outside his car and studied the small strip of asphalt. To call it a parking area might have been too generous. It was nothing more than a strip of pavement adjacent to the shoulder of the road. There was room for two cars max.
The parking area was significant because it was the nearest creek access to where Lily had been killed. The surrounding area was residential. This little strip of pavement and the short path that led down to the creek was town property. The murderer had either walked down this little path to the creek or had done as Lily and Jade had most likely done and cut through a backyard to get there.
The terrain on the opposite side of the creek meant that the killer almost certainly came from this bank. Navigating the narrow path or one of the backyards in the dark suggested to Sage someone local, someone who knew the area well enough to find their way around in the dark.
No one recalled seeing a car parked in the pull-off that night, but Sage had read the interviews closely. While no one could recall seeing a car there, there was also no one who could say with certainty that the parking area had been empty. Sage slowly turned around. There was only one, maybe two houses that would have really had a clear view of the parking area, and then only from certain windows. How likely was it that they would be looking out them in the middle of the night?
Someone could have parked in the parking area long enough to walk down to the creek and murder Lily and leave without anyone ever noticing, but why? And how would the killer have known Lily and Jade would be down at the creek? Had they arranged to meet the girls there? Was it just dumb luck?
Lily would have tried to run away from a stranger she met at the creek. She wouldn’t have stood there facing them. His skin prickled as he stood there looking at his car parked on the shoulder, but he wasn’t seeing it. He was seeing Melodie’s little Kia, pulled off at the side of the road less than a hundred feet from where they had found her body.
She had been working the closing shift that night. She was killed sometime between ten fifteen and eleven p.m. Her car had been in working order, so why would she have pulled off the road and gotten out of it? Could she have stopped to try to help what she assumed was another motorist in distress? He knew his sister and couldn’t see her doing something so foolish. Not that late at night, anyway. She would have called for help, perhaps, but she wouldn’t have stopped her car and got out, unless it was someone she knew, and that was the thing, wasn’t it? Like Lily Esposito, Melodie had been facing her killer. She hadn’t tried to run away.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” Melodie said to him. He could hear her voice like she was right there, and like history repeating itself, he ignored her phantom voice. He stepped into his car, slammed the door after him and drove away like he could escape his past mistakes.