“It’s a believable defense for the mess you’re in now,” Louis said.
Cade was silent. The Haitian man was ranting, his girlfriend’s crying growing louder.
“You’ll have to tell me everything that happened twenty years ago,” Louis said.
Cade sucked in a slow, long breath that expanded his chest under the orange jumpsuit.
“The only thing I’m going to say is that I was set up.”
Louis didn’t reply.
Cade raked at his hair with both hands, glancing again at the Haitian. Suddenly, he spun toward the man. “Hey, shut the fuck up!” he yelled.
The Haitian man and his girlfriend froze, staring at Cade.
Louis tapped on the plexiglass.
“Cade, forget them. Look at me.”
Cade’s eyes shot back to him.
“Now tell me about Kitty Jagger,” Louis said.
Cade shook his head slowly. “It’s over, man.”
“How did you lose the garden tool?”
“Look, I told you I don’t know nothing about it.”
“Who else had access to your tools?”
“I said I didn’t do it, man.”
“But someone-”
“I told you!” Cade spat out. “I told you I don’t know who killed that girl!”
Louis’s eyes flicked up to the deputy watching Cade’s back, then he looked back at Cade.
“She had a name, Cade. Her name was Kitty.”
Louis was amazed to see a small smile tip Cade’s lips.
“Kitty,” he said slowly. He cut Kitty’s name into two sharp syllables, holding each between his teeth before spitting them out.
Louis felt something tighten inside his chest.
“I didn’t kill Kitty,” Cade said. “Kitty killed me, man.”
Cade sat back in his chair, staring at Louis. His eyes had gone opaque in the florescent lights. The Haitian man had started up again, his voice ricocheting off the concrete walls.
Louis rubbed the bridge of his nose. Suddenly, the room seemed to close in on him, the stale stench, the clang of a door, the muted bellow of a deputy and the desperate babbling of the Haitian man.
Louis rose sharply and pushed back his chair.
Cade looked up. “Where you going?”
“Think about what I said, Cade,” Louis said. “Think about Kitty Jagger. She might be the only person right now who can save your ass.”
Louis didn’t look back as he walked away. At the door, the deputy buzzed him through.
Out in the hall, Louis paused. He could still see Cade’s eyes, as murky as that damn plexiglass between them. He pulled in a deep breath. Nobody should have eyes that you couldn’t see into.
Chapter Eleven
Louis took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. When he put them back on, the screen of the microfiche machine came back into focus. He had been at the Lee County Library for nearly two hours, tracking down anything he could find on Kitty Jagger’s murder.
“Excuse me.”
Louis looked up into the face of the librarian.
“We’re getting ready to close.”
Louis looked at his watch. It was only five.
“We close early the day before Thanksgiving,” she said.
Thanksgiving? Man, he had forgotten. He punched a button and the machine spit out a copy of the article on the screen.
Outside the library, he paused, then decided to go to the bar across the street. He ordered a Coke and arranged the clips in chronological order. He started with the earliest one, from the Fort Myers News-Press, dated April 11, 1966. The headline said, GIRL FOUND DEAD AT DUMP SITE.
It reported that the unidentified body of a young woman had been found at the city dump by two garbage men making an early-morning run. It was only a couple paragraphs on the bottom of the front page. Other news had taken precedence that day: Frank Sinatra had married Mia Farrow in Las Vegas.
Louis took a sip of the Coke.
He knew the dump site; he had passed it on the drive down to Bonita Springs. The locals called it Mount Trashmore. It was a giant landfill that had been sodded over to make it look nice for the new subdivision that was just a mile downwind. If it weren’t for the steady stream of garbage trucks and the gulls circling overhead, you could almost believe it was just a pretty hill. If South Florida had hills.
The next article was dated April 12th. Police had used a gold locket found on the body to help identify the girl as a local teenager named Kitty Jagger, age fifteen. The medical examiner’s report said she had been stabbed, beaten and raped. She had been dead about two days when found. Police had no suspects but had located a bloody garden tool that appeared to be the stabbing weapon.
He set the article aside and turned to the next one dated a week later.
It said Kitty Jagger had last been seen on April 9th, the day of her death, by her boss at Hamburger Heaven, a drive-in where she was a carhop. She had worked her usual five-to-eleven night shift and had left to walk to the bus stop as she always did. There was an interview with Kitty’s widowed father, Willard Jagger, an unemployed roofer on disability who said that when his daughter did not come home, he called the police to file a missing person’s report.
The article was illustrated with a small black and white picture of Kitty Jagger. It looked to be a yearbook photo, a blow-up from a group shot, probably Kitty’s freshman class. In it, Kitty Jagger was staring straight ahead, a small smile tipping her lips. From what Louis could tell, she looked like your average pretty high school girl, with long blond hair parted in the middle and hanging straight around her round face.
Louis moved on to the next article, heavy with a black headline: SUSPECT ARRESTED IN JAGGER MURDER.
This was the first mention of Jack Cade. There was a photo of Cade being led into the Lee County Courthouse. He was wearing a jumpsuit like the one Louis had seen him in yesterday, but his face was that of a very different and younger man.
Cade’s hair was flat and black, combed straight back away from a striking face. He was thinner, sinewy, the muscles in his upper arms tight against the grip of the deputy’s hands. The difference was the eyes. Cade’s eyes in this picture registered anger and bewilderment; they were nothing like the hard, flat eyes that stared back at him from behind the plexiglass.
Louis moved to the story. A bloody garden tool, recovered with the body, had been traced to Cade, who, like all lawn maintenance workers, regularly dumped his trash at the site where Kitty Jagger’s body had been found. The article also revealed that a pair of semen-stained panties had been found in Cade’s truck, and that the O blood-type, derived from the semen stain, matched Jack Cade’s type.
Louis sighed. Ronnie Cade hadn’t mentioned that.
The article finished up with a description of the damage done to Kitty’s body: blunt trauma to her head and twelve stab wounds to the chest and shoulders. Louis set the clip aside and looked down at his arm.
About halfway up his forearm was a long thin scar. He ran his fingertips over it, feeling the faint ridge. Then he turned his hand over and looked at the knife scar that marked the fatty part of his palm, cutting sideways to the center. His little finger was still numb at the tip, and sometimes when it was cold and wet, he could feel the muscles in his hand tightening beneath the skin.
He finished the Coke and took off his glasses. If he was going to start digging into this, he would be facing some tough opponents. Mobley and the prosecutor, Vern Sandusky, were sure to fight it.
And Susan. God, he wasn’t looking forward to telling her what he was thinking.
The bartender ambled over. “You want another one?”
“No thanks. Where’s your phone?”
“By the john. But it’s out of order.
Louis gathered up the clips. It was just as well. This was something he was going to have to do in person.
Louis pulled the Mustang to a stop in front of the yellow bungalow, double-checking the address he had written on a scrap of paper. It was a neat little house, tucked in the shadows of some swaying banana trees on Sereno Key. Susan Outlaw’s car, an old silver Mercedes sedan, was in the drive and a bicycle lay in the yard.