“That’s stretching,” Sean said. “If they both committed a crime, why would Denise leave but not Victoria? Why would either of them leave unless they thought the law would catch up to them?”
“It’s a good question. Maybe Denise didn’t feel comfortable with what she was doing. Or tried to get out of a sticky situation. This is the most frustrating case I’ve investigated in a long time.”
“The embezzlement angle is very similar to Stan’s alleged embezzlement. What’s the odds that two friends embezzled from the companies they worked for?”
“Possible, I suppose. Yet … what if it’s a motive that wasn’t a real motive? A red herring, something for the cops to follow. With both Denise and Stan. It worked once, right? The police thought Denise absconded with funds. Do it again—after killing Victoria.”
“I think you should call in your boyfriend.”
“He said you can call him because you’re not FBI.”
“Not following— Oh, I get it. He doesn’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”
“Exactly.”
“All right, we’ll talk to him tonight, after we find out what Lucy learned at the bank.” Sean pulled into his garage and turned off his engine. “Now, time for research. But I’m starving, so food comes first.”
Chapter Twenty
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
Lucy and Nate arrived at the Youngs’ house only a few minutes past twelve fifteen that afternoon. Nate had gone a roundabout way to ensure they weren’t followed.
JJ Young opened the door before they knocked.
“Ginny has something she would like to tell you,” he said.
Lucy should have guessed that JJ would talk to his daughter, considering she’d given him the idea that Ginny, not Joe, knew what happened to Ricky.
They walked in behind JJ, and Ginny was sitting at the dining-room table, her hands clasped in front of her. Joe was nowhere to be seen, and Jill stood in the doorway, her hands on her large stomach and her expression concerned.
Ginny wasn’t crying, but her eyes were rimmed-red and she stared at her fingers. When her father cleared his throat she looked up and met his eyes. This was a strong girl, Lucy thought.
Nate sat across from Ginny and said, “Your dad says you have something to tell us.”
She took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said, looking him in the eye. Brave, as well as tough. Her voice was a squeak. She cleared her throat and said, “I know where Ricky is and I know why he left.”
“That’s good. Let’s start at the beginning, okay? Ricky left your house that Friday at six to go home.”
She nodded. “The next morning I went out to feed the chickens and collect eggs, that’s one of my chores. I saw Ricky’s bike behind the chicken hutch. I got mad thinking he came over to talk to Joe and not me, we were all supposed to go see the puppies together. Then I heard something but didn’t see him. I went up to the tree house and he was there. He’d slept there all night and he’d been crying.” She paused and bit her lip.
“Ginny, it’s very important that you tell us everything,” Nate said. “You’re not going to get in trouble from us, I promise you that. We want to find Ricky. We know that he’s called his grandparents on Christmas every year for the last three years. He didn’t say anything, but a private investigator traced the call to a specific region in Mexico. Since we know his parents are dead, we think he made the call.”
Ginny said, “Ricky went home that night and no one was there. He waited, played games, and then four men came into the house. They had the keys. His dad’s keys. He hid in a closet downstairs and heard them talking about his mom. He didn’t tell me everything they said, but he heard them say his whole family was dead and one of the men was a policeman. He didn’t know what to do, and he didn’t want to go to the police. I said we could talk to my dad, and Ricky was really scared that what happened to his family would happen to my family. And I got scared, because I couldn’t even think about how I would feel if my mom and dad and Joe were … were … were dead. So I didn’t say anything.”
She paused, bit her lip. “I’m really sorry.”
Lucy said, “You were scared, we all understand how that feels. Why did Ricky go to Mexico?”
“We decided to get a bus ticket to Austin because we thought that was far away enough and he could trust the police there. One of our friends moved there, and we went to his birthday party the summer before, so it just, I don’t know, it just felt right. And it’s a whole different police department. But getting to the bus station would be hard, it would take hours on his bike, and I knew my uncle Javi—he’s not a real uncle, he’s my mom’s cousin, but we call him Uncle—he was coming to visit the next week. I said maybe Ricky could hide in his truck, then get out when he got to town. He could take a bus to Austin, or go to the police in San Antonio or another town that Javi stopped in.
“So Ricky slept in the tree house at night, and during the day he stayed in the woods. He kept out of sight. I brought him food. And he said maybe he should talk to my dad. So we were going to, on Tuesday, when Dad got home from work. But then the two detectives came and Ricky got scared again. Because one of them was the man in his house.” Ginny’s eyes narrowed. “You can’t tell them this. You really can’t. Ricky wasn’t lying about the men in the house. He said they shredded all his mom’s papers and two of the men went upstairs and got suitcases to make it look like everyone just left. Ricky said they’d kill us all if he said anything and he didn’t have anything anymore because his family was dead and he didn’t want my family to be dead, too.”
Now Ginny was crying, and so was Jill, who sat down next to her and put her arm around her daughter. “Honey, no one is going to hurt us.”
“But they killed them, Mom! They did, and … and it just made sense that they would h-hurt us if they knew that Ricky was here. They told us that Ricky’s mom took a lot of money and disappeared with her family to Mexico, and I know they didn’t, and Ricky knew they didn’t, and so did the police! They lied to us, and so when Uncle Javi left, Ricky said he was going all the way to Mexico with him and just disappear. I thought maybe when Javi found out Ricky was in the truck that he would come back, but he didn’t. And— Well, I got this a couple months later.”
She pulled a worn, tightly folded piece of notebook paper from her pocket and slid it over to Nate. Lucy read over his shoulder:
G: I’m okay. Javier is very smart and teaching me everything he knows about cars and fixing things. He said I can stay as long as I want. He’s teaching me Spanish. It’s very quiet here and he has a dog. I don’t have a family anymore and I can’t trust the police. Be careful. Never, ever, ever tell them you know where I am because they might hurt your family like they hurt mine. I miss you and Joe. But you can’t tell Joe anything because he can’t lie. R.
“Can I keep this?” Nate asked. “I’ll make a copy and give it back to you.”
“Is Javi going to get in trouble?”
“No,” Nate said. “He didn’t know Ricky was in his truck, right?”