The Bad Daughter(84)
“And the other man? What did he say?” the sheriff asked.
“He never said anything.”
Robin tried to gauge what the sheriff was thinking. Two men, both muscular and tall, one barking orders in a voice that Cassidy couldn’t identify, the other silent.
Alec and Landon?
Cassidy’s eyes widened in alarm at the vision taking shape in her mind’s eye. “Daddy lunged and the man whacked him with the gun on the side of his head. Daddy went down, and Mommy started screaming.”
“Which of the men struck your father?” Prescott asked. “The one who was yelling or the silent one?”
“The one who was yelling.”
“And where were you standing exactly?”
Cassidy spoke from her position at the entrance to the living room. “Here.”
“And no one saw you?”
“No. Not yet.”
“And then what happened?”
“The guy shot Mommy.”
“Which guy?” the sheriff prodded. “The one who was yelling or the other one?”
“The other one.”
“The silent one?”
“Yes.”
Robin did a quick mental calculation, trying to put herself in the sheriff’s head, to figure out how his brain was processing this information. If Alec and Landon were indeed the two men in the house that night, then Alec was undoubtedly the man yelling. Surely Cassidy would have recognized Landon’s voice.
Still, while it made perverse sense that Alec might hate his father enough to shoot him, it made no sense at all for Landon to kill Tara. If revenge was the true motive, wouldn’t Alec have shot Tara himself? She recalled Dylan Campbell’s chilling words: “If I wanted the bitch dead, I’d have taken care of it myself. I wouldn’t let someone else have all the fun.”
Unless, of course, Landon had panicked and just started firing.
Except that the gunman had shot Tara in the face. That was personal. Not panic.
Another nagging question: if Alec had come to Red Bluff expecting to rendezvous with Tara, as he claimed, and Tara told him she’d changed her mind, enraging him enough to kill, as the sheriff speculated, when had he had time to contact Landon?
Unless Tara had already broken up with him, giving her brother sufficient time to nurse his grudge and plot his revenge, to contact Landon, to enlist his help…
Unless. Unless. Unless.
“You’re sure it was the silent one who shot your mother?” Robin asked, her head spinning with unless.
“Robin, please,” the sheriff warned.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Cassidy said, eyes darting between Robin and Blake. Then, “No. Wait. I don’t know. Maybe it was the other guy. It could have been the other guy.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know.”
Prescott checked his notes. “You told us in the hospital that it was the second man, the silent one, who shot your mother. You were very clear about that, very sure.”
“Yes,” Cassidy said. “But now I’m not. It could have been the other guy. It all happened so fast, and I was so scared.”
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Robin said.
“It’s not really important who shot who,” Prescott said, the sudden gruffness in his voice betraying his impatience. “Both men were there. Both men are equally guilty under the law.”
Robin understood that while both men might be equally guilty, regardless of who pulled the trigger, in a case like this one, every detail was important. If Cassidy couldn’t be certain who shot her mother, if she wasn’t even sure if there’d been two men or three in the house that night, what else could she be mistaken about?
“What happened next?” the sheriff asked.
“I screamed,” Cassidy said, “and that’s when the men saw me and came after me.”
“They both came after you?”
“No. Just one.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know. They were wearing ski masks. They looked the same.” Cassidy was crying now, her words escaping her mouth in gulps. “I ran up the stairs to my room and grabbed my phone to call nine-one-one. That’s when the man burst through the door. He pointed the gun at my chest. Oh, God.”
“That’s enough,” Robin said. “She’s told you everything. We’re out of here.”
“Okay,” the sheriff reluctantly agreed. “We’ll call it a day.”
“I still need my clothes,” Cassidy whispered.
“I’ll get them,” Robin said.
“There’s a suitcase in my closet,” Cassidy told her. “You can dump my stuff in it. And there’s a bag for my shoes…somewhere…”
“I’ll find it.”
“I’ll give you a hand,” Blake said.
“No,” Cassidy cried, grabbing his arm. “Stay with me.”
“It’s okay,” Robin said. “I can manage.”
Sheriff Prescott motioned for the deputy to accompany Robin upstairs. He remained in the doorway as Robin walked straight to the closet in Cassidy’s room, trying not to see the blood staining the bed. She located the blue canvas suitcase on the floor and unzipped it, dragging Cassidy’s clothes from their hangers and stuffing them inside the bag, then moving to the nearby chest of drawers and emptying each one. Luckily, Cassidy’s wardrobe consisted mostly of jeans and T-shirts. And thongs, Robin realized, counting one for every day of the week. There were a few items with Trendsetters labels, including a pretty white dress that she could wear to her mother’s funeral.