He nodded.
“What about boyfriends?”
“She was seventeen,” Mulvane said.
“Exactly.”
“The neighbors said they’d never seen her with a boy. The mother was in a coma in the hospital, the stepfather was dead and the sister said no boyfriend, but she wasn’t the most reliable witness, even if she hadn’t been in some kind of state of shock.”
Shep was surprised by his take on Charlie but asked, “Were you the one who found her?”
Mulvane nodded. “I was in the office when the call came in. I offered to go with the new patrolman to deliver the bad news about the parents to the family. The father was dead. The mother was missing somewhere in the river. It was the last thing I wanted to tell the family. The moment the one daughter opened the door, I felt like something was wrong. You know when you just have a feeling you can’t shake. The girl... What was her name?”
“Charlie Farmington.”
“Right, the stepsister. She said Lindy was in the house, but when we called for her, she didn’t answer. I insisted we find her. Turns out she wasn’t in the house and hadn’t been for some time. When we found the back door standing open, I told her to stay and I stepped out back. Found Lindy Parker only yards from the house. She’d been brutalized. Definitely a crime of passion. I figured, like you, a boyfriend. At first.”
“At first?”
“Turned out that according to the sister—Charlie? Odd name for a girl, don’t you think?”
Not if you knew the girl, Shep thought.
“Anyway, it seemed that Lindy didn’t have a boyfriend. A little hard to believe that she wasn’t involved with anyone, as pretty as she was in her picture. So that left the sister. The neighbor said the two fought like cats and dogs. Then the sister answers the door acting completely out of it, you know?”
Shep felt a start. Charlie was “out of it” before she opened the door and found out about her father’s death? “How so?”
“Ditzy, like she was confused and didn’t know what was going on. And she lies about her sister being somewhere in the house.”
“Wait a minute.” Shep remembered what Charlie had told him. “Are you telling me you actually suspected Charlie of killing her stepsister?”
“I sure as hell did. If you had seen how strange she was acting... Then I find the sister’s body. By then the kid was catatonic.”
“Shock does that to some people.” Shep was still trying to digest this. “Was Charlie questioned as a suspect?”
Mulvane shook his head. “The forensics guys found footprints out by the creek where someone had hidden like they were watching the house. Once they found blood in the same shoe track near the body and disappearing into the woods behind the house, they figured they had their killer. So it’s always been believed that some vagrant hanging out in those buildings killed her.” He shrugged. “We found a bloody baseball bat back in the woods but couldn’t get any DNA off it other than the young woman’s.”
“You must have tried to find the man who’d made those tracks,” Shep said.
“There was the neighbor kind of kitty-corner from the Farmingtons’ place, an old farmhouse way back off the road. Paul Wagner. I think he still lives there. He said he hadn’t heard anything. Had his television turned up because he was half deaf. I asked if he lived alone. I already knew he had three older stepsons. But he said his stepsons hadn’t been around all night. Turned out that they didn’t know the girls at all. The media was quick to blame some homeless psycho traveling the rails near the old house and my boss was happy to go with that. No one wanted to believe there was a killer in town that might come after his or her daughter next.”
The former cop sighed and finished his beer. “Social services took the sister. The mother was found in the river a day or two later, barely alive. Once she got out of the hospital, she buried her daughter and that was that. The killer escaped justice.”
Shep left with a large manila envelope with copies of the file on the murder. He felt shaken that Mulvane had ever believed that Charlie was that killer. What struck him was the question of who else might blame her and be looking for justice?
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHEN CHARLIE RETURNED to her apartment, she found Shep poring over stacks of papers strewn across her kitchen table.
“What’s all this?” she asked as she shrugged out of her coat and boots. She padded in her socks into the kitchen.
“You may not want to look at these,” he said, trying to shield her from what she realized were copies of the murder investigation and what might have also been copies of autopsy photos. There were also copies of what appeared to be newspaper articles on the case.
“All this is about Lindy’s murder?” She couldn’t help her surprise. The table was covered several inches thick.
She felt a stab of guilt. Her foster care mother wouldn’t let her follow the news about the murder. But in truth, she hadn’t wanted to know. She knew what had happened. Lindy had been killed behind the house. It didn’t matter who’d done it or how. Charlie knew who the real guilty person was.
“The original stories were pretty sensational so it’s no surprise that they went national,” Shep was saying. “Since then, your stepsister’s story keeps coming up whenever the area papers do stories on unsolved murders.”
She stepped past him to pick up a page-one newspaper article and recognized Lindy’s high school photo. She’d forgotten how beautiful her stepsister had been and said as much.
Shep made a not-that-beautiful sound.
“Seriously?” she demanded. “Look at this girl.”
“You’re more beautiful than she ever was,” he said without looking at her.
She eyed him suspiciously. “If you think flattery will get you—”
“It’s the truth,” he said, looking up at her in a way that sent fissures of pleasure through her. “Your face is more interesting.”
Charlie laughed nervously. “Okay, I’m going to take that as a compliment.” She put down the newspaper article without reading it. She knew what had happened. Well, enough of what had happened. She’d lived with it every day for fifteen years. “I’m sorry, but how is this going to help?”
“I’m not sure, but I have to start somewhere and I need to know all the facts.”
“I already told you what happened.”
“You didn’t mention that you told the police she didn’t have a boyfriend. Did she?”
“What? You think I lied to the police? She didn’t have a boyfriend. Did she have a crush on someone?” She shrugged. “But there wasn’t any boy who took her out on dates, if that’s what you’re asking.”