“We may not have much crime in this county, but hell, we don’t even have the budget or personnel to handle what little we do have, much less remove any of you from those duties in order to investigate a seventeen-year-old crime.”
He held up a hand when all three started to speak at once.
“Do you know how much work is involved in cold cases?”
Flournoy’s face brightened again. “There’s a seminar down in Miami…”
“Yeah, right,” Rex said, and had to laugh. “That’s gonna happen. I’m going to send both of you to Miami about the same time I buy Hummers for everybody.” He got serious again. “It is incredibly tedious and time-consuming. The paperwork alone is enough to kill you. And I know how much you guys love paperwork.”
Their eager looks faltered a bit, as he had hoped they would.
“And speaking of paperwork that needs doing,” Rex said ominously.
His deputies took the hint. They picked up their coffee cups and departed the office together, leaving Abby alone to face the bad mood their boss was in this morning.
Rex swiveled his chair so he could stare at his old friend Abby.
“What’s up with this?” he asked her.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Or maybe I am. It started when we found Nadine, Rex. I started to think more about that girl who was killed, and how maybe now we could find out who she was-with all the new technology, like Edyth said.”
“And find out who killed her?”
Abby shrugged. “I don’t know about that. I just want to put a name on her grave.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Abby blinked. “Don’t you want to identify her? Wouldn’t everybody like to know who she was?”
“Of course. That’s not what I meant. I guess I mean, why you?”
Abby took her time answering and stared over his shoulder, out the window, while she thought about her answer. “Maybe I’m just curious.”
“There must be more to it than that.”
Abby could only shrug again. “I really don’t know.”
He took a breath and sat up straight in his chair. “Okay. Well, here’s the deal. I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen, not unless we get some kind of lucky break like we’ve always been depending on. We’d have to exhume her to get DNA, Abby. And we can’t afford to do that, and we can’t afford to do any of the rest of it, either, and don’t give me any baloney about you paying for it. I’ve seen how bad your house needs paint and I know how old your truck is. So just forget about anything like that, all right?”
“All right,” she said, so quickly and meekly that he was immediately suspicious.
“Abby…?”
“No, really, all right, Rex. I mean, what could I do by myself? Nothing.”
“That’s right,” he said firmly. “Nothing. Please do exactly that.”
Abby got up from the chair, gave him a warm smile, and started toward his doorway. When she got there, she turned around and said, “Your mother didn’t want me to do anything, either.”
“My mother?”
But Abby had already gone, leaving his doorway empty but his office filled with the musky scent of her perfume. Or maybe that was John Marvel’s cologne, Rex thought, and smiled in spite of himself.
He got up, walked over to his office door, and shut it.
Then he went back to his desk, picked up his pile of keys that lay on top of it, and rifled through them until he found the one he sought: a tiny silver key that fit into the bottom drawer of his desk. Once unlocked, the drawer revealed only papers…until he lifted the papers and then the false bottom beneath them. Below it, there was a box about four inches square.
He reached down and lifted the lid of the box.
Inside, there was a red circlet of fabric and elastic. The girls he had gone to high school with had called them “scrunchies.” This one had a dark stain on one side of it. It also had several long dark hairs curled within its wrinkles. When his father, Patrick, and he had lifted the dead girl into their truck and laid her down on the cold metal floor of it and covered her with burlap feed sacks, Rex had been the last to climb back down to the ground.
His father and brother had walked on toward the doors of the truck.
It was he who had sighted something dark lying in the snow.
He had reached down to pick it up, and found that he was holding a red elastic band that had tied back her hair.
The sound of someone clearing her throat made Rex look up toward his doorway.
He closed his fist over the red hair band, quickly hiding it.
Rex was shocked to see that a half hour had passed while he had just sat there.
Edyth Flournoy stood in the doorway with a grin on her face. Upon getting the boss’s attention, she said, “Hey, boss, I forgot to tell you…saw your brother doing something interesting this morning.”
Rex heaved a big sigh. “What? Robbing a bank? Driving under the influence?”
“Nah.” She laughed, assuming he was joking. “Shacked up with Abby, from the looks of it. I passed him coming from her place early this morning.”
Sensing a sudden change in the atmosphere, the deputy said, “Guess it’s none of my business,” and quickly walked away.
Rex felt the flash of intense anger he experienced almost every time his brother crossed his mind. It didn’t improve his temper to think that Abby had sat right there across from him and never said a word about being with Patrick last night. Not that she was likely to tell him, he had to admit, knowing how he felt about it, as she did. If he ever thought it was getting serious between Abby and Pat, he thought he might have to arrest her for something just to keep her from making the biggest mistake of her life. Or maybe he’d just shoot Patrick. He had to admit, though, that if he could have shot his older brother and gotten away with it, he probably would have already done it by now.
Rex opened his fist and stared down at the object in it.
It had slid off her hair when they handled her. When he had found the red “scrunchie” lying in the snow, he had hesitated for a moment, staring at it. Then he had quickly stuffed it down into his coat pocket, meaning to give it to his father. Or maybe he never had really meant to do that, he thought now, alone in his office. Maybe he had always meant to keep it as a private memento, since he was the one who had given it to her.
Chapter Seventeen
August, 1986
Maybe it was the heat-110 degrees on the thermometer that was screwed to an outside corner of the barn-that propelled him into following Patrick that summer day. Or maybe it was the fact that for three days out of the last five, Patrick had vanished from the fields where they were both supposed to be baling hay, leaving Rex to sweat through the work alone.
Despite the fact that he felt resentful enough to stick Patrick’s face in a water trough and drown him, Rex hadn’t complained about it to his parents. That wouldn’t do anything except bring parental wrath down on his own head. They had never allowed the brothers to come running to them to settle fights; from an early age, the boys were instructed to settle it themselves or to stew over it privately, their choice. So even when his father yelled at them that they weren’t getting enough work done fast enough to please him, Rex’s eyes had shot pitchforks at his older brother, but he’d kept his mouth shut while his parents were around. He figured his father wasn’t stupid. Nathan could read the signs. He knew he had one hardworking, sporadically dutiful son and one lazy-ass, rebellious one. Even if Nathan didn’t know the precise nature of the disagreement this time, he surely knew Patrick was the cause of it. But he still expected Rex to handle his complaints on his own. He also expected the hay to get put up while the weather held, whether both brothers did their shares or one brother did it alone. It was one of the prices the brothers paid for having a father who also held a full-time job as the county sheriff. Without two strong sons to work in his place, Nathan could never have pulled it off.