knots in her neck. She’d forget about the stress of the past seven weeks. And she wouldn’t think at all about the murderer of a young child who remained unpunished.
CHAPTER
40
Mickey Conklin had expected the knock on the door all week. As soon as he read in the newspaper that Angelina Calhoun was alive, he knew it was over. When Cannon showed up, it was almost a relief. He followed him willingly to police headquarters, waived his Miranda rights and waited patiently for the questioning to begin. He sat across a small table from the beefy detective. He knew that others were watching on the other side of the mirrored wall. But in the room, it was just him and Cannon. No one to play good cop.
“You must have had a good laugh stringing me along all these years,” Cannon said after he settled himself into the chair across from Mickey.
Mickey just shook his head.
Cannon took a sheet from inside a folder and held it in front of him. “You know what we did after we found out the child in the woods wasn’t Angelina Calhoun? We went and got an order to dig up the grave. Guess what we found?”
Mickey shrugged.
Cannon slammed his fist onto the table and screamed at Mickey. “You know goddamn well what we found! It was Stacy. Your precious daughter that you’ve been mourning two decades. The one you said couldn’t have been Stacy when we brought you in for an ID.”
“What makes you so sure it’s Stacy?” Mickey knew he’d cleansed her room of any remnants that could identify her.
“’Cause, jackass, I decided to go check our evidence kit from back when she went missing. And sure enough, we’d collected some of her things, including her hairbrush.”
Mickey remained silent. Talking wouldn’t help him, only hurt him.
“So, how did she die, you son of a bitch?”
Silence.
It went like that for two hours, with Cannon pushing and Mickey remaining quiet. Finally, Cannon said, “We have you on this, you’re gonna be booked for murder.”
“You have nothing. So what if it’s Stacy? Somebody grabbed her and killed her. I was too much in shock to identify her body. You know, denial. I didn’t want it to be her.”
Cannon leaned back in his chair. “You’re wrong, Mickey. We have plenty. Explain the note you left for the investigator from New York.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. We checked. It’s your fingerprints all over it.”
He knew the note had been a mistake. He’d been too impulsive. Shit.
“You’re bullshitting me. My fingerprints aren’t in any system to compare.”
Cannon nodded. “That’s true. But they were on the pen you gave me last time I was at your house. A perfect match. So, my only question is, did you kill her on your own or was Janine in on it?”
Mickey practically jumped out of his seat. “You leave her out of this!”
Cannon smiled a slow grin that grew bigger and bigger until all Mickey saw were two rows of yellowed teeth.
“Why? You do it all by yourself? You been lying to Janine, too, all these years?”
It was over. He needed to come clean. It wasn’t murder. Maybe Cannon would understand. With his voice barely above a whisper, Mickey began his story. “I never meant to hurt Stacy. I loved her. But, see, I’d been working double shifts back then, raking in the overtime. I’d come home so damn tired and just fall into bed. Janine would already be asleep. I never woke her. She’d always been a deep sleeper. When Stacy was an infant, before she slept through the night, it was me who woke up first. I always had to nudge Janine awake.”
Cannon didn’t need to take notes. The tape recorder was running, and cameras were capturing the whole thing.
“I came home wired one night. See, there was this woman at work, Darlene. She was new at the plant and worked the night shift, too. When she first flirted with me, I thought it was a joke and played along. But that night, it went beyond joking. She cornered me when I came out of the john and asked when I’d finally get around to kissing her. I acted like a dumb fool, all fumbling and mumbling. She must have thought I was an idiot. But I didn’t kiss her. When I came home, though, I was rattled, and so instead of going to bed, I had a couple of beers first, maybe more than a couple. … I’d