After Caroline (28 page)

He realized that he wanted to talk to her about this, and wasn’t sure if it was because he valued her insights and judgment or simply because he found himself wanting to talk to her about everything. Either way, it bothered him.

“I promise I won’t share anything with the gossips of Cliffside,” she said.

Griffin put the message aside and looked down at the diary lying open on his blotter. “Mrs. Wade came into the office this morning,” he said. “She’d been packing up her daughter’s things and found her diary.” He turned the small book around and pushed it across the desk toward Joanna.

She leaned forward and started to reach for it, then hesitated and looked at him with troubled eyes.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Mrs. Wade hadn’t looked inside, and I didn’t want to read it either. But Amber’s dead. And if anything she confided in the diary can help us
find out what happened to her … Anyway, I haven’t backtracked—yet. Just read the final entry.”

Joanna almost wished she hadn’t asked to know what Griffin had found out. But she had asked. Telling herself he was right in saying they needed information to find out what had happened to Amber, she took the diary and began reading the final entry. It was dated Sunday, eleven
P.M
. Her handwriting had been large, round, and somewhat childish, and she had drawn little hearts over her i’s and
j’s
.

Joanna placed the diary gently on Griffin’s desk and pushed it back toward him. Melodramatic and self-important as the feelings were, she knew they had been very real to Amber, and she felt so sorry for the girl it made her throat hurt. The desperate pangs of a young love were normal and to be expected at eighteen; dying was not.

“So now we know why she went out that night,” Joanna murmured. “And when.”

“And who she planned to meet.”

“Griffin, she wasn’t sure herself that Cain had read the note, so—”

Unemotionally, Griffin said, “Funny that he never mentioned a note, don’t you think?”

“Maybe he never got it.”

“And maybe he just didn’t want to tell me about it. The
same way he didn’t want to tell me he left his cottage Sunday night.”

“He left his cottage? How do you know that?”

“Somebody saw him.” With an index finger, Griffin tapped the message brought in earlier. “Cain drives a silver Jaguar. It’s very noticeable—and, due to a faulty muffler, very loud. One of his neighbors had gone to a window to see if the storm was really over or just pausing for a minute. His car backfired, catching her attention. He was heading for the coast road.”

“What time was it?” Joanna asked slowly.

“Eleven forty-five, give or take ten minutes.”

“But wasn’t that too early? I mean, I thought Amber was killed hours later, closer to dawn.”

Griffin shook his head. “I just talked to Doc Becket, and he says it could have been anytime between ten
P.M
. and four
A.M
. The diary entry tells us she was alive at eleven, so she was killed after eleven and before four. That’s the official line. Off the record, Doc says it was probably nearer midnight.”

Joanna linked her fingers together and looked down at them for a moment, then returned her gaze to Griffin’s impassive face. “Okay, having done it, I know you can walk from Cain’s cottage to The Inn in about fifteen minutes—and that’s just a leisurely stroll. Hurrying, you could do it in less. So, if she left the hotel within minutes of writing that entry—”

“Which she most likely did,” Griffin interrupted. “The storm had died down, but she expected it to start up again. She didn’t strike me as the sort who would have wanted to get caught in a downpour, especially on the way to meet a man.”

Joanna nodded. “Then there would have been enough time for something to happen before Cain drove away. Time even for her to have walked to his cottage and back—either alone or with him. Maybe time for him to have walked her back to the hotel and then make it back to his
cottage, if he hurried. But Griffin, that’s assuming an awful lot.”

“Yeah, I know. But I have a couple of cold, hard facts as well. Amber died that night. And Cain lied to me about where he was when it happened.”

“He might have had a perfectly innocent reason for not telling you the truth.”

“Reasons for lying are seldom innocent,” he said dryly.

“You know what I mean.”

“And you know what I mean. Joanna, I don’t want to believe Cain killed that girl—deliberately or accidentally. But I’ve got a gut feeling she was pushed or thrown over the cliff, and Cain wasn’t where he claimed to be. So what am I supposed to think?”

“Maybe he left to get away from her, have you thought of that? Maybe she came to his cottage that night, and to get rid of her he told her he had to go somewhere. So he drives off and she has no choice except to go back to the hotel. And … maybe she slipped. Or maybe she jumped.”

Griffin shrugged. “Maybe. But if he
did
see her, I want to know why Cain lied about it.”

“Because he knew you’d suspect him?”

“He was a suspect anyway, as far as I was concerned, and he knew it. Finding out he lied to me hasn’t exactly cleared him in my book.”

Try as she might, Joanna couldn’t discard the conviction that Amber’s death was somehow connected to Caroline’s, and to Robert Butler’s, and if that was the case, what motive could Cain have had to cause the deaths of three people? It just didn’t make sense.

“He might have just lost it,” Griffin said, seemingly reading her mind. “Amber wouldn’t take rejection well, from all I’ve heard of her. Maybe she got hysterical and wouldn’t let go no matter what he said. Hell, maybe he just shoved her—a little too hard.”

“If he did, you’d never be able to prove it in court,
would you? I mean, no matter what happened, you have no real evidence. You can’t actually place Cain at the scene of Amber’s death or even with her anywhere that night; there were no witnesses to what happened; the postmortem findings say death from a fall. A little churned-up ground might mean a lot—or nothing. So unless somebody breaks down and confesses, you haven’t got anything you could take to court.”

