what was his name?”
Casey tried to read over his shoulder, but she couldn’t see around his arm, and he waved her out of his space.
“And you were his what? Cousin? Niece. Her cousin. All right.”
Casey stuck her nose over the paper and he shoved her aside.
“I’m just trying to find her family. No, I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you for now—”
He listened for a bit, biting his lips together.
“I’m in Colorado, and a woman with that name died and we’re trying to find out about her family. Actually, the woman was using another name entirely, but there seemed to be a connection with an Elizabeth Mann.”
He listened some more.
“I know. It could easily be someone entirely different. No, no, I don’t think you should come up. At least not yet. I’ll send you a photo.”
She squawked on the phone.
“No, no,” Eric said, “I have a nice picture from before her death, so it will be….Good. Do you have an email account or something where I could send it? Right. Got it. I’ll be in touch when I find out more. You have my number. And I’m sorry. Good-bye.”
He hung up and took a shuddering breath. He’d gone pale.
“What is it?” Casey said. “What’s wrong?” She grabbed the paper, but couldn’t make sense of his handwriting.
He took the paper back and laid it on his thigh, smoothing his hand over it. “ At least one Elizabeth Mann grew up in a little town called Marshland, Texas. This woman—Betsy Lackey—was her cousin.”
“Lackey? How did you know to call her if her last name’s not Mann?”
“I didn’t. I left a message on her father’s phone, and he gave her the message.”
“Did she know why Alic—Elizabeth came here?”
“She didn’t know she was even in Colorado. Had no idea where she was. If this really is her. We have to remember that. We could be talking about someone completely unrelated to Alicia.”
“What about the guy? You were talking about a guy.”
“This Elizabeth Mann’s father. Cyrus Mann. If we have the right person, it could be the man in the photograph we got at the restaurant.”
“Is he still there in Marshland?”
“No.” Eric let out a breath and shook his head. “He hasn’t been there for over seventeen years. And neither has Elizabeth.”
“Seventeen—Why so long ago? What happened back in the early nineties?”
Eric lifted his eyes from the paper, and Casey winced at the pain she saw. “Cyrus Mann was murdered,” he said. “On the same night his teenage daughter disappeared.”
Chapter Twenty-four
“So who murdered Elizabeth’s dad?”
“Lots of theories,” Eric said. “No certain answers.”
“What do we know?”
“It was bad. An execution, really. Shot in the head. Left to die.”
“What do the cops think?”
“This woman didn’t get into it all, but basically it sounds like his murder has never been solved, and the police have stopped trying to solve it.”
“Do you think the cops had something to do with Elizabeth disappearing? I mean, do they think she killed him?”
Eric shrugged. “You heard my side of the phone call. We didn’t talk that long.”
“So let’s see what we can find out.”
They went back inside to use Eric’s iPad. Death sat at the table in Eric’s chair, looking over the scribbled notes from the morning.
“The murder was so long ago,” Casey said, “I wonder how much will even be recorded.”
Death looked up. “How long ago? And who are we talking about?”
“About seventeen years, right, Eric? What was his name? Cyrus Mann?”
Eric looked at her curiously, and sat down in his chair, right on Death’s lap. Death squeezed out from beneath him, and Eric shuddered. “Does your heat work? Can we turn it on? And yes, his name was Cyrus. I told you all this.”
“I wanted to be sure.”
Death was visibly trying to call up the information, finger tapping on chin, eyes unfocused. “Ah, yes. Cyrus Mann. I remember. Not much to go on. You know with these violent, spur-of-the-moment deaths I’m not always there in time to see the cause. Or the perpetrators, anyway.”
“Any witnesses?” Casey asked.
“Haven’t found anything yet,” Eric said. “Give me a minute. It’s not coming up under just her name…”
“Only one other person there,” Death said. “A girl. Fourteen years old. She was holding him when he died.”
“Didn’t he die immediately?”
Eric glanced up. “Why are you asking me these weird questions I don’t have answers to? Oh, here we go. I had to put in everything I knew in order to find it. ‘Man found dead. Daughter missing.’”
“It’s not like the movies,” Death said. “People