Scratchgravel Road (Josie Gray Mysteries #2)(27)
Josie smiled. “That’s what I’m wondering. You’re a nice girl, you’re intelligent, a hard worker, pretty. Artemis is small, not a lot of options, but—” Josie stopped, unsure how to proceed without offending her.
Cassidy stretched her legs out and stared at her feet. “He’s not that bad. He just says things to people because he doesn’t feel good about himself. He knows people look down at him. It makes him mad and he gets defensive.” She looked up. “He doesn’t do that to me. I swear it.”
“He doesn’t talk down to you?”
Cassidy didn’t answer the question. She crossed her arms over her chest and pulled them in tight as if she were cold.
“Would you tell me if you were in trouble? If you needed help?” Josie asked.
She sniffed and lifted a shoulder but said nothing.
“No one can figure out why a girl who’s shown no interest in hiking would suddenly choose to go out in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave.”
“I don’t know what else to say. I just did.”
“Any explanation about the wallet?”
She looked up then, her face finally animated. “I swear, I didn’t put it there. I never saw it before.”
“Why didn’t you tell Leo about the wallet in your car?”
Her face registered surprise, and then worry. “Did you tell him?” she asked.
Josie shook her head. “Why didn’t you tell him?”
Cassidy’s eyes remained large and confused. Josie often had the sense that Cassidy was trying to concoct a story, but she wasn’t good enough at lying to keep her stories straight, so she panicked and said nothing. Josie opted to wait her out.
Cassidy finally said, “I was just afraid he wouldn’t believe me.”
“About what?”
“That someone put a man’s wallet in my car, and I didn’t know why.”
Josie pulled away from the counter. “Here’s the situation. You are the only connection to a dead man. You found him. His belongings were locked inside your car. I suspect you know quite a bit more than you’re telling me. I would suggest you think this over, and come see me tomorrow. If you’re worried that you’ll get someone else in trouble, put that out of your head. Trying to protect someone usually ends up backfiring.”
EIGHT
When Josie arrived back at the station she found a packet of cheese crackers in her desk drawer, and borrowed one of Otto’s Cokes out of the refrigerator at the back of the office. She carried her lunch downstairs where she asked Lou for the evidence room keys and logged the time she entered the room on a clipboard that hung beside the door. She flipped a switch to the right of the door and the fifteen-foot-wide by forty-foot-long room slowly came to light under the flickering fluorescent bulbs. The floor was poured concrete, but the walls remained the rough red brick that covered the outside of the department and the Gun Club next door. At one time, evidence was kept upstairs, in a small locked room that was now used for the custodian’s cleaning supplies. When the amount of evidence grew too large for the small area, the alley between the two buildings was bricked up on either end and the space finished to house the growing number of objects and boxes of paperwork. The only access to the locked room was a door cut into the police station wall.
Twenty-five feet of metal shelving units were attached to the brick on the Gun Club side. Otto had made wooden signs in his workshop at home and hung them from the top of the shelving units. The years were noted on the signs to aid in locating evidence more quickly.
Josie took a deep breath. The room smelled like rock and sand and musty paper boxes. The smell seemed old and comforting, like her grandma’s cellar back in Indiana. She found a shoebox-sized cardboard box on the shelving unit labeled 2012–2014 and pulled it down and placed it on an eight-foot-long library table that sat to the right of the door. The room had no windows, so the only light was the yellow fluorescent flicker from ten feet above. She turned on two hundred-watt lamps on either end of the table and sat on a metal folding chair.
When a case was going nowhere she liked to walk through the crime, altering the variables and playing out different scenarios in her mind. With the rain, there was no chance of getting back to the crime scene, where any trace evidence that may have remained would have been washed away. All she had was a small box of objects collected from Cassidy’s car, while the majority of the evidence still sat in a hazardous material bag at the jail. Her only connection to the dead body was a young woman who Josie suspected knew something but refused to talk.
Josie laid her pad and paper on the table and opened the box. She pulled out the man’s wallet in the sealed, clear plastic bag. She knew Cowan would have wanted it quarantined so she left it sealed. The wallet was opened so she could see the inside. The leather was worn around the edges, as if the man had carried it in his back pocket. Due to the curve of the wallet, Josie was certain it had not been carried in the front of his pants, so how had Cassidy pulled the wallet from underneath the man? Had she taken it before the man died? Someone had placed the effects in her car, Josie was certain of it. But why? How had they gotten there? And why lock the car again—was the person attempting to mess with the investigation, or with Cassidy?
She had told Josie the only other person with a key to her car was Leo, and he had been in Presidio at the library, with a library receipt that showed his checkout time was two hours after the time that Josie found the car. Cassidy had told Josie that she was certain the wallet had not been in her car when she left for the desert that morning because she had removed a container of laundry soap from the backseat that she had left in the car after work the day before. Cassidy said she would have noticed if it was on the floor. Josie had a sense that Cassidy was telling the truth.