Ash took a second to consider his words. He didn’t want to sound like a cop interrogating a witness. Still, there was information he needed.
“Did she have a happy childhood?” he finally asked.
“She wasn’t abused, but I don’t know if it was happy,” Dana said with a shrug. “Her dad took off when she was in grade school. Angel never talked about him, but someone told me that he ran off with another woman.”
Ash made a mental note to do a check on the missing Mr. Conway. If he had moved to Chicago, that might have been a reason for Angel to travel there.
“What about her mother?”
“During the day she works at the convenience store near the interstate and at night she cleans the bank. I don’t think she was home very much when Angel was growing up.”
Ash felt a pang of pity for Ms. Conway. It sounded like she’d done her best as a single mother to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Now her daughter was dead. It didn’t seem fair.
“Did Angel have any brothers or sisters?”
“No.” Dana lifted a hand to her lips to smother a sudden giggle. “Well, everyone said her father got half the women in town pregnant before he took off, but none of them admits to having his kid.”
Ash grimaced. He definitely needed to check out Mr. Conway.
“Was Angel a good student?” he asked.
Dana released a sharp crack of laughter. “She didn’t give a shit about school. She was planning to haul ass to Hollywood as soon as she turned eighteen.”
“Did she?”
“Yep. She went to California for a year. She thought that she was going to be a big star just because everyone was telling her how pretty she was.” There was a hint of bitterness in Dana’s voice. Ash suspected she’d been unfavorably compared to her supposed best friend since they were in kindergarten.
“I assume it didn’t work out?”
“Naw.” Dana tried to hide her hint of satisfaction. “She came back and started working at the store with her mom.”
Ash was beginning to get a sense of Angel Conway. A girl who’d been raised by a distracted mother and an absent father who had been desperate to escape her small-town life. “Did she have a boyfriend?”
“Lots of them, but none were serious.” It was Mason who answered, a hint of bitterness in his voice. Had he nurtured a crush on his sister’s friend? Probably. “She thought she was too good for the local guys.”
Ash nodded, turning the conversation in the direction that most interested him. “Did she ever have any trouble with the law?”
Dana’s brows snapped together with genuine outrage. “Angel was poor, but she wasn’t trash.”
He offered an apologetic smile. “I never thought she was. Believe me, the last thing I would ever want to do is tarnish Angel’s memory, but a multidimensional person is more interesting than a saint, don’t you think?”
There was a long silence as Dana battled between her loyalty to her dead friend and the opportunity to grab her fifteen minutes of fame.
Fame won out.
“I suppose,” she agreed, leaning forward. “Angel liked pills.”
He guessed the most likely drug of choice. “Painkillers?”
Dana nodded. “She started them when she was out west. She said they helped her nerves when she was auditioning.”
“And continued the habit when she came home?” Ash asked.
Dana hesitated, sending a quick glance over her shoulder. Ash suspected the local dealer was standing in the crowd across the room.
“When she could get the money,” she finally muttered.
Ash didn’t press. He could sense that Dana would clam up if she thought she might get one of her friends in trouble. Especially if it happened to be the beer-drinking man who was sending suspicious frowns in their direction.
He turned the questions to a less-sensitive topic. “Did she spend a lot of time in Chicago?”
Dana released a small breath of relief. “No. The bank repossessed her car last year. Even if she had the money to go to the city, she didn’t have any wheels to get there.”
“How did she get to the city?”
The young woman shrugged. “I’m not sure. I just know that a couple of months ago she told me that she had a fabulous opportunity in Chicago and she’d be gone for a while. That’s why I didn’t worry when she just disappeared.”
He shared a quick glance with Remi before returning his attention to Dana. They both had the same thought. This was how the killer lured Angel to Chicago. Or maybe he came and picked her up in his own car.
He needed to find out. Even in this small town there were plenty of security cameras. It was possible one of them had caught an image of the Butcher’s vehicle.
“What was the fabulous opportunity?” he asked Dana.
“She couldn’t say. She had to sign some piece of paper that said she wouldn’t tell anyone about it.”
“A nondisclosure agreement?” he suggested.
“I guess that’s what it’s called.” Dana grimaced, clearly uninterested in legal documents. “I thought at first that Angel was making up shit. She did that when she was feeling depressed about being a nobody stuck in this god-awful town. But one day she came by the hair salon—” She paused to send Ash a flirtatious smile. “I’m a fully trained manicurist if you happen to be in the mood for a pedicure. I give the best foot rubs in town.”
She waited for Ash to respond. When he refused to be lured by the promise of—actually, he wasn’t sure what he was being offered—she continued with a shrug. “Angel was there to show off a stack of money she got in the mail. She said it was a down payment.”
“Someone sent her cash?” he demanded in confusion.
A few serial killers created elaborate games to toy with their prey, but during the investigation five years ago they’d never had any indication that the Butcher did more than select his victim and slit their throat.
Was the killer evolving? Or were they completely off base in trying to pin this latest murder on him?
“That’s what Angel told me,” Dana said, her tone puzzled.
Ash gave a small shake of his head. He was losing focus. He’d sort through the variations in the murders once he returned to Chicago. Right now, he needed to finish his questioning and get out of town. Eventually, someone was going to walk into the restaurant who wasn’t so easily convinced that he was there about a documentary.
“You didn’t hear from Angel after she left town?” he asked.
“No. I sent her a couple of texts, but she ignored them. I assumed she thought she was too big a deal to waste her time with me.”
Ash glanced toward the crowd that was starting to file out a side door. It was obviously time to move on to the next hot spot. “Is there anyone else in town she might have contacted?”
Dana considered before giving a slow shake of her head. “She didn’t have a lot of friends. She might have called her mom, I guess.”
Sensing he’d pressed his luck far enough, Ash nodded toward Remi, who promptly slid out of the booth to head for the door. Ash dropped a five-dollar bill on the table and sent Dana and Mason a professional smile.
“Thanks for taking time to talk to me. You’ve both been a lot of help.”