"Because I was ready to move on." He stopped it there and stared McDaniel in the eye defiantly.
The cop didn't blink. "I see. Well, let me ask you something else, Cullen. How well did you know Laura Turner?"
He shrugged. "She was house staff, I was stable staff. We don't mix much now and didn't at all then."
"You'd both been here for several years; are you trying to tell me you didn't know her at all?"
"Didn't say that. Said we didn't mix in those days. I knew her name, knew her to speak to, to say hello. Knew she had a kid. That's about it."
"Did you go to her daughter's funeral?"
That one caught Cullen unprepared, and he had to settle himself before answering evenly, "All the staff went."
"Just a matter of paying your respects, I guess."
"Yeah. Yeah, it was like that."
McDaniel nodded, and as if it had been a signal, the fed left the silent redhead's side and came to sit in the other chair across from Cullen.
"Still paying your respects?" he inquired casually.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Sure you do, Cullen. On a hunch, I asked Captain McDaniel to check something for me before we called you up here. And it turns out that the caretaker at the cemetery definitely noticed your visits. Once a week, ever since you came back to work at The Lodge. You visit Missy's grave, and you leave a single flower there."
Some hunch. Some goddamned hunch, Cullen thought.
He found himself gazing into a pair of extremely sharp blue eyes, and debated silently before deciding once again to hold his peace. He couldn't afford to be wrong, couldn't take the chance they'd lock him up before this was finished.
Because it had to be finished. This time.
Still, he had to say something, had to at least appear to cooperate, else they'd lock him up anyway. Part of the truth, he thought, was better than none.
"Okay, so I pay my respects. So I knew Laura Turner and her daughter a bit better than I let on."
He could see he'd surprised the fed, and pressed his advantage to lead the "conversation" in the direction he wanted it to take.
"I knew that little girl didn't belong here. Never should have been here. And sure as hell never should have died here. There's nobody from this place ever visits her. The caretaker told me that. So I visit. And put something pretty on her grave."
Slowly, the fed said, "What do you mean, she never should have been here?"
Cullen hesitated visibly, striving to look reluctant. "I overheard something, okay? Something that made me realize Laura's own little girl had died — and she had stolen Missy away from her rightful parents."
The silent redhead moved suddenly, leaving her chair and coming to join Cullen on the sofa. Her face was pale, those green eyes anxious, and when he turned his head to meet her gaze, Cullen felt an instant, surprising certainty.
So that's it. That's why she's here. He felt his heartbeat quicken and had to fight once again to remain calm.
"Are you sure about that?" she asked unsteadily. "Sure she had been abducted from her real parents?"
"Sure enough."
The fed said, "Missy never said a word to even hint that Laura might not be her real mother."
Cullen managed a shrug. "She wasn't but about two when Laura took her. By the time you came here that summer, I imagine she'd forgotten she belonged anywhere else."
The fed's eyes narrowed. "You remember me?"
"Of course I remember you. You could ride any horse we had, even the mean ones, and you didn't mind grooming them afterward. Not such an arrogant little shit as most of 'em were. And I'm thinking you were the one the others followed that summer. The bunch of you spent more time down at the stables than anywhere else." Cullen shrugged again. "And left Missy to play alone, more often than not."
He half expected to get a rise out of the fed with that one, but it was clear the younger man had been a cop too long to let something like that get to him. Then again, maybe he just knew Cullen had said it deliberately.
"Yeah, she didn't care for horses. Which makes me wonder how you spent any time with her."
"I'm wondering something else," McDaniel said suddenly in the slightly-too-loud tone of a man who'd been forcing himself to be silent against his will. "I'm wondering why in hell you didn't say a word after she was murdered about Missy having been abducted. Didn't it occur to you that it might be important information?"
Cullen looked at him and, coolly, said, "Fact is, I did say something about it. To the chief of police. And signed my statement, all right and proper. So they knew then. They knew Missy was a stolen child."
It was nearly midnight when Nate hung up the phone in the lounge and turned to face Quentin. "Well, the chief isn't happy with me. I woke him up."
"How can he possibly sleep with all this going on?" Stephanie demanded. She had come into the room as Cullen was leaving, and had been filled in by the others.
"Easily. He's six months away from retirement."
Keeping to the point, Quentin asked, "What about Ruppe's statement?"
"The chief denied it ever happened." Nate sighed heavily. "But either you've infected me with your conspiracy theories and I imagined it, or he was badly rattled by my question."
"Which do you believe? Gut instinct."
"He was rattled. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that Cullen Ruppe made exactly the statement he says he made — and for some reason that statement and any information supporting it were expunged from the record."
"Why on earth would they have done that?" Stephanie asked.
"Secrets," Diana said. She was still sitting on the sofa where she had earlier gone to join Cullen. "Someone wanted the secret of Missy's abduction kept under wraps."
Frowning, Stephanie said, "I suppose someone connected with The Lodge might have wanted that. I mean, if Laura Turner was unbalanced enough to have stolen a child, her living here all those years didn't exactly reflect well on whoever had hired her. But to suppress a statement... even if it had nothing to do with Missy's murder, the information in that statement was important to the investigation. It must have taken a pretty big stick or a hell of a carrot to persuade the chief to bury it."
"My father could have done it."
CHAPTER 16
They all looked at Diana, and it was Nate who said, "If we believe Missy was abducted from your family, Diana, then I'd think your father would be the last one we could suspect of suppressing that sort of evidence. They can't have known who took their child, let alone where she was, or they would have gotten her back."
"That's true enough. But suppose my father only found out after Missy was murdered."
"How?" Nate shook his head. "Cullen claims he never knew who Missy really belonged to, so even if his statement wasn't initially suppressed, no one else would have been notified of her death. And as Quentin has pointed out more than once, there was precious little media coverage. Never a picture run in the press that your parents might have recognized, even if the story had made the news outside this area."
Diana was afraid she sounded paranoid about all this, but Quentin kept telling her to trust herself, her feelings and intuitions, and that's what she was trying to do.
She didn't know who had murdered Missy, but she was utterly certain her father had had a hand in the subsequent investigation, and that he was responsible for the suppression of facts and information.
No wonder Quentin had found the trail to Missy's killer so cold for so long.
Holding her voice steady, she said, "I don't know how it happened. But there is something I do know." She looked at Quentin. "When I talked to Dad on the phone, when I told him where I was, he reacted. He was surprised, unsettled, maybe even afraid. Because I was here, at The Lodge. That's what shook him. And why would it have, if there wasn't something here he didn't want me to find out about?"