Vindicate (Recovered Innocence #1)(65)
“Yeah.” Eventually. Possibly.
She leafs backward through the binder as slowly as she did the first time she looked through it. I study the pages with her. Now that Cora’s not in the room there’s really nothing else to look at. She pauses on a page with a newspaper clipping about the murder Cora printed out from the Internet. I recognize the front of Cassandra’s apartment building cordoned off with police tape. There are a number of uniformed and plainclothes officers in the photo. A crowd has gathered. But none of that is the center of the photo or the accompanying article.
Two officers wrap up Beau, who is struggling to get past them. I almost don’t recognize him. His hair is longer, sure, but that’s not why. There’s something fundamentally different about him from the man I met several weeks ago. He’s rougher, harder, and a lot less sure of himself now. I try to imagine what happened to Beau happening to me. If someone murdered Cora in the cruelest, most brutal way imaginable and then I was convicted for it…I don’t know how he wakes up every day carrying that. How has he not gone insane missing her?
Mrs. Wheeler struggles for a closer look at the photo. I hold it up for her.
“Do you see something?”
She points to a drawer in the tray table. “Get my magnifying glass.”
I find it and hand it to her. I adjust the binder to the right height for her.
She peers through the magnifying glass. “I should’ve done this sooner.” She gestures upward. “Turn on the overhead light.”
I do as she asks. A part of me wants to go get Cora, but I don’t want to get her hopes up like she did last time.
“Is there another picture like this?” Mrs. Wheeler asks.
I flip through the binder. “Here.”
This one is a different angle from the street, looking up. The door to Cassandra’s apartment is open. A bunch of people stand around. I never realized how many people showed up at crime scenes. There are reporters too, like the one who took the photo we’re looking at.
Mrs. Wheeler runs her magnifying glass over it, then looks up at me. “Are there any more?”
I find the third and what I know to be the last photo from that day. She does her magnifying-glass thing again, this time slower, and it’s like my heartbeat has slowed too. She stops moving and holds the glass over one spot in the pic. My arms are killing me, holding the binder all this time, but I don’t care.
She slides a finger between the paper and the glass. “There. Do you see that?” She leans back so I can have a look.
I’m not sure what she’s talking about. “The guy in the blue shirt?”
“No. The one in front of him with his face turned away. All the pictures of him are like that. I wasn’t sure because he does a real good job of blending in and hiding most of his face, but I’d recognize that ugly tie anywhere.” She taps the page with her finger. “That’s the detective who interviewed me.”
“Detective? You said it was an officer who interviewed you.”
“Same thing, different clothes.”
“I’m not sure they’d see it that way. And he doesn’t appear anywhere else in the book?” I flip back to the pages with the detectives who were involved with the case. “Are you sure it’s not one of these guys?”
“It’s not one of those guys.”
I take out my cellphone thinking I can do a search, but I forgot I’m in Mexico and my cell service doesn’t translate.
We have an almost match. Maybe if I jogged her memory a little it might help.
“What else do you remember about him besides his tie?”
We chat a little more, but she’s not able to give me anything else on the detective, so I change tactics.
“What company was the deliveryman from?” I ask. “Was it UPS, FedEx, the U.S. Postal Service…?”
She shakes her head. “No. It was that one with the arm-in-arm logo. Always reminded me of snakes.”
“Postal Pronto?”
“That’s the one.”
“Do you remember approximately what time he made his delivery?”
“Around four o’clock. Which was weird because usually they delivered to our complex around seven. I remember it being four because my favorite talk show came on. I guess that’s why I only saw him leave.”
“Wait a minute. You didn’t see him arrive with the package, you only saw him leaving?”
“Yes.”
“So he could’ve been there for hours before that. I know it’s been a long time, but do you remember what time you woke up that day?”
“Probably the same as every day. I liked to watch the local news before Good Morning America starts at seven.”
“So you woke up around six a.m. What time did you go to bed the night before?”
“Early. I’m usually asleep by nine.”
I sort it out in my head. Beau said he arrived at Cassandra’s at about ten after Mrs. Wheeler was asleep, so she wouldn’t have seen him. He left just after one in the morning. Some time after one a.m. the delivery guy got there and then he left around four the next day, according to Mrs. Wheeler. LeFeaux said he saw Beau leaving Cassandra’s apartment around two, but his testimony is bullshit, so I can’t count that.
“Do you know if he delivered to only Cassandra’s apartment or to any of the other tenants too?” I ask.