“Enough to believe she was a runaway,” Louis said, not bothering to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
Ahnert didn’t look at him. “I knew she was Willard’s daughter. I had seen her around town.” He paused. “I found out more about her when we got into the investigation.”
“Like what?”
Ahnert’s eyes came back to Louis’s face and rested there for several seconds before going back to the matchbook.
“She lived with her old man, took care of him, just the two of them in that house over in Edgewood Heights.” Ahnert was staring at the TV again. “Edgewood was a part of town that no one paid attention to, kind of low class. I think because of that people maybe thought Kitty was too. There wasn’t the outrage that would have come with the murder of, let’s say, the prom queen or a big-shot’s daughter.”
Louis had the feeling Ahnert was including himself in that damnation.
“But there was a quick arrest,” Louis said.
“Folks were afraid Cade might start hunting in better neighborhoods.”
Louis sensed a softening in Ahnert’s voice. “Do you believe Jack Cade killed her?”
“Sheriff Dinkle felt we had our man,” he said.
“What about you?”
Ahnert hesitated. “I believe every piece of evidence should be examined and explained. Things that aren’t explained leave doubts. Doubts that don’t go away.”
Louis let Ahnert’s words hang in the air as they both stared at the television. A clock ticked somewhere in the room.
“Detective, what were the doubts?” Louis finally asked.
Ahnert seemed frozen in the chair, but his fist closed slowly around the O’Sullivan’s matchbook.
“Dinkle was a good sheriff. He just liked to keep things simple for the lawyers.”
Louis leaned forward. “Are you saying you withheld evidence?”
Ahnert shook his head. “Of course not. The lawyers had every piece of paper I collected.”
“Then what happened?”
Ahnert unwrapped his fist and looked down at the matchbook, taking a deep breath. “I just had a few more questions to ask and I wasn’t allowed to ask them.”
“Dinkle stopped you?”
Ahnert shrugged. “It was probably nothing. Nothing that would prove Jack Cade innocent. Just a few loose ends.”
Louis clenched his jaw. Excuses from a cowardly old cop.
“If you couldn’t ask the questions twenty years ago, let me ask them now,” Louis said. “What’s the harm? Dinkle’s dead. You’re about to retire-”
Louis heard a car pull into the drive. Ahnert stood up and went to the window, bending a slat in the blinds.
“My daughter-in-law is home.”
“Detective,” Louis said, “I think you want to tell me something.”
“You’d better leave now, Mr. Kincaid.”
Louis stood up. “Okay, I get it. You got a lot of uniforms looking up to you. Maybe you don’t want your name brought up in this mess. I can understand that. But don’t leave me hanging on this. Jack Cade was convicted of killing Kitty Jagger. And this whole damn town is about to convict him for another murder.”
Ahnert looked suddenly very tired. Louis drew in a breath, angry at himself for getting angry.
“Detective, please,” Louis said.
Ahnert pursed his lips, then nodded. “There are two things in the file you should look at.”
“I don’t have the time to keep going through a file looking-”
Ahnert’s hard blue eyes silenced him. “You have more time than I had, Kincaid.”
Louis took a breath, forcing himself to calm down. “Okay, what about the file?”
Ahnert hesitated. “There is something in there that should make you ask why is this here? And the other is something that should be there, but isn’t.”
Louis felt his anger rising again. “Come on, man, don’t pull this Deep Throat act with me.”
The front door opened. A moment later, a woman appeared at the door of the den, her arms filled with grocery bags. Her eyes went from Louis to Ahnert and she smiled.
“Hey Dad, I see you got a visitor,” she said.
“Yeah, but he’s just leaving,” Ahnert said. “Let me help you with those, Brenda.”
“There’s more in the car,” she said, heading off to the kitchen.
Ahnert went out the front door. Louis followed him out to the station wagon in the driveway. As Ahnert was about to reach in for a bag, Louis grabbed his arm.
“Give me something real, someone to talk to,” Louis said.
“Talk to Kitty,” Ahnert said.
“Come on, Detective.”
“That’s all I’m saying,” Ahnert said. “Talk to Kitty.”
Louis let go of Ahnert’s arm. He thought of the sign outside Vince Carissimi’s autopsy room: Mortui Vivos Docent. The dead teach the living.
“What, the autopsy report?” he asked.
“Talk to Kitty,” Ahnert repeated. “But be careful.”
“Of what?”
Ahnert hoisted a bag of groceries up into his arms. “That you don’t start hearing Kitty talking back to you.”
Chapter Fifteen
The beeper went off. Louis grabbed it off his belt and tossed it on the passenger seat. He knew without looking that it was Susan again. He would eventually have to break down and call her. But not now.
Now he wanted to calm the demons that had been swirling around in his brain since leaving Bob Ahnert’s house, and he didn’t want Susan yanking on his chain trying to reel him back to the Duvall case, deal or no deal.
Talk to Kitty. Okay, he would go back and look at the autopsy report again. But he knew Ahnert meant more than that. Ahnert knew what every detective knew: Walk in the dead person’s shoes and you’ll find the killer.
So now he was on his way to find Kitty Jagger’s home. And her father-if he was still alive.
It didn’t take Louis long to find Edgewood Heights. It was north of downtown, an old neighborhood of small homes with the cookie-cutter, slapdash look of the Levittown boxes that had sprung up in the ’50s. It might have been a nice neighborhood in its day, populated by young couples just starting out. But now most of the homes needed work and had iron bars on the windows and rusted trucks in the drives. Louis suspected it had probably looked much the same when Kitty lived here.
Louis pulled up in front of 5446 Balboa. The house was a small rectangle, a faded gray that had probably been blue once. There were empty flower boxes under the plain windows. As he went up the cracked sidewalk, Louis noticed the overgrown shrubs and bare flowerbeds, the brick edgers scattered in the dirt. A sun-bleached plastic flamingo lay by the front door.
He knocked. He was about to give up when he heard the lock turn. The door opened and an old man squinted in the sunlight.
“Yeah?”
Louis knew from the police reports that Willard Jagger had been only forty-five when Kitty was murdered. This guy looked at least eighty.
“Mr. Jagger?” Louis asked.
The man retreated behind the door. “What you want?”
“My name is Louis Kincaid. I’m an investigator and I’d like to talk to you about your daughter.”
“Daughter? Ain’t got no daughter.”
“You’re Willard Jagger, Kitty Jagger’s father?” Louis asked.
Something passed over the man’s face. “Kitty?” he said. “You’re here about Kitty? Something happened to Kitty?”
Louis hesitated. The guy was really confused, or sick maybe.
“Mr. Jagger, may I come in?” Louis asked gently.
Willard Jagger’s milky blue eyes were searching Louis’s face, like he was desperately trying to recognize him. He started to close the door. But Louis realized he was just unhooking a chain. The door swung open. Louis went in.
Willard Jagger was standing in the middle of a small living room, looking back at Louis. He was wearing old baggy pants, a short-sleeved sports shirt and beat-up slippers.
“I’m sorry. I get mixed up sometimes,” he said. He rubbed his stringy gray hair vigorously, his eyes moving around the room and coming back to Louis.