The Little Grave (Detective Amanda Steele)

“I read that in the file.” Casey-Anne was more likely sex-trafficking victim than perpetrator.

“Well, when she showed up to rent her place, she’d banged on the building manager’s door, saying she was responding to the paper in the window advertising the studio apartment. She had a wad of bills in hand, enough to cover first and last month’s rent.”

Pawning the bracelet on its own wouldn’t net “wads of bills.” Assuming they weren’t completely off base with their theories about Casey-Anne, it would seem she’d exchanged other items for cash too.

“Did she provide references?” A stretch, no doubt.

“She didn’t have any, but she had cash. That was something the manager repeated often.”

A ball of rage knotted in Amanda’s chest. All it took was a wad of cash and some members of society could overlook a young girl who was obviously running from some sort of trouble.

“How did the manager describe Casey-Anne?”

“Said she was jittery, but she was clean—another thing of importance to the man. He wanted a building free of druggies.”

“At least he had some standards,” Amanda lamented. “My part— another detective in my unit happened to search for Casey-Anne Ritter and came up empty. He was under the impression it was a fake name.”

“I found the same, but she had ID that pegged her as Casey-Anne Ritter, twenty-one.”

“And that’s what you ran with?”

“Yes and no.”

“It’s the no part I’m interested in.”

“I did consult the missing persons database for Atlanta to see if anyone had reported her missing. To me, she barely looked eighteen.”

Amanda glanced at her monitor, her mind on the files waiting for her on the mainframe, all those young girls. Would she find Casey-Anne Ritter among them? “I’m taking it nothing hit for you?” she said to Banks.

“No. You think she might have had ties to your city—”

Dumfries wasn’t exactly a city, but… “Was thinking Prince William County as a whole, maybe farther out.” Once Amanda started digging in, she’d check the local missing persons database and see what she could find, but the more specifics she could gather on Casey-Anne first the better. “Did she have any distinguishing markers?”

“Besides the gunshot wound?”

Banks paused there and she wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or had a warped sense of humor. He cleared this throat and continued.

“She had a cherry birthmark the size of a quarter on her lower back. Beyond that she was a natural brunette, though she was a platinum blond at the time of death. She had brown eyes and a small dimple in her chin. She was five-seven.”

Amanda scribbled all this down for quick reference when she got off the call. “What about any leads in the case?”

“Didn’t get far. I mean, obviously, given that the case went cold.”

She didn’t respect how easily it seemed Detective Banks had relieved himself of any obligation in that regard. He clearly wasn’t the see-it-through type.

“What about friends, coworkers at the club where she stripped?”

“Georgia’s Peaches. Yeah, we spoke with all of them. Oh— There was one dancer who went by Ginger, who saw Ritter just before she left what was her last shift. She said that Ritter was in a hurry to get out of the club.”

“Did she know why?”

“She said she seemed spooked but pressing that didn’t get me anywhere.”

Probably because Ginger had her own secrets that she didn’t want being probed, and getting too involved in a police investigation had a way of making that happen. But the fact that Ritter was “spooked” made Amanda wonder if Casey-Anne had spotted someone from her past and that’s why she’d been high-tailing it out of the club that night.

“There’s also something else that might help, though it hasn’t so far.” Spoken as if Banks had continued working the case. “A neighbor in Ritter’s building said she saw a man in the hall outside her door.”

Amanda sat up. “Was this around the time of the murder?”