“See if you can find any tracks downstream,” McCall said. “The current is strong enough here that he would have been washed downriver a ways.”
“Should be easy to track him since he is wearing only one shoe,” the deputy said.
“Let’s try to find out before it gets dark,” McCall said. Otherwise they would be dragging the river come morning for a third body.
On the other side of the car, a deputy pulled on a pair of latex gloves and opened the passenger-side door to get into the glove box. McCall watched him carefully check the soaking wet registration.
“The car is registered to a Ray Allan Evans Jr., age thirty-five, of Palm City, California. Looks like he just purchased the car three days ago.”
Chapter Five
Josey felt the air in the dining room tremble with expectation as she waited for Jack to answer his grandmother. What was this about a room that he’d been forbidden to enter?
“What would make you think I’ve been in that room?” Jack said, meeting his grandmother’s gaze with his cold blue one.
His grandmother’s look was sharp as an ice pick. She knew, just as Josey sensed, that he was evading the question. But why would he care about something that happened when he was six?
And why would his grandmother care after all these years?
“Those cute little party hats you were all wearing when you went upstairs,” his grandmother said. “I found them in the room.”
“Really?” Jack said, forking the piece of the cake Pepper had passed him. “I’m afraid I don’t remember anything about some party hats.”
“Is that right?” His grandmother’s tone called him a liar. “Are you going to also tell me you don’t remember that day?”
“Oh, I remember that day. I remember my mother losing her job and us having to leave the ranch, the only home I’d ever known,” Jack said in a voice Josey barely recognized. “I remember my mother being terrified that she wouldn’t be able to support us since Angus had been cut off without a cent and didn’t have the skills or the desire to find a job. I remember looking at the Winchester Ranch in the rearview mirror and you standing there, making sure we all left and didn’t come back.”
“Oh, my,” Virginia said, clearly enjoying Jack’s rancor at her mother.
“I remember Angus losing himself in the bottle and my mother struggling to take care of us while she tried to make us a family,” Jack said, his voice flat and cold. “I remember the toll it took on her. But nothing like the toll being exiled from here took on Angus.”
“Your mother. Is she...?” Virginia asked.
“She died a year before Angus drank himself to death.”
Pepper looked down at her untouched cake. “I didn’t know.”
“Really? Then you didn’t know he left a note?” Jack reached into his pocket and took out a piece of folded, yellowed paper. Josey saw that it was splattered with something dark and felt her stomach roil.
Jack tossed the note to his grandmother. “It’s made out to you.” With that he got to his feet, throwing down his cloth napkin. “If you’ll excuse me.”
MCCALL SAT IN her patrol car, studying the screen. The moment she’d typed in Ray Allan Evans Jr.’s name, it had come up. Ray Jr. was a person of interest in a homicide in Palm City, California. The murder victim was his father, Ray Allan Evans Sr. He’d been killed two days ago—just a day after his son had purchased a very expensive luxury automobile.
She put through a call to the detective in charge of the case in the Palm City homicide department, Detective Carlos Diaz. She told him that she’d found Ray Jr.’s car and that he was wanted in Montana for questioning in another homicide case.
She asked what they had on the Evans murder so far.
“A neighbor can place Ray Jr. at the house at the time of the murder. But he wasn’t alone. His stepsister was also there. Her car was found on the property. No staff on the premises, apparently, which in itself is unusual. This place is a mansion with a full staff, at least a couple of them live-in.”
“I’m sorry, did you say his stepsister?” McCall asked, thinking of the young Jane Doe the fisherman had hooked into.
“Josephine Vanderliner, twenty-eight, daughter of Harry Vanderliner, the founder of Vanderliner Oil. The father is deceased. The mother married Evans two years ago, was in a car accident shortly afterward, suffered brain damage and is now in a nursing home. The stepdaughter had been in a legal battle over money with Evans Sr. Her fingerprints were found on the murder weapon. Neither Vanderliner or Evans Jr. has been seen since the night of the murder.”
“What’s the story on Ray Jr.?”
“Goes by RJ. Thirty-four, no visible means of support, lives with his father.”
And yet he’d purchased himself a new expensive car on the day his father was murdered?
“The housekeeper found Ray Sr.’s body—and the safe—wide-open. She says she saw Ray Sr. putting a large amount of cash into the safe just that morning. According to the eyewitness, RJ and his stepsister left together in a large, newer-model black car at around the time of death estimated by the coroner. Didn’t get a make and model on the car.”
“Sounds like the one we just pulled from the Missouri River.”
McCall filled him in on what they had so far—one female victim in the same age range as Josephine Vanderliner and a car registered to Ray Allan Evans Jr., driver missing and suspected drowned. “We’re dragging the river now for a possible third body,” she told him.
Detective Diaz sent her photographs of both Ray Jr. and Vanderliner.
McCall watched them come up on her screen. Ray Evans Jr. first. A good-looking, obviously rich kid from the sneer on his face. She thought of the abuse her Jane Doe had
