The Sorority Murder (Regan Merritt, #1)(11)

She’d noticed as soon as she moved back home last fall that her dad had taken down her wedding picture. She didn’t know if he removed it months ago when she told him she and Grant were getting a divorce, or when she told him that she’d resigned from the US Marshals Service and asked if she could come home until she figured out what to do.

There were, of course, many pictures of Chase, John’s first grandchild, along with photos of JT’s two young girls. A recent picture of her and Chase caught her eye. Even among the hundreds of photographs mounted on the great-room walls, her eye always gravitated to it. They’d come to visit her dad the Christmas break before Chase was killed. They’d gone skiing at the Snowbowl atop the San Francisco peaks. Chase’s face was red from the cold and exertion, but his green eyes lit up with joy. She was grinning, and now remembered how free she’d felt that week. How happy she’d been to share so much with her boy. Like her, he loved the outdoors. He took to skiing like a fish to water, and she’d been so proud of how, when he fell down, he got right back up.

Chase was her kid, through and through. She’d never settled for failure. She worked at something until she mastered it. Chase did the same.

Today, she didn’t know how to get back up.

She averted her eyes for fear of being lost in the past. Finished her sandwich and washed her plate. She then sat in the living room and pulled out her phone to listen to Lucas Vega’s podcast.

It would keep her mind off—well, everything, for an hour or two.

Before she hit Play, her dad walked in.

“I brought you peach cobbler,” he said. “Jeff insisted.”

“I’ll eat it later.”

“You should have joined us. Jeff cooks better than anyone in our family.”

“I don’t know about that. You can barbecue a mean steak, Dad. And your venison stew is the bomb.”

“True.” He put the cobbler in the kitchen and sat in his favorite chair, across from where Regan sat curled on the sofa, her feet tucked under her butt. “How was your presentation this afternoon?”

“Good. The students seemed interested. They had intelligent questions. After, I went up to Henry’s office. He said to say hi.” Her dad and Henry Clarkson had become friendly over the years. They’d met on campus when Regan was a student, and being from the same generation and loosely in the same field, they’d started playing golf on occasion. They didn’t see eye to eye on everything—Henry had been a criminal-defense lawyer in his day, and her dad was a strict law-and-order guy—but their arguments were good-natured. Her dad had guest-lectured for Henry multiple times.

“Our last two standing golf dates were rained out, but it looks like this Sunday is going to be clear.”

“Cold, but clear. That’s what the meteorologist says.”

“You don’t agree?”

“Ask me Saturday morning.” It could be bright and sunny one day and a storm could brew over the San Francisco peaks overnight and dump inches of water on them in a matter of hours. The local weather was wrong far too often for her to ever trust a forecast more than twenty-four hours in advance.

“Join us. You used to be wicked on the course.”

“Not this time.” She enjoyed golfing occasionally but much preferred more rigorous sports. “Jessie and I are going hiking in Sedona on Saturday, and knowing Jessie, I’ll need Sunday to recoup. Humphreys is still covered in snow, and I’m not in the mood to pull out my snow boots.” Humphreys Peak, the highest point in Arizona, was one of her favorite hikes. It was ten miles, and at the top on a clear day you could see the Grand Canyon. It wasn’t an easy trail and was best to tackle in the late spring or summer.

Jessie Nez had been her best friend since forever. She worked for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. If Regan’s naturalist granddad were still alive, he would have loved her, but he died the year before Jessie moved with her mom to Flagstaff from the Navajo reservation.

“I would love to go up there again, but I don’t think my knee would tolerate it,” her dad said. He’d had knee-replacement surgery shortly after he retired. He’d had problems for years, but her dad never did anything about it, much to her frustration.

“What do you remember about the Candace Swain murder investigation?” she asked.

“Swain—the college student, body found at the public golf course?”

“Yes.”

“Not much. Flagstaff PD handled the investigation, and I’d already retired.” He thought a moment. “Strangled, drowned in a lake, if I recall. I remember them looking for a transient, a homeless guy who had been hanging around the sorority. He disappeared around the same time they found her body.”

“One of Henry’s students has a podcast. He’s retracing Swain’s steps, trying to find out exactly where she was after she disappeared and before her body was found.”

Her dad frowned. “I forgot about that aspect of the case. I assumed that she died shortly after she disappeared.”

“According to Lucas—the kid who’s running this project—no one knows where Candace was or what she was doing for more than a week prior to her murder. He wants to interview me on his podcast, but I made no promises—other than to listen to the first two episodes and see what he has and if it’s interesting. Want to listen with me?”