“I thought the murderer might have come back.”
“The murderer. That’s an interesting choice of words.”
“Well, someone murdered her, right? The woman who died there today?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. But if she were murdered, I might wonder if the person who did it decided to return to her apartment to collect any evidence left behind.”
“Exactly!” Riza slapped a hand on the table.
“You were the person who broke into that apartment tonight.”
“And you too.”
“I’m a detective investigating a crime.”
“Well, I didn’t know that.”
“Did you know the woman who died there today?”
Riza shook her head. She didn’t know if they’d released Sandy’s—no, Elizabeth’s—name. “I saw the police there after my walk this morning, but then I went to work, so I don’t know much about what happened.”
“Does the name Elizabeth Healy mean anything to you?”
Riza squeezed her hands together beneath the table. “Not a thing.”
“Jesus, Riza,” Casey grumbled as she waited for the officer to pass her personal items through the glass window. “You might have called me before you decided to mace a cop. You’re lucky I have friends in the force.”
She ignored him and collected her flashlight, mace, and bank card.
As they walked down the cement steps outside the precinct, she yawned and blocked her eyes from the glare of the sun.
They didn’t talk as he drove her home. Riza leaned her head on the window and tried to keep her eyes open.
“Thanks for picking me up,” she mumbled when he pulled up to the curb in front of her apartment.
Both of their eyes drifted to the discoloration on the gray sidewalk. Someone had washed away Sandy’s blood, but a dark blotch remained.
“Riza, we need to talk about this. Okay. Come over after work? Please?”
Casey cast his imploring green eyes on her face and she flashed on a hundred memories of looking into Casey’s eyes. She frowned and looked away from him. “I’m calling in. I’m exhausted.”
“That’s probably a good idea. Here.” He popped open his glove box and pulled out a business card. He wrote something on the back and handed it to her. “This is my home address, 701 Stony Avenue. I’ll be back by five. Come over.”
She said nothing, but climbed from his truck and shuffled into the building, her lower back aching from hours in the interrogation room.
Don grumbled about the McCarthy cottage not being ready for the family if Riza begged off of work, but she held her ground. She’d never called in sick, not once, and Don had half a dozen other employees who could take care of the McCarthy place.
Despite her exhaustion, Riza barely slept, passing the hours instead by clicking through stations on the TV, unable to concentrate on any show for more than five minutes. At ten after five, she decided she would not go to Casey’s house. Already his re-entrance into her life had thrown her off kilter. She couldn’t afford to get in any deeper.
Despite her insistence she wouldn’t go, by five-thirty, she was dressed and driving her black Dodge Shadow into Traverse City. She parked behind Casey’s black pickup truck in the driveway at 701 Stony Avenue and studied the house. Casey lived in a brick bungalow with a small cement porch and maroon shutters. It was a tidy place with trimmed square hedges beneath the windows and short, recently cut, grass.
It wasn’t what she had expected and when she tried to imagine what she had expected, Riza only saw the stick forts Casey used to build in the woods behind the Northern Michigan Asylum.
Riza made it halfway to the door when she changed her mind and abruptly turned. Before she could jump back in her car, Casey called her name. “Riza!”
She turned to see him standing in his open doorway.
“Come on in. I ordered pizza.” He’d changed out of the plaster-streaked dark jeans and Vaughn’s Tiling shirt he’d been dressed in that morning. Now he wore comfortable-looking gray sweats and a cut-off blue t-shirt. His hair appeared wet, as if he’d just showered.
Casey was handsome, far better-looking than he’d been when they were young, and his mature looks got under her skin. Riza felt as if she hadn’t aged physically beyond sixteen, but somehow Casey had grown fully into a man.
“Ham and green olives. Your favorite,” he called.
Riza frowned. She hadn’t eaten pizza in years. It had been a staple for the Six. Tony’s Pizza and Subs had been walking distance from the asylum and they’d often returned bottles and cans to scrounge up enough to get a pie once a week.
“Hey. I’m happy you came,” he said, moving aside so she could walk through his front door.
The door opened into a living room on the right and a dining room/kitchen on the left. An open box of pizza sat on the round wooden table.
Riza grabbed a slice of pizza and sat down, studying the black and white framed pictures that covered one wall. They were men and women with dirt-streaked faces and dressed in rags. Some of them slept on doorsteps and sat in rows along brick walls. One photo revealed a woman breastfeeding a child as she sat in a weedy lot surrounded by debris and broken bottles.
“What are those?” She nodded at the pictures.
Casey glanced at them, eyes lingering on the woman feeding her infant. “They’re photographs of homeless people. I bought them at a charity auction last year.”
“And the homeless people got that money, I presume,” she said sarcastically.
He shrugged and took a slice of pizza, plopping it on a paper plate. “A community organization called Off the Streets got the money. They help people who are down and out, but I’m not exactly sifting through their finances, so how much of the auction money went to homeless people is beyond me. Did you get some sleep?”
Riza took a bite of pizza. She wasn’t hungry, but forced it down. “Yeah, a little.”
“Good.” He heaped three more slices of pizza on his plate, finishing his first slice in three enormous bites.
“You said you have friends in the force? What have you heard about Sandy?”
Casey crossed his legs, propping one ankle on his knee, and finished chewing. “I want to talk about this with you. I need you on this. But what you did last night was stupid. If we’re going to work on this together, you can’t be impulsive.”
“Wow. Really? Coming from the guy who broke his hand twice punching walls.” She laughed and rolled her eyes.
“That was a long time ago, Riza. I’m a different person. We both are. We need to be able to look into this without getting implicated in those murders from when we were kids. You running into the apartment where Sandy got pushed puts you at the top of their list of suspicious people. Now they’re looking more closely at you. Do you want to end up in prison?”
“Well, at least I wouldn’t end up murdered.”
“I’m serious.”
She frowned and felt like her twelve-year-old self sat scowling at Casey instead of the woman she’d become. It infuriated her how much she regressed in his presence. “Okay, fine, whatever. No more stupid mistakes.”