“That’s about the size of it.” Griffin smiled without amusement. “No matter what Cain tells me, a confession isn’t likely, I’d say. And I have, as you say, no hard evidence that she was murdered. So my final report will likely state that Amber Wade’s death was most probably the result of an accident or suicide. That she was most probably alone out there when she went over the cliffs. That I don’t know, for sure, what happened out there. And the cold comfort of that her parents can take home with them. Along with her body.”

Looking at him, Joanna realized for the first time just how deeply Griffin Cavanaugh felt things. Amber had been a stranger to him, and investigating her death was his job, and yet what ate at him about his inability to fix the blame for her death wasn’t professional pride but a very real and deep compassion. Her parents would live the rest of their lives wondering if she had fallen or jumped to her death, would no doubt question and blame themselves for what had happened to their daughter, haunted by the possibility that they might have been able to prevent it—and Griffin knew it. He knew it, and he hated it.

The word these days was
closure
. Griffin wanted to give those grieving parents closure. He wanted to be able to offer them a reason, an explanation for the senseless death of their daughter. He wanted to be able to say to them, “This is what happened … and this is why it happened … and I’m sorry as hell none of us could stop it from happening.”

Joanna hadn’t looked deep enough, she realized. She
had picked up on his guilt and anger over Caroline’s death, but hadn’t seen what was really there. Something deeper and more painful than the events of this last summer.

“You lost somebody, didn’t you?” she said slowly. “You lost somebody, and nobody could tell you why.”

“
D
OES SHOW SO PLAINLY
?” Griffin asked finally, his voice a little rough.

Joanna shook her head. “No.” She didn’t elaborate, didn’t explain that it was something she felt in him rather than something she saw.

“I guess we all carry baggage with us,” Griffin said. He linked his fingers together on top of his blotter and looked down at them for a moment, then met Joanna’s gaze steadily. “It’s been more than twenty years. Twenty-two, as a matter of fact, this past August. I was fifteen. My sister was twelve.”

Joanna listened to his voice, stony with control now, and felt a chill because she knew what was coming.

“We were close. Army brats tend to stick together, I suppose because we’re always being yanked out of one place and dropped into another. Anyway, we were in a new town and about to start at new schools; we’d just been there a few weeks and had barely met some of the other
kids on the base.” He paused, then went on, his voice still deliberate. “Lindsey had made a friend of another girl her age, and that day she told our mother she was walking over to play with the girl. Their house was on base, like ours, and it was hardly more than a few blocks away.”

Griffin paused again, and this time when he continued it was with more difficulty. “We knew something was wrong within an hour, because Lindsey’s friend called asking where she was. But it was three days before her body was found about a mile from the base.” His face tightened and those dark eyes were bleak. “She’d been … hurt for a long time before she finally died, according to the newspapers. That was how I got the few facts I did, from the newspapers and television. The police and military officials investigating her death wouldn’t tell me much of anything, and my parents were so shattered they couldn’t see beyond the fact of her dying.”

“I’m sorry,” Joanna said quietly. “You must have gone through hell.”

“I think the worst of it was the sheer bewilderment. It happened so suddenly, without warning. She was alive—then she wasn’t. And it was so damned senseless.”

“Nobody could tell you why.” Joanna was aching inside, for the pain of that boy and the pain of this man. No wonder he felt so deeply about Amber’s death; he understood loss all too well.

He shook his head. “There were no answers, no reasons. The authorities found no clues and had no suspects. The investigation went on for months before finally just—fading away. We buried Lindsey. And life went on. But none of us ever got over her death. Hell, we couldn’t even get past it, because all we had were questions.”

“You never found out what happened?”

Griffin shook his head again. “To this day, the file on the death of Lindsey Cavanaugh is still open down in Texas. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

That must have been the worst of it, Joanna thought. Never knowing for sure what had happened. “Is that why
you became a cop? Because you wanted to find the answers for other people?”

“Yes.” He didn’t hesitate, and there was no doubt in his voice. “If I’d been older or younger at the time, maybe it would have had a different effect on me. Maybe. Or maybe not. I just knew that the worst thing in the world was not knowing
why
you had lost someone. There was no way to move on from there, no way to get past it. I knew right then, that summer, that I’d be some kind of cop.”

He shrugged suddenly. “Maybe a lot of my choices were made because of what happened to Lindsey. All I know for sure is that those unanswered questions destroyed my family. My parents split about a year later, still shattered, each of them blaming the other for something neither of them could have prevented. I lived with my dad until I was old enough to join the army myself, but since then I’ve seen him maybe a dozen times. I’ve seen my mother twice in the last ten years, Christmas visits that were definitely a mistake. Her house is a shrine to Lindsey, and I’m a stranger to her. Dad retired and moved to Alaska; Mom’s living in Florida. They couldn’t have put much more space between them if they had measured it out. They’re both very, very alone.”

One child dead and another emotionally abandoned—and two parents driven apart and left alone. Lindsey’s murderer had done more than kill her, Joanna thought. He had killed her family as well. And though Griffin had survived emotionally, he was clearly marked by what had happened.

“Do you believe your parents would still be together if they had known who killed Lindsey?” she asked, because she felt herself that not knowing would have been the most unbearable fact of an unbearable tragedy.

“I believe it’s more than likely they would,” Griffin answered immediately. “As it was, they had no one to blame except each other. If there had been a villain, someone they could have at least looked at and asked why, then maybe their marriage could have survived her death. Maybe they could have survived it.”