“You think Severs learned something that linked those brothers to the bank job? And that they killed him?”
He tapped the little stack of photocopies on the table. “For now, I’m saying his stepdaughter is the only little girl killed in the time period you’re talking about.”
“Or are you thinking that Severs could have been involved in planning the robbery, or just stumbled across something that led him to the money afterward?”
“I know, Elstrom; it’s tantalizing. Who’d suspect a cop? But as I said, there’s no hard evidence suggesting Severs was involved.”
“Except the death of a little girl in a double-wide trailer who had proof that her stepfather, a cop, was also a crook? And the disappearance, right after Severs got shot, of two potential suspects?”
“We need more than that.” His face tightened. “Like the originals of these letters.”
“Why burn the unit if Severs was shot? Why attract that attention?”
He shook his head. “I don’t expect we’ll ever know.”
He caught the smile that was beginning on my face. “You’ve heard something humorous here, Elstrom?”
“What are you going to do?” I asked, by way of not answering.
He glanced down at the letters in front of him. “I want the originals of these, to see if there are any fingerprints still on them.”
“And if there are no known comparison fingerprints of Lucia, and the typed letters are clean?”
“We’ll get Carolina Dare’s photograph from her Florida driver’s license, perhaps put out a bulletin.” He frowned at the grin I thought I had under control. “What’s so damned funny, Elstrom?”
“You know all of this is futile?”
“That’s funny?”
“That’s perfect.” This time I let the laugh out, at the relief of it. “Carolina Dare is so far gone no one will ever find her.”
“We’ll-”
“Sure you will,” I cut in, before he could make something up. “How hot is the money?”
“Meaning, was it marked with secret ink, or the serial numbers recorded, so when it starts getting passed at the Seven-Eleven, we’ll be able to race to the scene and apprehend the villain?” For the first time, part of a smile was beginning to play on his starched pale face as well.
“You funnin’ with me, Sergeant?”
“Just trying to wipe that shit-eating grin off your face. I don’t like being handled.”
“Me either, but you’ve got to admit, this wasn’t handling, this was finesse, born of necessity. Because of that bank job, and then the murder of that little girl and her stepfather, Carolina Dare had lived in fear that someone was coming for her next. Until she figured out how to make that bank money work for her.”
He scowled, but it faded away. “The money was not marked. We’ll never know if it is being spent.”
For a minute, we concentrated on not looking at each other. Then I asked, “If I gave you a dried blood sample, would you have it analyzed, store the results?”
He looked at my eyes, trying to figure if I’d said it for show. “To see if it belongs to your client?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you’d convinced yourself she was gone, with the money.”
“That’s what I want to believe, because she deserves it. And because it ends things for me. I don’t have to keep going around screaming that something bad has happened to her.”
“So why the blood sample?”
“Just in case.”
“I’d need a known comparison sample, one that definitely belongs to your client or a close relation.”
“It might take time to hunt down a relative.”
“Years, maybe decades?”
I stood up, felt in my pocket for my keys. Carolina’s flat key rested thin next to the one for the Jeep. I was beginning to think of it as a key to nothing, a false clue. That made it all the more comfortable in my pocket.
I went out to the Jeep to get the originals of the letters.
Sixteen
Driving back east across Iowa, as the sun eased into the horizon behind me, I let my mind play over the good certainty that Carolina Dare was alive.
She’d known the town from the zip code. After the box of money had arrived on Windward Island, the letters from the girl had stopped, and the threatening letters had begun, Carolina would have called out to a local paper or the police department in Cedar Ridge. She would have found out about the death of a girl in a trailer fire. More chillingly, she would have learned the girl’s stepfather was a cop, someone with resources good enough to find anybody.
Scared, she fled Florida. She found her way north, to Rambling, Michigan, a place cheap enough to get by on her column income, a place desolate enough to hide from a cop. She arranged to have her checks cashed and sent with her mail to a post office half an hour away. She locked the girl’s money in a bank box, because it was her only insurance, should the cop somehow find his way to her.
As safe as she could make herself, she stayed vigilant. She kept track of Severs, because by now she knew his name. She must have called the Cedar Ridge Police Department every day or two, from a pay phone, asking if the officer was in. “No, ma’am,” she would have been told, “can we have him call you?” “No need.” She’d laugh, relieved that he was still in Iowa, as she fired up another Salem.
Then one day she called and learned Randall Severs would no longer be in. He’d died in a car fire.
I could almost feel the way her lungs must have filled, deep, perhaps for the first time in over a year. She wouldn’t have let herself feel safe, not at first. Too many months of running and hiding couldn’t be erased like chalk off slate, and she must have suspected that somebody involved in the bank job had killed Severs. Still, Severs’s death must have muddied the trail to her.
She stayed put, kept writing her columns, trailing out to Woodton for her mail. She stayed edgy, too, running to the window every time a car drove by or a branch snapped at the side of the house. After a time, she must have seen her life unraveling like that, living scared in a sagging, drafty cottage on a desolate piece of dirt. It was then that she must have seen-really seen-that lockbox with one million, two hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars in it.
Money that nobody knew she had.
She considered all the angles, chose something simple: Leave the white cotton panties, the sensible JCPenney bras, the twenty-year-old Dodge, and the damned generic cans of food that, by then, all tasted the same. Hunt up someone to name as executor, someone she’d met at a job long ago, someone who wouldn’t remember her and make it personal, trying to find out what happened to her. Find a lawyer, some lethargic fellow working above a junk store, drop off a will. Then visit the lockbox, fill the bag or the backpack, spend a little of it on a used car, privately advertised in the Intelligencer. Then, after dark, daub a little blood, smash a few windows, slip on the coat, tuck the smokes into the pocket. Stop in West Haven, slip the keys though the lawyer’s mail slot. Then, after a few hundred miles make a couple of last calls from a pay phone someplace, talking low through a wad of Kleenex, to tell the answering devices of the lawyer and the blueberry cop that Louise Thomas was dead. Be gone.
I’d been had, by a terrified, hunted woman. It felt good. I was done.
I thumbed Reynolds’s number on my cell phone, got him on the second ring. “You should be a real cop, Reynolds. You’ve got a good nose.”
“I called you twice.”
“I’ve been to Iowa.” I told him about Carolina’s connection to Lucia Helm, the bank robbery, the two brothers who took off, and the late incinerated stepfather cop, Randall Severs. “All that gives the Iowa cops a fresh angle. That might get the Feds interested in the Kovacs brothers.”