Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,27

“is the last thing I’m going to be able to get you for a while.”

Kade tapped the folder again. “Then who emptied his bank account?”

“Huh?”

Tap. Tap. Tap. “It’s all in the folder. I included the bank transaction. His account was emptied less than a week ago.”

“Jesus.” I stared at the folder and said again, “Jesus.” Then, wiping my face, I said, “Yeah, ok. Thank you. I guess . . . maybe drugs? I mean, how do you explain something like this? His mom plays tennis with my mom. What’s the fucking warmup? Take a few swings, limber up that tennis elbow. Hey, sorry again my boy killed your boy.”

Kade shrugged and grabbed the file I’d given him. “You’re asking the wrong guy. All I can tell you is good luck.” He flipped the folder open to stare at the papers. “Tell me about Cassandra Mayfield and Cyprus Manor.”

“Right.” I sat up a little straighter, retrieved my phone, and tapped through several screens. Kade’s request this time had been a little odd, and I checked my notes to make sure I had it right. “Twenty-three years old. White. Female. It looks like the investigation started pretty hot. The family filed a missing person report, and the DuPage Sheriff’s Department took it seriously. Nothing gets the buzzards flapping like a rich white girl vanishing, and the sheriff wanted Cassandra back home before the AP could send it out. The deputies he put on it are solid guys, Castanera and Fletcher. They had a line on a ‘person of interest,’” I drew the quotes with one hand, “who was, of course, a black man who had the bad luck of taking odd jobs in the Mayfields’ neighborhood. The guy was new to the area, he’d been in Leakesville for a possession charge, and he immediately moved up to number one on their list.” I sat back and shrugged. “You can guess how far they got with him.”

Kade leaned back in the booth, the vinyl crackling under him. “I’m assuming they found nothing to hold the guy. Especially with no hard evidence to pin it on him.”

I shook my head. “They didn’t even get that far. Dante Coleman slipped and accidentally put his head through a noose. They found him a few days later. Castanera and Fletcher are pretty sure the Mayfields weren’t involved, at least, not directly, but some good old boys decided to take matters into their own hands. Castanera and Fletcher kept digging. The more they dug, the less they found. Dante Coleman hadn’t done jack shit since getting out of Leakesville—just a guy trying to make a living.”

“Fuck,” Kade said with a sigh. “Anything else I need to know? About the area or her case?”

I shuffled the flatware that had been wrapped in the napkin. Then my hands stopped, and I opened the folder in front of Kade. I started laying out the photographs I’d printed out for him. Some of them looked like they were from college yearbooks. Some of them, with dangerous-looking shoulder pads, looked like they were 80s glamor shots. Some of them were in black and white, women with their hair marcelled and looking like they’d hung out with Douglas Fairbanks on the weekends.

“Eliza Powell,” I said, tapping what looked like the earliest photograph. “1927. Lessie Lynne, 1933. Theresa Cannette, 1936. Then it’s quiet for a while—or people are being made to be quiet. Cissy Taranto, 1988. Miranda Blanch, 1991. Janice Faulkner, no relation, 2000. Clair Cannette, 2008. That one is a relation, by the way. She’s a great niece or something of the one from 36. And, of course, Cassandra Mayfield. All of these girls were reported missing and were never found. All of them lived within a twenty-mile radius of Cyprus Manor. And want to hear the freaky part?”

Kade’s eyes moved from picture to picture, following my finger. A waitress wearing a Mills Diner t-shirt stopped at the booth, an order pad in hand, and he glanced up at her.

“Are you two ready to order?” she asked.

“I’ll have a double-bacon cheeseburger with a side of fries and a soda,” Kade told her before glancing toward me.

“Same.”

Her pen flew over the pad, and she left without another word.

“Ok,” Kade said. “What’s the freaky part?”

“Twenty-three years old.” I tapped the first picture. “Twenty-three.” I tapped the next. “Twenty-three. Twenty-three. Twenty-three. All of them twenty-three years old.” A little grin twisted one side of my mouth. “I thought Theresa Cannette was an outlier because the report said