“Yeah.”
“He gave my son some grief a few years back. Acted like Greer had been stealing out of garages down on Oak Street.”
Oak Street . . . where the Ryersons lived. “I remember.” Cooper had been on the force, but hadn’t yet made detective. Mike Corliss had just retired, but he’d been called back in on Greer Douglas.
“It wasn’t Greer. It was Troy Stillwell and Tyler Stapleton. No one wants to believe the two best players on the football team are lowlife thieves. Easier to blame it on Greer.”
And there was that joy ride with the neighbor’s car that both Troy and Greer had been involved in. The neighbor had screamed grand theft auto, Dug had found a way to soothe the man with a nice settlement. Tyler Stapleton may have been part of that spree as well, but Troy and Greer had covered for their team quarterback.
“Your son was never charged,” Cooper reminded him. Dug’s expensive lawyers had seen to that.
“I’m telling you this because it’s the truth. Think what you will. You always kind of were a self-important prick. But it wasn’t my boy. Keep that in mind.”
Self-important prick . . .
Cooper thought about Dug’s wife, a pretty, somewhat insecure, stay-at-home mom who spent a lot of time around the high school, according to Robbie, trying to ease her son’s way through school. The little Cooper had seen of Greer he’d thought the kid could go either way. He had the grades, brains, and skills to make something of himself, but Dug, for all his business successes, was still insecure and somewhat unformed, at least in Cooper’s biased opinion, and if Greer took a page from Dug’s book, he’d never reach his potential.
“You see Corliss often?” Dug asked.
“Not really.”
“Something in particular brought you two together tonight?”
Cooper decided there was no reason not to tell him. “I’m looking into the attack on Emma Whelan. Wanted to see what he could remember.”
“What the hell, man. That’s ancient history.”
“It was never solved, though.”
“Why now?” he asked.
“Her mother just died and her sister’s back, taking care of her. Just seemed the right time.”
“I hear the sister’s a looker. Like Emma.”
“She is,” Cooper allowed.
“You got a hard-on for her, too?” he asked, that slow smile widening across his lips.
Cooper said evenly, “I just want to know what really happened that night. I think Emma and her family deserve to know, too.”
“Cooper Haynes to the rescue.”
“One thing Corliss said . . .”
He stiffened a bit. “Yeah?”
“He still thinks one of us had something to do with Emma’s attack.”
“Hell no. We were all cleared. Totally cleared,” he added with some heat.
“He doesn’t have proof. That’s just what his gut is telling him.”
“Well, his gut’s wrong.” Dug glowered at him a moment, then asked, as if he couldn’t help himself, “What have you got so far?”
“Nothing, really. I’m just going through the reports from that night. Doing some interviews. Maybe I’ll catch up with you later,” Cooper added.
“Hah.” He turned away then, and Cooper watched him head to his vehicle, a black, Jeep Rubicon.
On the way home, Cooper thought about Douglas’s body language. He’d definitely reacted to Corliss’s belief that there was more to the story from Cooper and the guys who’d spooked her that night. Was there more to the story?
Dug had been with Race, and Race had had it bad for Emma, who’d yelled at them disparagingly from the porch, which hadn’t sat well with any of them, but not with Race in particular. Could Race have done something in a fit of jealousy and rage? And, as Race’s right-hand man, could Dug have known about it?
But Race had been devastated over Emma. Cooper would swear that wasn’t faked. Race wasn’t that skilled of an actor. But maybe it was devastation of another kind . . . a manifestation of guilt and regret?
Cooper shook his head. No. Race, for all his faults, would never hurt Emma. He’d had a number of girlfriends over the years since. Nothing that seemed to pan out into something lasting. Cooper knew a couple of them, and none of them had anything bad to say about Race, other than that he’d never really grown up and was basically unreliable. If anything, they acted like he was disengaged. Not in the moment. Not involved enough to care whether he was in a relationship or not.
“His feelings just aren’t that deep,” one of them had said with a huge sigh. “I wasted too long on a guy who never matured past junior high.”
That was an improvement on fourth grade, but not by much.
But Dug . . . Dug had wanted Race’s approval more than about anything else in those days. Could Dug have confronted Emma in a misguided attempt to win favor with Race?
Or are you just trying to pin something on Dug because he pissed you off?
He let himself into the house and flipped on the kitchen lights, then wandered toward the living room and the hallway that led to the bedrooms. There was a bookshelf recessed into the hallway wall. He rarely noticed it, but tonight, his eye was drawn to the tall books on the top shelf, one of which was his high school yearbook. He snagged it and took it with him to his bedroom. There was a desk in one corner. His father’s, now his. He opened the book and turned to the senior pictures. The book practically flipped open on its own to the correct page, it had been so well used.
There he was. Cooper Haynes. Looking directly at the camera with a stupid, cocky grin on his face. He flipped back, and there was Patrick Douglas, his expression serious, as if he were trying for an actor’s headshot rather than a senior picture. He went past his picture and found Race Stillwell, chin jutted forward, but there was something
