Page 70

CHAPTER 70

THE MORE MILES I put between myself and Ukiah, the better I felt. There was no sign of the army-green pickup truck in my rearview, and the day was warm and bright. I drove and cleared the 2 Sisters Detective Agency voicemails of abusive phone messages and requests for me to speak about what Troy was really like on true-crime podcasts. Then I called Men’s Central Jail in LA again and asked to speak with Troy. It took a few hours for the request to work its way through the system.

“Didn’t seem like you were going to call me on your own,” I said when Troy finally phoned back. My stomach was churning with competing emotions. “So I thought I’d give you a nudge.”

“Oh, I’ve been trying,” Troy said. “They gave me the form to say who I wanted on my approved-call list. I filled it out. They lost it. I filled it out again. Then I got a beatdown. By the time I was through the infirmary and back in my cell, the guards had lost the second form.”

“Welcome to the American prison system,” I said. “Their red-tape game is world class. I had a client who wanted a new pillow once. Took a year and a half for him to get it.”

“Well, the one thing I have got going for me is a lawyer,” Troy said. “Hired him this morning. And ... and I don’t know how to say this, Rhonda. But I’m going to need every dollar I have so I can pay him.”

“So I’m still fired?” I laughed.

“You gave it everything you had.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I’ve got more to give. You’ll have to do more than fire me to get me to drop this case, Troy. I need to know the truth. I need to know what happened to Daisy and to the people in that box. So I’m going to ask you a question now and I want you to tell me the truth no matter how you think it might affect your case.”

“What?”

“Did you kill Chelsea Hupp?” I asked.

There was silence from Troy. The prison sounds rattled in the background of the call. Guards barking. Inmates hollering. Doors slamming.

“You were a kid,” I offered. “You couldn’t have known — ”

“Who’s Chelsea Hupp?”

I gripped the steering wheel hard and caught a flash of my own fierce eyes in the rearview mirror. I looked fed up, and I was. The exhaustion was suddenly physical as well as mental, and I struggled to keep the car on the road. I saw a sign for a rest stop coming up and flicked my indicator on.

“You know what, Troy?” I said. “I’m getting damn tired of your naive-little-innocent-boy act.”

“What?”

“You don’t know who Chelsea Hupp is?” I asked. “You never heard that name before? You expect me to believe that? Because I’ve been asked to believe a whole lot of stuff about you in the past twenty-four hours, Troy. Like why your work route has followed the lives of those people in that box almost exactly . Do you have any explanation for that? For you being two blocks away from Dennis Maynar’s workplace on the same night he disappeared?”

“I didn’t know that I was.”

“Oh, you didn’t know that you were.” I smiled. “How convenient.”

I hung up and pulled into the rest stop. I desperately needed to use the bathroom after all the coffee at breakfast, and I had to stock up on energy drinks if I was going to stay awake all the way back to LA. I made certain to lock the Chevy before I went inside. When I got back to the car, it was still locked.

But a bloody handprint stood out against the white paintwork on the handle of the passenger-side door.

I stopped in my tracks, then put my energy drinks on the hood and went to look at the handprint. The knuckles were clearly defined in the concave handle well and a large thumbprint was perfectly impressed on the handle itself. I tried to tell myself the print was from some vagrant traversing the parking lot, trying his luck on every car, looking for any unlocked vehicle. But the parking lot and the surrounding areas were empty, and my car was the only one with a print on it.

I reached out and touched the blood. It was still wet.