Bill Whitmire was smoking a cigarette on the front steps of his townhouse. “Detectives, thank you for coming.”
“I didn’t get the impression we had much choice in the matter.” It was the kind of comment she had learned by now not to make, but her mind was still back in Max’s office, and she’d had about enough of these people. She’d grown up collecting albums by bands this man had made. But every piece of evidence showed that Whitmire was a crappy father, and now he was trying to make up for it by using his influence to control their investigation. “Where is this alleged witness?”
“There are two, actually. Right inside.” He used the handrail to help him stand. “My wife tried to tell you from the very beginning this wasn’t self-inflicted—”
“And we are treating this case as a homicide, Mr. Whitmire.” Against my best instincts, she wanted to add. “We’ve been following all relevant leads. In fact, we’ve found some information on your daughter’s computer that we’d like to talk to you about.”
“Okay, that’s fine. But talk to these two people first. My wife told you she thought it had something to do with those strange kids she found here with Julia. And now it turns out she’s right.”
“You already interviewed these witnesses?” she asked. “We assumed you were simply collecting information from the tip line to pass on to us. Even that goes far beyond the typical involvement of private parties in a criminal investigation.”
“My intention was to do this the right way.” The front door cracked open and Katherine Whitmire stuck her head out, but her husband didn’t bother to pause. “We hired Earl Gundley’s firm. He served his full twenty-two years of service. The plan was for him to handle it all just like he would have as a cop, but with full-time attention to only one case. But then these two showed up, right at our doorstep, ready to talk.”
“Then you should have sent them directly to the precinct,” Rogan said.
“I told you it was a bad idea, Bill.” The flat, quiet voice did not belong to the same bossy woman who had met them at the door yesterday morning. The spark was gone. Ellie suspected a pharmaceutical influence.
Bill Whitmire had enough energy for both of them. “Did you really expect us to wait? We didn’t want to lose them. We had to act fast. Even after they talked to us, it was hard enough to convince them to cooperate with the police. We had to promise to give them ten thousand dollars of the reward money now, just to get them to stay until your arrival.”
Terrific. Now it looked like straight-out bribery.
Rogan jumped in before she raised the confrontation level even further. “Look, what’s done is done. Let’s hear what they have to say, and we’ll take it from there.”
“I can live with that.” Whitmire held the front door open, then followed them into the foyer. “They say they know who killed our daughter. They say it was some girl who tells everyone she’s a boy. She goes by the name of Casey. Casey Heinz.”
Jimmy Grisco took another look at the schedule he’d picked up at the Buffalo Greyhound station.
Packing was easy enough. His uncle’d thrown him out two weeks earlier. Grisco didn’t mind. He’d already stayed two weeks longer than the month he’d initially been promised.
Jimmy lugged the same duffel bag out of this shithole that he’d carried into it, holding all the same familiar clothes, plus the Adidas shoe box containing all the old letters.
He took one last look around the motel room before shutting the door behind him. There was an 11 p.m. bus leaving that night. He’d be at the Port Authority Bus Terminal by 6:30 the next morning.