Annie cocked her head and smiled, tapping her dark blue nails against my desk. “Now we’re playing ball. The article was inspired by a social media post actually, about another bungled case by the Blue Creek Police Department. There was a kid, Billy Zambrano, who was found dead in his grandparents’ yard. Cops called it a suicide from the second they showed up, but the parents insist it was a murder. Happened around two weeks before Charlie’s case. I’ve known Char for years now, so when I saw his bare-bones police report and the lack of any concrete answers from the investigators, I knew something was up.”
She wasn’t wrong about the police report. It had been one of the flimsiest ones I’d seen. They might as well have written down “Charlie Marsh was in an accident” on a sticky note and it would have been more than what was in the report.
“So you’re saying the cops could be involved?”
She put her hands up. “No, no, I wouldn’t go that far. I’m calling them incompetent, yes, but involved, I’m not sure.”
“Then who did you think was involved?” I asked point-blank.
Annie mulled the question for a moment. No doubt she was going over that contract she signed. “You have my word that you won’t be implicated in anything by speaking to me. No one will ever even know you were here.”
“Is that a threat?” she joked, laughing a bit, the tension in her shoulders easing. “Fine. I can drop a name. Hank Trainor.”
“The owner of Honey and Wood?”
She nodded, affirming it was the one and only. Hank was well-known around Blue Creek for owning the only strip club in a hundred-mile radius and for also having ties to some pretty fucked-up people. He was never liked, although he was always respected.
“You think Hank tried to kill Charlie? Why? What’s the link there?”
“I don’t know, which is why I’m not saying Hank did it. What I do know is that a few days before the accident, Charlie was spotted at Hank’s house. Neither of them are saying why. Charlie because he can’t remember and Hank because he isn’t saying shit. Plus, the cherry picker that Charlie was on? It was rented by Hank.”
That was new information, and huge at that. “How did you find that out?”
“Looked at surveillance footage from the day. Hank showed up but signed it out as Charlie for some reason.”
“Shit,” I said, impressed. “You did more than the cops.”
“Yeah, and I got paid a good chunk less. Fucked-up world, huh?”
“Very,” I agreed. “Was it Hank who took the article down?”
“Can’t really say. The legal department at the paper handled it all. They just came down on me with a hammer, making me delete it and any mention I made of it.” She sighed and ran a hand through her short-cropped hair. “If you want to talk to Hank, he’s usually drinking at the Library, hunting new dancers for his club.”
There were more questions that followed but nothing as illuminating as what I discovered during the beginning of our interview. By the time she had left Stonewall Investigations, I had a new list of people I wanted to interview, along with an almost concrete conclusion that this wasn’t an accident.
Someone had planned for this to happen. Someone in Blue Creek wanted Charlie dead, and they went to great lengths to make sure it happened. When it didn’t, they went to equally great measures to keep the real story buried.
But why? What was Charlie tangled up in?
I was determined to dig up the truth and bring some peace back into Charlie’s life, I just had to be quick about it. Whoever had done this to him was still out there, and there was always the possibility that they’d want to finish the job.
As long as this case was open, Charlie’s life was still in danger.
8
Charlie Marsh
“He tried to kill me!” I shouted, pointing at the mess of broken ceramic on the floor. I was standing in the back room of the pet store with Shelly, who was going over the day’s receipts and closing us out. She gave a seconds-long glance at the murderous cockatoo perched on his stand and shrugged, going back to her work. The back room was pretty cramped with stacks of pet supplies and other random shit going up toward the ceiling, making the tiny space feel borderline claustrophobic. One of those stacks happened to have a few ceramic dog bowls sitting on the top. Like lethal little Christmas tree stars.
And it seemed like Houston had been waiting up there for someone (I assumed me) to walk underneath it, when he then proceeded to make it rain dog bowls.
Yeah, I was almost positive the feathered fucker tried to kill me. Shelly didn’t seem to mind, though, which didn’t surprise me. She’d already mentioned how great her insurance was.