Thicker Than Water by P.J. Parrish Page B

muted bellow of a deputy and the desperate babbling of the Haitian man.
    Louis rose sharply and pushed back his chair.
    Cade looked up. “Where you going?”
    â€œThink about what I said, Cade,” Louis said. “Think about Kitty Jagger. She might be the only person right now who can save your ass.”
    Louis didn’t look back as he walked away. At the door, the deputy buzzed him through.
    Out in the hall, Louis paused. He could still see Cade’s eyes, as murky as that damn plexiglass between them. He pulled in a deep breath. Nobody should have eyes that you couldn’t see into.

Chapter Eleven
    Louis took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. When he put them back on, the screen of the microfiche machine came back into focus. He had been at the Lee County Library for nearly two hours, tracking down anything he could find on Kitty Jagger’s murder.
    â€œExcuse me.”
    Louis looked up into the face of the librarian.
    â€œWe’re getting ready to close.”
    Louis looked at his watch. It was only five.
    â€œWe close early the day before Thanksgiving,” she said.
    Thanksgiving? Man, he had forgotten. He punched a button and the machine spit out a copy of the article on the screen.
    Outside the library, he paused, then decided to go to the bar across the street. He ordered a Coke and arranged the clips in chronological order. He started with the earliest one, from the Fort Myers News-Press, dated April 11, 1966. The headline said, GIRL FOUND DEAD AT DUMP SITE.
    It reported that the unidentified body of a young woman had been found at the city dump by two garbage men making an early-morning run. It was only a couple paragraphs on the bottom of the front page. Other news had taken precedence that day: Frank Sinatra had married Mia Farrow in Las Vegas.
    Louis took a sip of the Coke.
    He knew the dump site; he had passed it on the drive down to Bonita Springs. The locals called it Mount Trashmore. It was a giant landfill that had been sodded over to make it look nice for the new subdivision that was just a mile downwind. If it weren’t for the steady stream of garbage trucks and the gulls circling overhead, you could almost believe it was just a pretty hill. If South Florida had hills.
    The next article was dated April 12th. Police had used a gold locket found on the body to help identify the girl as a local teenager named Kitty Jagger, age fifteen. The medical examiner’s report said she had been stabbed, beaten and raped. She had been dead about two days when found. Police had no suspects but had located a bloody garden tool that appeared to be the stabbing weapon.
    He set the article aside and turned to the next one dated a week later.
    It said Kitty Jagger had last been seen on April 9th, the day of her death, by her boss at Hamburger Heaven, a drive-in where she was a carhop. She had worked her usual five-to-eleven night shift and had left to walk to the bus stop as she always did. There was an interview with Kitty’s widowed father, Willard Jagger, an unemployed roofer on disability who said that when his daughter did not come home, he called the police to file a missing person’s report.
    The article was illustrated with a small black and white picture of Kitty Jagger. It looked to be a yearbook photo, a blow-up from a group shot, probably Kitty’s freshman class. In it, Kitty Jagger was staring straight ahead, a small smile tipping her lips. From what Louis could tell, she looked like your average pretty high school girl, with long blond hair parted in the middle and hanging straight around her round face.
    Louis moved on to the next article, heavy with a black headline: SUSPECT ARRESTED IN JAGGER MURDER .
    This was the first mention of Jack Cade. There was a photo of Cade being led into the Lee County Courthouse. He was wearing a jumpsuit like the one Louis had seen him in yesterday, but his face was that of a very different and younger man.
    Cade’s