“Probably in triplicate, but I don’t want her to know we’re looking into her father’s death unless I have to.” Emmy finished typing and dropped the phone in her lap. “Bill looks so good for the shooting. He was broke and desperate. The Rawleys were on his ass. Allison was divorcing him. Dad loved a money motive, but shooting a woman and her child to get five grand for a pawned camera isn’t much to hang a case on.”
“If it’s not Bill, then who?”
“The same old same old. Reggie, the Rawleys, and I’ve still got this UnSub worrying the back of my mind. And on top of that, we’ve got the clues Allison left. God knows what that’s pointing to.”
“It could be five different things that are connected to Allison and Mandy but have nothing to do with the shooting.”
“We could churn butter with all these circles we keep going round.” Emmy turned onto Main Street. “The crime scene was sloppy, amateurish. The killer couldn’t shoot straight. We’re still missing a bullet and a casing, which means at least one of the gunshots is unaccounted for. We’ve got three hundred grand that hasn’t been touched in twenty-four years. None of the five suspects fits what we found inside Allison’s house. If you wannakill somebody, you go in and kill them. Tell me what I’m missing.”
“I have no idea,” Jude admitted.
Emmy tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. Jude recognized the expression on her face. She was working through a piece of information, trying to find the meaning. “What did Millie mean when she saidyou know who Ruel Clifton is?”
Jude held back a curse. Emmy really did remember every word anyone had ever uttered. “I slept with Ruel before he met Cynthia. She found out after they were engaged. Obviously, it didn’t stop them from getting married.”
Emmy said nothing.
“I told you that you wouldn’t have liked me back then.” Emmy tapped her fingers again. “Were you ever married?”
“Yes.” Jude felt cautious. She had seen Emmy take quick turns during an interrogation to throw off a suspect. “We lasted six years. He’s a good guy. Remarried, loves his wife. Loves his kids.”
“You didn’t want children?”
“Wasn’t in the cards.” Jude forced her eyes to stay on the road. “What happened between you and Dylan?”
Emmy shrugged. “He said he couldn’t compete with solitude.”
That sounded familiar. “It’s not a bad idea for you to have time alone to work on yourself.”
She laughed. “The only time I’m ever alone is inside this car. I’ve got grown men acting like ducks nibbling me to death at work all day, my sister sleeping on my couch when I get home at night, and my son pretending like I didn’t tell him to move out six weeks ago.”
Jude tried to put them back on more solid ground. “It’s good that Cole found the camera. He’s been chomping at the bit for more assignments.”
“You are bizarrely obsessed with horse imagery.”
Jude sighed audibly as Emmy turned into the hardware store.
There were three other cars parked in the lot. Inside the building, the overhead lights flashed to warn customers that they were about to close.
“Cole texted back.” Emmy’s phone was out again as theywalked toward the entrance. “Verona PD doesn’t have the case file on Ruel’s drowning. His death certificate lists it as accidental. All the guys who worked on the Verona force back then are either dead or warehoused in a Florida nursing home.”
“That leaves Taybee.”
“Louis might know the details. They don’t lose the older memories until later. Mom couldn’t tell me what she’d had for lunch, but then she’d yell at me for making an A-minus on a spelling quiz in fourth grade.”
The glibness in her voice didn’t match the troubled expression on her face. It was clear that no matter how much she worked to block it, Myrna was never far from Emmy’s mind.
Emmy jerked open the door. “Stop analyzing me.”
Jude followed her winding path through the store. Wooden bins. Hand-painted signs. It was exactly the same, down to the smell of sawdust and machine oil.
She told Emmy, “Nothing was open on Sundays when I grew up here. The whole town closed at two on Saturday afternoon and didn’t open back up until eight o’clock Monday morning.”
“What did you do for fun?”
“Pummeled each other with metal lawn darts and took turns screaming into a box fan.” Jude gestured toward the back. “Millie said that Louis is always in the office.”
“I need to find Sonny and make sure he’s okay with us talking to his dad. Wait here.”
