The Birthday List(91)

Matt nodded. “Too bad the daughter wouldn’t tell Poppy if Tommy had assaulted her.”

“I know,” I sighed, “but it’s given me a whole lot of motivation to bust his ass. We might not get him on sexual assault, but distribution to minors will set him up with a nice, long prison sentence.”

And as soon as we put Tommy away, I was going after Aaron.

I hadn’t kept tabs on Tuesday Hastings—or Poppy—these last five years. But when Poppy had asked me to check on her, I’d gotten curious too. Over the last month, I’d researched Tuesday, starting with her school. Things had looked promising at first. She was a straight-A student. She had perfect attendance and her teachers seemed to love her. Everything pointed to a smart, well-adjusted teenager.

Things had looked so good I hadn’t rushed to investigate her home life.

Now, I regretted waiting so long.

Just yesterday, I’d learned that Tuesday had been placed with Aaron after Kennedy had been murdered. Kennedy had never married Aaron and had held sole custody of Tuesday—not even giving her daughter her father’s last name. But after the murders, Aaron had been next in line for custody. At the time, he hadn’t been a known drug abuser.

Either he’d hidden it well back then, or he’d gotten hooked on drugs while his daughter had shared his home.

“The timing of all this is the really crazy part,” I told Matt. “I called social services yesterday when I saw Aaron’s name pop up as Tuesday’s guardian. I told them that he was a known meth addict and it would be worth making a visit.”

Matt chuckled. “But Poppy came to the rescue first.”

“That she did.”

Tuesday was Oregon-bound to live with Kennedy’s mother, who would get the custody of her granddaughter she probably should have had all along. And I had come to the station this morning with a fire in my veins to put Tommy Bennett and Aaron Denison in jail so they could never hurt her again.

“Tommy is getting bumped up as target number one for the task force.”

Matt nodded. “Agreed. He’s got to go down.”

“We’ll make a plan when we meet with the rest of the team later.” With a nod toward his desk, I changed subjects to the murder case. “The DMV just got back to me with registration info from that new set of plates we sent in. I put the list of names on your desk.”

“Nice.” Matt stood and went to his desk, opening up the folder I’d set there earlier. “God, I hope we find a lead here.”

“Me too.”

The months I’d spent working on the liquor store murder had worn me down. I hated that all we had to go on were old videos. I hated that, after all this time, we’d made so little progress. But mostly, I hated that I didn’t have anything to give Poppy. I couldn’t tell her we’d found Jamie’s killer, but I also couldn’t tell her that the case was cold.

The stagnancy—the helplessness—was gnawing at me.

But at least it wouldn’t last forever. Matt and I were on our last-ditch effort to track down a lead.

“This list,” Matt tapped the folder, “if it doesn’t have anything, I don’t know what else we’ll do.”

Nothing. If that list didn’t turn up a lead, we were stuck. “I sure as fuck hope we find something, but I’m not holding my breath. If the women you questioned last month didn’t give us a lead, I don’t think we’ll find anything here either.”

“I don’t want to admit defeat, but you’re probably right.”

Matt had spent last month interviewing potential suspects—six women in total. Each had been caught on camera leaving the grocery store complex the day of the murder. Each had dark hair and had worn jeans that day. Each had driven out of the parking lot alone. Six women, and all of them had been cleared.

Three of them had had alibis. Thanks to their phones, they’d been ruled out because of texts or phone calls made during the time of the murder. One woman’s teenager had been with her at the grocery store, but since they’d arrived and left in separate vehicles, I hadn’t paired them together on camera. And two other women had been at the register in the grocery store, checking out at the time shots had been fired. Their credit card statements had proved their innocence.

Confirming alibis—a miserably slow process—had been necessary for the investigation, but after the initial interviews, Matt and I had known that none of the six women we’d brought in were viable suspects. None of them had motive. Each of them were, and had been five years ago, plenty well-off financially. They’d had no reason to rob a liquor store for less than a couple hundred dollars.

Which meant going back to the video footage, spending our early mornings combing through it all over again. And this time, we’d pulled every woman on tape, period. We’d identified seventeen additional vehicles driven out of the complex with females inside. Next week, Matt would start bringing them in for questioning, and with any luck, we’d find a lead before Christmas.

Otherwise, the case was dead. Matt and I would have done everything we could.

“Have you told Poppy anything?”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to tell her anything until I know for sure.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. We were grasping at straws to begin with. I think she knows the likelihood of us finding anything is small. I just . . . I don’t want to let her down.”