The Sorority Murder (Regan Merritt, #1)(60)

Regan’s phone vibrated, and she had a text message from Rachel Wagner.

Vicky agreed to talk to you on the condition that I’m there with her. I don’t think this is a good idea, but I agreed. Can we meet tomorrow?
She didn’t immediately respond because Richie approached her at the same time and took her empty plates. “Can I get you anything else?”

She glanced around the sparsely populated bar in the middle of the afternoon. Happy hour started at four, so she was glad she had come now, before they got busy.

“Five minutes of your time. My name is Regan Merritt. I was hoping to have a word with you about your former girlfriend Candace Swain.”

Richie was twenty-seven now, had dropped out of college after two years, and had been working here ever since. He was attractive though not her type: his hair was a little too long, his smile a little too cocky, his clothing a little too grunge, and he had a few too many tattoos. But she’d done her research and knew he was a responsible employee, respected by his coworkers, and had no criminal record. A year ago, he’d bought a small house up the hill from the pub, not too far from Lucas’s apartment. Nothing expensive, but she’d driven by it on her way here and it was clean and well maintained.

He frowned at the mention of his former girlfriend. “Who are you again? The name sounds familiar.”

“I’m doing research for the host of a podcast about Candace’s disappearance and murder. You might have listened to it.”

“That’s it. Yes, I heard you the other night. You’re the marshal.”

“Former,” she corrected.

“I’ve been ignoring Vega. I don’t want to get in the middle of this.”

“But you listened to the podcast.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

She nodded. “You might be able to help solve her murder.”

“I talked to the police before and after Candace was killed. I know they were first looking at me because I was her boyfriend, but they know I didn’t kill her.”

“I believe you.”

“So why do you want to talk to me?”

He didn’t seem defensive, only curious. She liked his straightforward personality.

“Since you’ve listened to the podcast, you know what Lucas is trying to do.”

“Figure out where she was before she died. Right. And I told the police I didn’t know. And I don’t. Candace was her own person. I cared about her, a lot, but I knew it wasn’t going to last. She was planning to leave Flagstaff, and I’m not. I love it here, my mom is here, my grandmother, my little brother. I can ski in the winter, and there’s nothing better than loving where you live.”

“I agree. Born and raised here.”

“So you get it. And Candace would never be happy living here for the rest of her life. And I guess, well, I loved her too much to push her to stay and didn’t love her enough to follow wherever she went.”

Pretty astute observation from a twentysomething.

“All I know,” Regan said, “is what the media reported, what her roommate said, what her sister said. But you really knew her.”

“No one really knew Candace. I might have known her better than most, but even I suspected she was different around me than she was around others, if that makes any sense.”

“A woman of a thousand faces.”

“In a way. Excuse me.” He stepped aside to refill a pint for an older guy at the end of the bar and to ring up a tab for another customer. He returned a few minutes later. “So what do you want to know?”

“Why didn’t you respond to Lucas Vega when he reached out to you?”

Richie shrugged. “I didn’t know what he planned to do, and I’m actually pretty busy. I work here full-time and work on ski patrol in the winter. And I didn’t want him to use me to create some sort of, I don’t know, tell-all about my dead girlfriend. She deserves more respect than that.”

“So you’re saying he didn’t make it clear what the podcast was about.”

“Right. All he said was that he was doing a project for his capstone about Candace’s murder and wanted to interview me.”

“Now that you’ve listened, do you have a different perspective?”

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Where do you think Candace was that week?”

“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot, but other than her sister, she wasn’t all that close to anyone. She had a lot of friends, but no close friends.”

“Did she have a friend that she might have visited? Maybe just a casual friend? In or around Kingman?”

“Yeah. I thought about it after I listened to the caller who saw her there. One of the Sigma Rho girls who had already graduated lived there, and I wondered if she was who Candace had visited. Now that I think about it, they were pretty tight—it wasn’t the first time she’d driven out there. But not so close that Candace talked about her a lot.”

“Do you know her name?”

“Sorry, I never met her. Candace might have mentioned it once or twice, but I don’t remember.”

It should be pretty easy to find a sorority sister from Kingman.

“So that caller didn’t surprise you.”

“No.”