Chasing Fire
Page 75

She moved forward, a small woman who pushed her burly husband aside so that he stepped back, his head hung down like a scolded child’s.
“I’m just tired, Reenie. I’m so damn tired. And you’re wearing yourself to the bone, tending the baby and worrying.”
“We’re not asked to lift more than we can carry. So we’ll lift this. Do you want some coffee, or tea, or anything?”
“Don’t you worry about that, Mrs. Brakeman.” Quinniock took a seat in the living room on a chair covered with blue and red flowers. “I know this is hard.”
“We can’t even bury her yet. They said you need to keep her awhile more, so we can’t give our daughter a Christian burial.”
“We’ll release her to you as soon as we can. Mrs. Brakeman, the last time we spoke, you said Dolly got a job in Florence, as a cook.”
“That’s right.” She twisted her fingers together in her lap, a working woman’s hands wearing a plain gold band. “She felt like she didn’t want to take a job in Missoula after what went on at the base. I think she was embarrassed. She was embarrassed, Leo,” Irene snapped as he started to object. “Or she should have been.”
“They never treated her decent there.”
“You know that’s not true.” She spoke more quietly now, briefly touched a hand to his. “You can’t take her word as gospel now that she’s gone when you know Dolly didn’t tell the real truth half the time or more. They gave her a chance there,” she said to Quinniock when Leo lapsed into brooding silence. “And Reverend Latterly and I vouched for her. She shamed herself, and us. She got work down there in Florence,” Irene continued after she’d firmed quivering lips. “She was a good cook, our girl. It was something she liked, even when she was just a little thing. She could be a good worker when she put her mind to it. The hours were hard, especially with the baby, but the pay was good, and she said she could go places.”
“You didn’t remember the name of the restaurant when we spoke before,” DiCicco prompted.
“I guess she never mentioned it.” Irene pressed her lips together again. “I was angry with her about what she did to Rowan Tripp, and embarrassed my own self. It’s hard knowing Dolly and I were at odds when she died. It’s hard knowing that.”
“I have to tell you, both of you, that Agent DiCicco and I have contacted or gone to every restaurant, diner, coffee shop between here and Florence, and Dolly didn’t work in any of them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She wasn’t working in a restaurant,” DiCicco said briskly. “She didn’t get a job, didn’t leave here the night she died to go to work.”
“Hell she didn’t,” Leo protested.
“On the night she died, and on the afternoon prior, the evening prior to that, Dolly spent several hours in a room at the Big Sky Motel, off Highway Twelve.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Leo, hush.” Irene gripped her hands together tighter.
“Several witnesses identified her photograph,” Quinniock continued. “I’m sorry. She didn’t spend those hours alone. She met a man there, the same man each time. We have a witness who’ll be working with our police artist to reconstruct his face.”
With tears trickling down her face, Irene nodded. “I was afraid of it. I knew in my heart she was lying, but I was so upset with her. I didn’t care. Just go on then, I thought. Go on and do what you want, and I’ll have this baby to tend. Then, after... after it happened, I took that out of my mind. I told myself I’d been harsh and judgmental, a cold mother.
“I knew she was lying,” she said, turning to her husband. “I knew all the signs. But I couldn’t let myself believe it when she was dead. I just couldn’t have that inside me.”
“Do you have any idea who she was involved with?”
“I swear to you I don’t. But I think maybe it’d been going on awhile now. I know the signs. The way she’d whisper on the phone, or how she’d say she just needed to go out for a drive and clear her head, or had to run some errands so could I watch Shiloh? And she’d come home again with that look in her eye.”
She let out a shuddering breath. “She never meant to change.” Dissolving, Irene turned to press her face to Leo’s shoulder. “Maybe she just couldn’t.”
“Why do we have to know this?” Leo demanded. “Why do you have to tell us this? You don’t leave us anything.”
“I’m sorry, but Dolly was with this man the night she died. We need to identify him and question him.”
“He killed her. This man she gave herself to, this man she lied to us about.”
“We need to question him,” Quinniock repeated. “If you have any idea who she was meeting, we need to know.”
“She lied to us. We don’t know anything. We don’t have anything. Just leave us alone.”
“There’s something else, Mr. Brakeman, we need to discuss.” DiCicco took the ball. “At approximately nine thirty tonight, Rowan Tripp and Gulliver Curry were fired on while walking on the base.”
“That’s nothing to do with us.”
“On the contrary, a Remington 700 special edition rifle was found hidden in the woods flanking the base. It has your name engraved in a plaque on the stock.”
“You’re accusing me of trying to kill that woman? You come into my home, tell me my daughter was a liar and a whore and say I’m a killer?”
“It’s your gun, Mr. Brakeman, and you recently threatened Ms. Tripp.”
“My daughter was murdered, and she... My rifle’s in the gun safe. I haven’t had it out in weeks.”
“If that’s the case, we’d like you to show us.” DiCicco got to her feet.
“I’ll show you, then I want you out of my house.”
He lunged up, stomped his way back to the kitchen to yank open a door that led to a basement.
Or a man cave, DiCicco thought as she followed. Dead animal heads hung on the paneled wall in a wildlife menagerie that loomed over the oversized recliner and lumpy sofa. The table that fronted the sofa showed scars from years of boot heels and faced an enormous flat-screen television.
The room boasted an ancient refrigerator she imagined held manly drinks, a worktable for loading shot into shells, a utility shelf that held boxes of clay pigeons, shooting vests, hunting caps—and, oddly, she thought, several framed family photos, including a large one of a pretty baby girl with one of those elasticized pink bows circling her bald head.