He picked up his cup of coffee. It was cold, but he downed it anyway, crushed the paper cup, then tossed it into his wastebasket under the desk. Who was this guy? What was his game?
His gaze moved to the next sheet of paper: his notes on Shannon Flannery. She, he was certain, was at the center of whatever was going on. He was aware that the kid she’d given up for adoption thirteen years earlier, Dani Settler, was missing. A piece of the kid’s birth certificate had been partially burned and left at Shannon’s home and not too long after, a fire started on her property. In both cases the symbol for the center of the star had been left.
Was she number six? What did that mean?
Whatever was going on had to do with Shannon Flannery.
And had to do with fire. Why else bother to char the birth certificate, or burn down Shannon Flannery’s shed, or take the trouble to set fire to the bathroom where Mary Beth, according to preliminary reports, was already dead, the result of strangling?
Paterno’s phone buzzed and, still staring at the papers strewn over his desk, he jerked the receiver to his ear. “Paterno.”
“The preliminary toxicology report is back on Mary Beth Flannery,” Jack Kim said without preamble. “Nothing unexpected. Her alcohol level was over the legal limit for driving, but not for taking a bath.” The lab technician’s stab at a joke fell flat. “So far, there’s nothing else to write home about. Autopsy’s scheduled for the day after tomorrow. The family wants the body for the funeral.”
“I’m not releasing it until we’ve got a few more answers.”
“That’s what I told ’em.”
“Good.” That was always the trouble with victims’ families. They wanted answers, the criminal brought to justice, but they also were in a hurried-up rush to put their beloved’s body into the ground. Paterno hung up and scooped up his page of notes on Shannon Flannery. He was still waiting to get the case records surrounding her husband’s death three years earlier, and when he did, he planned to go over them with a fine-toothed comb, then go over them again. Something about the woman didn’t wash. Too many people who’d been close to her had seemed to die or fall off the face of the earth. Where the hell was the father of her child, Brendan Giles? And what happened to her brother Neville? He fleetingly wondered if they’d met some sort of violent end, just like her estranged husband. According to
witnesses, the last time anyone had seen Neville Flannery had been barely three weeks after the murder of Ryan Carlyle. He’d quit his job, started acting strangely and then…just disappeared.
Unlikely.
Paterno made a note to find out more about Shannon’s missing brother. People didn’t just up and vanish. Something didn’t fit.
So what was it?
He reconstructed what he knew about the murder of Ryan Carlyle and Shannon’s subsequent arraignment. The evidence was circumstantial at best, but the DA seemed to have a hard-on for nailing her.
The prosecution’s case had been pretty basic. Shannon Flannery’s husband had beaten her. There were hospital records of her injuries sustained on two separate occasions. The first time she’d insisted she’d fallen in the horse barn; the second she hadn’t tried to hide the fact that he’d struck her hard enough to crack her jaw. She’d filed charges, but he’d gotten out on bail, only to go after her again. That time she miscarried. She managed to get a restraining order against him and was heading for divorce. Before that could happen he violated the court order, refusing to be cast out of his own home.
But she’d been waiting for him, almost as if she’d expected him to show up, and she’d set a trap. With the aid of her brother Aaron, she’d installed a video-and-audio system to capture Carlyle on tape while breaking the law.
Almost on cue the stupid son of a bitch had shown up and started in on her. In Carlyle’s rage he’d discovered the video equipment and smashed it into a million pieces.
She’d ended up in the hospital again.
A week to the day after she’d been released, Ryan Carlyle’s body had been found, nearly charred beyond recognition. He’d died in a forest fire, which was started, the defense had insisted, either by Carlyle himself, a known fire bug, or by careless campers who had left their fire untended. The tinder-dry forest must have caught fire just as the wind had shifted and Carlyle had been trapped in a canyon surrounded by flames. Two thousand acres of national forest had been burned to cinders. As had Ryan Carlyle.
No physical evidence had directly linked Shannon to the fire.
Though she hadn’t had an alibi (she said she had been home alone with her dogs at the time), the defense had cast enough reasonable doubt into the prosecution’s theory that Shannon Flannery Carlyle had walked. Or skated, depending upon your viewpoint.
Ryan Carlyle’s family, including his cousin Mary Beth, had been up in arms at the outcome of the trial. The press had a field day. Speculation ran hot on whether Shannon Flannery had literally gotten away with murder.
No one, it seemed, felt that justice had been served.
Paterno mopped at his brow and noted that the temperature in his office was over eighty, though the air conditioner rumbled and wheezed, the fan blowing the papers on his desk.
Stretching, he walked to the window where, from the second story, he could look down at the sidewalk below. Pedestrians strolled, pigeons flapped and tiny pieces of glass within the concrete reflected the sun’s intense rays. There was a moratorium on all exterior watering and the trees lining the street looked withered, their yellowing leaves hanging limply from near-naked branches. Heat jiggled in waves as he gazed up the street at the cars, vans and trucks moving through the traffic lights, their images distorted and shimmering.
He wasn’t convinced either way of Shannon Flannery’s guilt or innocence, but he intended to sift through all the evidence once the old boxes of files were brought up from the warehouse where they’d been sealed for the past three years. Maybe then he’d be able to make his own determination.
Not certain what he expected to find in those documents, he hoped there was something that would help him figure out what was going on today. Why did it seem that everyone around Shannon Flannery either disappeared or died? Where the hell was the father of the child she’d put up for adoption? Brendan Giles’s family still resided somewhere around here…maybe Santa Rosa.
Paterno made a note to contact anyone who knew Giles and find out what the hell had happened to him. As he already had about Neville the brother who had, after Ryan’s death, disappeared. Another one who had done a major vanishing act. Without a damned trace. Had Neville been involved in Carlyle’s murder? Was he guilty and running from the law? Or had he been silenced, his body dumped? Maybe somewhere in the forested hills or deep in the Pacific Ocean, which was only a couple of hours west.
He would take a second look at the other brothers, too. Though Paterno felt Robert was innocent, he didn’t completely scratch him off the list yet. He had motive and opportunity. As for Shea Flannery, the guy was all right, but he was secretive and nervous. Paterno didn’t like him, was glad to relieve him of his duty for a while. That left Aaron, who was now a PI because he’d gotten himself kicked out of the fire department. Why? He circled Aaron’s name, decided to do some digging into his past.