Never Tell

Chapter Forty-One

Four days later . . .

“Are you two okay with this?”

“Yes,” Rogan said. “No question. Absolutely. Sí. Oui. We are totally down.”

Max had asked them the same question three different ways already. Ellie cut in before her partner could continue with his list. “I think what Rogan’s trying to say, Max, is that we can’t recall having an ADA be so concerned with what we thought about a charging decision.”

“And I can’t recall ever having two detectives who were so peachy keen about springing a suspect loose from custody.”

“This case was a no-go from the very beginning,” Rogan said. “This whole mess with Casey is all that damn Bill Whitmire’s fault. You best be boycotting his records from now on, woman.”

“Request noted,” Ellie said. Bill Whitmire had sabotaged their investigation. He had been the one to wave that exorbitant award money around. He had been the one to hire Earl Gundley, the private investigator whose team had taken Casey into custody. They still weren’t entirely sure what Gundley’s people had done, but Gundley had since admitted some of his tactics might have been “aggressive.”

It was a mess.

The tipping point had come when Casey had volunteered for a polygraph over the weekend and passed it.

Granted, the test results were inadmissible. And knowledgeable experts could assure them that well-versed liars can beat the machine.

But then they’d met the previous night with the Whitmires to detail the status of the case. Although Max said he could probably get a murder charge against Casey through the grand jury, he explained why he would never be able to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt at trial. Casey had a key to the apartment, but there was no evidence he had used it that night. Vonda Smith and Brandon Sykes were gone, and there was no guarantee they’d be found before trial. And on top of it all, there would be no shortage of red herrings a good defense lawyer like Chad Folger could use at trial: the possibility (probability, in Ellie’s view) that Julia had in fact committed suicide; Casey’s diagnosis as bipolar and his use of an experimental treatment; and evidence that Julia had been threatening her friend’s mother, perhaps with a still-unidentified accomplice who continued to harass the woman. Plus, Max had added, there were the troublesome polygraph results.

At Max’s mention of the poly, Ellie had known immediately that something wasn’t right.

Bill looked huge on the tiny settee in the Whitmires’ living room, his feet crossed at the ankles like a child. He stared at his hands, planted on his knees, and did not look up when he finally spoke. “I was only trying to help.”

“Excuse me, sir?” Max had asked.

“I was trying to help.”

Ellie couldn’t hold her tongue. “Like you helped by paying Vonda and Brandon before trial, even though we specifically warned you against it?”

He nodded. “I’m sorry. I was—oh my God, are you telling me I may have been wrong?”

She’d wanted to scream at him. Of course what he did was wrong. But that is not what he meant.

“I was so sure she did it. This fucked-up girl who thinks she’s a boy had a key to our house, and two of her friends told us she did it. I was so sure. Damn it, I screwed this up. I told Gundley to do what he had to do. That’s what I told him, exactly: ‘to do whatever you have to do.’ ”

And that’s when Ellie knew. “You paid him, didn’t you?” Ellie had asked. “Not just for manning the tip line. Or for finding Casey. You paid him extra to seal the deal. What did you expect would happen?”

He had broken down in tears at that point. He had apologized. He reached out a hand to his wife in search of some sign of forgiveness, but instead received a view of the back of her turned head. Ellie had felt sick to her stomach as she watched him, so oblivious to the harm he had inflicted by trying to buy private justice.

“So you guys are okay with this?” Max asked one more time, pen in hand over a motion for dismissal.

Rogan let out a small scream of frustration. “Just sign the damn thing already.”

It was a lighthearted moment, but Ellie took no happiness in it. As pissed as she was at Bill Whitmire, she was angrier at herself. She had known in her gut that Casey wasn’t guilty but had allowed the investigation to get away from her. He had spent nearly six days in custody.

Ellie had been wrong about so much, from the very beginning of this case. She was off her game. She was still tiptoeing around Rogan, even around Max. Now they were correcting at least part of the harm by dismissing charges against an innocent, troubled kid.

She knew one thing, though. Even if Julia wasn’t murdered, she had left this world shrouded in secrets she never had a chance to tell. It was another wrong that Ellie had to correct.