“Whattya mean?” said Quilla.
“What were the ages of the three women?” he asked.
“Quilla’s Aunt was nineteen,” I said. “Alyssa was nineteen. And I’m not sure how old Virginia Thistle was.” I turned to Quilla. “Do you know how old Gretchen’s mother was when she disappeared?”
Quilla hesitated, her face flushed. Begrudgingly she said, “I don’t know.”
“Let’s check,” said Perry. He punched in a couple of keys on his computer. “We keep the closed cases in one file, active in another. I can understand how you might come up with ideas on who might’ve killed your Aunt. But rather than waste time trying to tie her death to an obscure case that’s officially been closed for nearly a quarter of a century, you’d be better off concentrating on remembering who your Aunt associated with before she
disappeared. Here we are. Virginia Thistle was thirty-two years old at the time of her murder. Two nineteen-year-olds and a thirty-two-year-old doesn’t sound like much of a pattern to me.” He leaned back. “Let’s let the Thistle case rest in peace and concentrate on Brandy Parker.”
“What about the Alyssa Kirkland case?” said Quilla.
“There is no Alyssa Kirkland case,” said Perry.
“Can’t you start an investigation now?” said Quilla.
“On whose complaint?” he said.
“Mine,” I snapped.
“An ex-boyfriend this long after the fact, filing a complaint?” said Perry. “With nothing except a remote hunch.”
“You’re a policeman,” said Quilla. “Are you telling me that if a person tells you that someone might’ve been a crime victim you’re not going to at least check into it?”
“If it’s within reason, sure. Based on what’s in the Alyssa Kirkland file, nothing happened.” He looked at me. “Del, I’m sorry to hear about this long lost love of yours, but you can’t expect to come in here fifteen years after she gave you your walking papers and want me to suddenly believe she’s a murder victim.” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t want to hear anymore about things that happened so long ago. It’s gonna be hard enough for me to solve a murder that took place nine years ago.” He turned to Quilla. “The way I understand it, the purpose of this meeting was for you to tell me everything you know or remember about your Aunt. That’s what I want to talk about. Nothing else.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at the cardboard box setting on the floor next to Quilla’s chair. “What’s in there?”
“Some personal things from my Aunt you should check.”
“Let’s take a look,” Perry said.
With a frown Quilla picked up the box and set it on Perry’s desk. She removed the items one at a time, setting them on the desk. Four photo albums overflowing with pictures, a calendar of the year Brandy Parker disappeared, five notebooks and a cigar box filled with knickknacks.
“There’s a lot of information here,” said Quilla. She picked up the notebooks. “These have her thoughts and feelings about things. It’ll take you a while to read them.”
“I’ll go over every line, believe me,” Perry said. “But what can you tell me about your Aunt that only you know?”
Quilla paused for a few moments, clearly unsure of where to begin. “Well…it’s like…I…”
“Tell him what you told me,” I said.
She looked at me, confused.
“About your Aunt and cemeteries,” I said.
She turned to Perry. “My Aunt was a cemetery buff.”
Perry looked at me, then back at Quilla. “You know that for sure?”
“I remember her talking about it. I didn’t understand what she meant because I was little and didn’t really understand cemeteries. She only started doing it near the time before she… near the end.”
Perry considered Quilla’s remark for a moment, then said, “This is good. Okay. What else?”
“You gotta understand that I was so young when I knew my Aunt… I didn’t understand… sex. So when she would say things to me about guys, I didn’t really know what she was talking about. But, after I started to read the stuff she wrote in her notebooks I was able to put things together. I think my Aunt really got screwed over by boys her age. I think she started to go out with older guys. Father figures. See, my grandfather, my Aunt’s and my mother’s father, was a real dork. When he died, nobody really cared. Not even my grandmother. And from what I’ve been able to piece together, he and Aunt Brandy didn’t get along. IIf I had to take a guess, whoever killed her might’ve been some older guy who she thought would treat her nice.”
“An older guy who might’ve also been a cemetery buff? Is that possible?” said Perry.
I shrugged. “Why not?”
Perry scribbled something down on a piece of paper, then said, “Do you think it’s possible that this ‘older’ man you think she might’ve been seeing is the one who introduced her to being interested in cemeteries?”
“There’s no way I could know that. Until Del mentioned the words cemetery buff I never even knew such a thing had a name.”
“Anything else I should know?” said Perry.
Quilla thought for a few seconds. “No.”
“Let’s see if I get any info from your Aunt’s things, then we’ll talk again.”
“Alright,” said Quilla.
“Del,” said Perry. “I need to talk to you for a second. Quilla, why don’t you wait out front with Greg?”
“Why should I be left out?”
“I need to ask Del about another matter.”
Clearly not believing Perry, Quilla blurted a suspicious, “Okay,” glared at me and walked out.
I looked at Perry as he began removing the possessions of Brandy Parker from the box.
“Who came up with this crap about three murders?” he said, lifting out a thick photo album. “Her or you?”
“Both of us.”
“I get the feeling you think that little shit’s a good kid.”
“She is. She’s troubled, but she’s okay. She’s honest and sincere.”
“This idea about Kyle Thistle’s wife and your girlfriend is so off the wall I’m not even gonna consider it.” He pulled out Brandy Parker’s notebook. “But what I will consider is what the kid said about her Aunt being a cemetery buff. I don’t know what it is about that, but ever since you mentioned it the day we found the body I’ve been haunted by it. I’ve felt that somewhere in it was the clue I need. And now that she says her Aunt was one, it places the victim in the cemetery.”
“She could’ve been killed somewhere else and brought to the mausoleum.”
“Or she could’ve been doing whatever cemetery buffs do, checking out a tombstone and the killer could’ve snuck behind her, killed her and hid her in the mausoleum. So I have to ask myself if the killer was a cemetery buff or not. And if he was… was he there with her, you know, like, on a date or something? Or was he just a stranger who popped into a cemetery to look at old tombstones and who saw Brandy Parker and maybe he knew who she was from her wild nights in bars… and maybe he thought she was sexy because she was wearing that tight ‘I’m A Virgin Islander’ T-shirt…and let’s face it, she was a babe. Only problem with this line of thought is what you said about the graves where she was hidden.”
“Whattya mean?”
“Nobody goes there to visit.”
“That reminds me,” I said. “We made a list of all the names on the headstones near the mausoleum.” I reached into my shirt pocket and removed the pieces of paper on which we’d written down the names and handed them to Perry. “We figured that maybe one of the names on the headstones might be the ancestor of the killer.”
“And?” said Perry as he picked up the sheets of paper and glanced at them without much interest.