Fran Castle had been at the casino with a friend. When the friend couldn’t find her...they hadn’t come together, you see. But they’d planned to spend the day together. Play some machines, have something to eat and then maybe head back in or play bingo or I don’t know. They were supposed to spend the whole day together. The woman who reported her missing—Terry Highsmith—said they’d gotten into a little tiff over some kind of animated machine.”
“This Terry Highsmith was checked out, right?” Nigel asked.
“Thoroughly. She never left the casino. Cameras everywhere, you know.”
“What about Fran Castle?” Andrew asked.
“She got a phone call and then left the casino. That was at 10:30 a.m. Then there were no more cameras. After Fran went missing, Terry waited there all morning, growing more and more anxious.”
Vinnie had told them he didn’t remember much. He did. In his mind, Raina thought, Vinnie remembered it all well—he just didn’t remember anything he thought could be of use.
Vinnie was still deeply bothered by what had happened.
Haunted by it.
By the failure of law enforcement or anyone else to find Fran Castle before she’d been killed.
Twelve noon.
Raina glanced at Axel, who gave away little of his thoughts. But she knew him. And she knew his next move would be to find out just where Frank Peters and Loretta Oster had been between 10:30 and noon on the day that Fran Castle had gone missing.
Again, the question rose in her mind.
Why?
Why kill someone like Fran Castle?
Or any of the others for that matter, including Jennifer Lowry?
“I just don’t know anything more about that day. Terry couldn’t understand why Fran would have left the casino. They had a spat—but just a really little tiff because she’d been at the machine, and Fran had sat down, and the bonus had come in. It hadn’t been big. Fran had just moved over to another bank of machines...”
And then disappeared.
“Normally, it takes time for an official missing-persons report. But her having just walked out, with her car abandoned, and Terry Highsmith so insistent that something had to be wrong, well, it got things moving. Sometimes idiot folks start walking around along the shore of the canal looking for birds or even trying to snap pictures of sleeping gators. Made sense for us to look. Never made sense that we couldn’t find her.”
“What about her friend?” Axel asked. “Terry Highsmith? Was there ever a time she was able to tell the police anything more? Fran’s friends, her enemies, was she in debt?”
“I talked to her after I found the car. She was babbling, mostly. Very frightened because I’d found the car abandoned. She was the one to suggest Fran might have just gotten angry and headed up to the Seminole casinos. The abandoned car was what made that theory a little wild. Terry was trying to think of reasons Fran might’ve left. But she was scared for her friend. Just disappearing like that wasn’t the kind of thing Fran did. And she hated bugs and mosquitoes and alligators and snakes. There was nothing wrong with the car—it was just parked off the Trail. We all wanted to believe there had been a problem, that she’d called another friend, but she was never seen again. Until now,” he added softly.
“Maybe talk to Terry Highsmith again,” Jon suggested.
“Dead,” Vinnie said. He paused. “I kept up on it, you know. Couldn’t forget the way Fran Castle had just seemed to vanish. I’d call Terry every few years and just check on her, and, well, she died five years back. An aneurism or some such thing—just dropped dead at work one day. She’d been a manager at one of the big grocery stores in Miami. Anyway, we tried everything. Everything and everyone. And never found Fran Castle or any reason for why she disappeared.”
“What happened to her estate?” Kylie asked.
“What estate? She didn’t leave any kind of estate. Maybe a few thousand dollars. She was never declared dead, so... I don’t know,” Vinnie said.
He looked old and sad. Raina was next to him and she set a hand on his arm.
“We can only imagine how much of yourself you gave to trying to find Fran Castle,” she said softly. “Thank you.”
He looked at her strangely, probably wondering what a dog trainer might have to do with the search for a killer. But he did know Axel had “spooky” friends, so he might not be as confused as he could have been.