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I haven’t changed history. I’ve just given it a shove in the wrong direction.
Tonight, I intend to knock it on its backside and drag it kicking and screaming back into place.
I help Karen off the floor and out into the foyer where Burke is interviewing Jeff.
Glance at the clock.
I have roughly six hours to track down Danny’s stakeout…and keep him from committing the act that will destroy us all.
11
Jeff and Karen Holmes give us nothing new, at least from my recollection.
Gretta Holmes turned eighteen three months ago, and after a blistering fight with her father about her boyfriend, she ran away from home. They reported her missing, but the police never followed up because of the nature of her disappearance.
Besides, the parents suspected she was holed up with friends from school. Periodically, Karen had received phone calls from Gretta and had even given her money through a trusted friend, her softball coach.
Burke is giving me a run-down of this familiar information as we stand outside in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Uptown. The sun is heavy on the backside of the day, and the heat is starting to run down my back. Burke is eating an ice cream cone. I’m finishing off a Diet Coke.
I know what’s going to happen next, also. Burke and I will interview Teresa, the manager at Lulu’s diner, and she’ll tell us about how Gretta worked as a waitress. How she was a favorite with the patrons, and especially one who came in often. A blonde man, a little thick around the middle, who Gretta occasionally joined for an after-shift milkshake. Mid-thirties, he sometimes wore a suit, other times a t-shirt and jeans.
It rolls through my mind now, that maybe this guy is the father of her baby.
However, in the past, and probably again, Teresa hadn’t seen him on the day of Gretta’s murder—today—and Gretta was scheduled to work.
“I think we should head to the diner, and talk to her boss, again,” Burke says, predictably. “She was busy with the morning rush when we were there. I’m thinking she’ll have more information for us. Maybe she saw the car that picked her up.”
The car.
Yes, she had seen a car because it was remarkably out of place. A Lexus ES. Good memory jog, Burke.
But I just hum, and nod because circling through my brain is also the little information I know about Danny’s murder.
Danny and Asher were at a convenience store just down the road from their home, picking up ice cream when the shooting occurred. They’d just gotten out of Danny’s truck, were walking into the building when a 1990 Buick wood-paneled station wagon pulled into the lot, and someone pulled out an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and peppered the Mulligan men with bullets.
No one else was injured.
Danny and Asher died on the spot, the wagon drove away and Booker asked for my help on the case twenty-four hours after I’d held Eve in my arms at the hospital.
My guess is that he knew I needed something—anything—to do.
Now, I wonder if Booker had other motives, even then. Like…if we never found the murderers, maybe I could circle back in time…
The thought has my brain in knots, but I look up when Burke says, “Did you think the father was acting weird?”
“Yeah.” I pause. “I don’t know. Maybe he couldn’t look at his daughter like that. Beaten, dead, knowing that he wasn’t there to stop it.”
Burke finishes off his cone. “He looked angry. Like he’d like to end somebody.”
“Wouldn’t you, if your daughter was murdered?” That came out a little too strong, so I add a shrug. “I’m just guessing.”
Burke nods, wiping his hands. “But that’s what we’re here for. So he doesn’t do something stupid.”
Like turn into a drunk and destroy the only thing he has left, his marriage? I suddenly wonder where Burke’s been over the past two years as I tried to put together the pieces of my life. “Maybe he doesn’t trust us to find the killer. Maybe he feels like he’s alone in the fight, and that everyone has given up. That if he doesn’t do something, then no one will.”
I must be channeling the future me because there is too much passion in my voice to not let it take root and find hollow places.
“All I know is that if anything ever happened to my child, I’d never stop looking for the killer.”
