Sage sat at his desk flipping through the pages of the Lily Esposito file. The car Raquel Walker described hadn’t belonged to Bud Ivan, but could it have belonged to Lily’s murderer? Culver Creek was a small town, and the neighborhood down near the creek was even smaller; a strange car would have been noticed, and likely by more than one resident. Yet as he flipped through the pages of the report, there didn’t seem to be any follow-up investigation on the car. It was yet another example of the shoddy work that had been done on the case.
Sage went back and reread the statement from Raquel Walker, and that was when he noticed something he had missed before. There had been two officers there when she made her statement, and one of them was Steve Arlo.
Sage jumped up from his desk and went over to where Rod was regaling a couple of junior officers with some tale of heroic derring-do.
“You know where Steve is?” Sage asked.
Rod looked pissed that Sage had interrupted his story, but Rod had a gift for gab. Once he got going on one of his stories, he might end up talking for a quarter of an hour or more.
“Why?” Rod asked. “You going to arrest his son again?”
This earned him a laugh from the two other officers. Sage kept his expression impassive. He wasn’t going to take the bait. Kevin Arlo was never formally charged, but that decision had not been Sage’s. Nor had it been Steve’s. He wisely kept himself out of the whole affair. It was Rayanne who made the final decision. Sage hadn’t agreed with her. Kevin needed a wakeup call. Sage hadn’t shared this opinion with Steve or any of the other officers, but maybe Kevin had shot his mouth off, or maybe Rod was just trying to get him riled up.
“I need to ask him a question about the Lily Esposito case.” Sage started to return to his desk, but Rod wasn’t done with him.
“Here’s what I don’t get, why in the hell are they paying you all that money to stick your nose into some dusty old files and chase after some murderer who’s long gone?”
“Because maybe he’s not long gone,” Sage said. “And either way, that little girl deserves justice.”
At this Rod rolled his eyes, and the two junior officers laughed like he was a comedian. Sage might have delivered a longer explanation about closure for Lily’s relatives and the importance of a fresh perspective and the benefits of modern technology, but Steve walked in the door and Sage decided he had wasted enough time talking to Rod and his cronies.
Steve didn’t remember the car.
“We talked to a lot of people that day,” Steve said. “We canvassed the whole neighborhood. It was a hot summer day, up in the nineties I think.”
They stood at the far corner of the squad room.
“This was at the Walker house,” Sage said, and he thought he saw a flash of recognition. Sage double-checked the notes. “It was a single mom and her son, a few years older than Lily.”
“A widow,” Steve said.
“What?”
“She was a widow,” Steve said. “I was there the night her husband died.”
Sage’s cop instincts tingled.
“Natural causes?” Sage asked.
“A bad fall down the stairs,” Steve said. “Fell at an awkward angle and broke his neck. It was an awful thing.”
“Did you suspect the wife at all?”
“She was out of town,” Steve said. “Poor bastard was home babysitting the boy.”
“Parenting,” Sage corrected automatically.
“What?” Steve asked.
“He wasn’t babysitting because it was his own kid. He was just performing his parental duties.”
“Okay,” Steve said.
He started to walk away.
“But what about the car? Do you know if you ever followed up on it? It seems like it could be significant.”
Steve wasn’t facing him when he said, “I think we worked out that it belonged to a friend or a relative of one of the other neighbors. Just someone who came in for a visit or something.”
Sage stared at the retreating back of his colleague. A minute ago, he couldn’t remember anything about the car, and now suddenly he knew it belonged to a friend or relative of one of the neighbors?
“You sure about that?” Sage asked. “There’s nothing in the file.”
“There were a lot of notes, not everything got saved. That was back before we digitized everything, so some stuff might have been lost in one of the floods.”
This was the first Sage heard about records being lost in a flood. Was it possible he didn’t have the complete file?
“Hey, Sage, can I talk to you a second?” Rayanne said, poking her head out of her office.
He had a feeling this was going to be a dressing down for how he had handled the Kevin Arlo thing.
It wasn’t about the Kevin Arlo thing. Rayanne returned to her desk chair, while Sage sat down in one of the chairs facing her desk.
“How’s everything been going?” Rayanne asked.
“No complaints,” Sage said.
“You making any headway with that old murder case?”
“Not as much as I would like,” Sage said, which felt like a gigantic understatement.
Rayanne nodded absently. “I’ve got a favor to ask of you,” she said, and Sage wondered if the son of another officer had run afoul of the law. But then she said, “Mick Hillman is visiting the Rixby plant tomorrow.”
The politician’s face appeared in Sage’s head as one of his recent campaign videos played out. Family values and hardworking Pennsylvanians and other vague, meaningless catchphrases swirled around in his head.
“Is he under investigation?” Sage asked hopefully.
Rayanne shook her head. Sage didn’t have anything against Hillman personally. It was more of an aversion to all politicians.
“After touring the plant,” Rayanne said, “he’s scheduled to make a speech on the lawn outside. Hillman has his own security detail, but we’ve been tasked with providing crowd control.”
“Are we really expecting the masses to turn out?” Sage asked.
“Apparently there’s some sort of bonus being offered to Rixby employees and their families who attend the speech,” Rayanne said.
“Bribery,” Sage mused.
“I know it’s not in your job description,” Rayanne said, “but would you be willing to put on a uniform and pitch in?”
Sage could have come up with a thousand better ways to spend his time, but Rayanne wouldn’t have asked him if she didn’t really need him. Besides, it might be a good opportunity for him to show some solidarity with the rest of the Culver Creek police force.
“You can count on me.”