Page 76 of A Week Away
Suzie. Aunt Suzie. She’d arrived a few minutes before Joanne was shot, sat there in the van and watched her get shot and then drove away. That had to mean she had something to do with it. Didn’t it? Had she hired someone to kill Joanne? Who? Who had she gotten to do it?
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
September 17, 1996
Tuesday evening
After we fast-forwarded through a couple of hours before the murder and a couple of hours afterward, we watched Joanne get killed a few more times. I was trying to work out where the shooter might have gone. Obviously, he took the hoodie off and stashed it somewhere—possibly in the ceiling of the second-floor men’s room. Then where did he go? Did he wait until he heard the police sirens? Did he come out of the building at the same time as the people who worked there? At its height, there was a crowd of twenty or twenty-five people. Even though the building was fully occupied, there were enough different businesses that no one would have noticed someone they didn’t recognize. They probably saw people they didn’t recognize all the time. Even if you only counted temps and clients.
I looked through the small crowd several times but didn’t see anyone who stood out. Not that I could see anyone clearly. The cameras were actually a couple hundred feet away so people were very small. And, as Rocky had explained, the quality was low. The people I did recognize, I recognized partly because of other factors: Joanne’s jacket, the Voyager with a bumper sticker, Mr. Cray coming out the back of the building with his briefcase. Any of those could be wrong, except I knew they weren’t.
Before I left, I gave Rocky a couple hundred more out of Joanne’s stash. He asked me, “Where are you from? You’re not from Michigan.”
“I’m from California.” And as soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t want people to know that much about me. “San Diego,” I lied.
“That’s where I’d go. If I was gonna leave. I’d go to California, re-invent myself.”
“Not a bad idea.”
I drove back to the corporate flophouse. I’d decided to deal with Aunt Suzie in the morning. I hated the idea that she was involved. But she was there and that meant something. It might even mean I got to go home soon.
I missed home. I missed Ronnie. Terribly. We’d only been together a few months when we bought a little house on Bennett and moved in together. It was a crazy thing to do. I nearly backed out three or four times. That would have been logical, but imagining my life without Ronnie has been difficult almost from the moment I met him.
I debated whether to call him. I wanted to wait until I could tell him exactly when I’d be home. He was going to be furious with me... and rightly so.
When I walked into the motel room the phone was ringing. That was disturbing. No one knew where I was. I picked it up and said, “Hello.”
“Hey, it’s Cass.”
Okay, one person knew where I was.
“Hey. What’s going on?”
“I need to you to come back to the house, okay?”
“Why?”
“Just come back.”
“You can’t tell me over the phone?”
“No. I can’t.”
“Are people still there?”
“Some, yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
I hung up. Honestly, I had no idea what that was about. Driving over I weighed the possibilities. He probably had some theory about who killed his mom or his dad or both. Probably one that was way off base.
I wondered if Aunt Suzie would still be there—and whether I should talk to her about what I’d seen. No, I shouldn’t talk to her. Not in front of Cass. If she’d hired someone to kill Joanne I didn’t want him to know. I didn’t want him getting any ideas about—well, I didn’t really think he'd kill his aunt. Would he? Oh, God, maybe. No, if she was involved then I needed to convince her to turn herself in. For Cass’s sake.
The Voyager was still in front of the house when I got there. The Cadillacs were gone, as was the Corvette. A purple Honda Civic I hadn’t seen before sat in the driveway. The Belvedere was gone. I assumed he’d pulled it into the garage.
Before I could ring the doorbell, Cass opened the door. He’d been waiting for me. His eyes looked worried, but all he said was, “Hey.”
He walked away and I followed, shutting the front door behind me. The living room and dining room had been cleaned up with everything put back in place. In the kitchen, Aunt Suzie was at the sink washing the few remaining dishes, while Heather sat at the breakfast nook with a very good-looking Hispanic guy about her same age.
