“At the time, no, not really. I mean, since Kimmie saw them together and him having that bloody shirt in his car and all, it didn’t seem odd.” Brinkley crossed his legs, one foot pumping nervously.

“And now?” Andrew prodded him.

“Now…I don’t know, man.” He uncrossed his legs, then recrossed them.

“We were told that sometime before Shannon disappeared, there’d been some sort of bad blood between Eric and the chief’s nephew,” Andrew said.

“Oh, Jeff Feeney.” Brinkley nodded. “Yeah, they did get into it a few times. Last time might have been sometime before Shannon was kill…disappeared.”

He exhaled loudly.

“Where’s she been all this time?”

“She’s been around. Here and there,” Andrew told him. “She had a hard time of it.”

“She been on the streets all that time?” Brinkley searched Andrew’s face.

“It’s all going to come out soon enough.” Andrew nodded. “Yeah, she’s been on the streets since she left Hatton.”

“Son of a bitch.” Brinkley shook his head. “Son of a bitch.”

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully for a moment. “How’d she die?”

“Shot through the heart at close range,” Andrew replied.

“Someone wanted to make damn sure she was dead.”

“It appears that way, yes.”

“Wow.” Brinkley got up and paced, his hands in his pockets. “Wow. All this time, she’s been…wherever she was. And Eric…Jesus, man, that poor son of a bitch.”

“You can understand why we want to get a handle on what went on back then.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Brinkley continued pacing.

“So if you can think of any reason why Chief Taylor might not have considered anyone else for Shannon ’s murder…”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Maybe that thing with Jeff…I don’t know.”

“You know what that was all about?” Dorsey asked.

“I don’t. All I know is that there was no love lost between the two of them, but what was at the bottom of that?” He shrugged.

“Could the chief have been influenced against Eric because of bad blood between Eric and the nephew?” Dorsey pressed.

“I want to say no”-Brinkley dropped back onto his chair-“but truthfully, I don’t know. I don’t know what it was about, but whatever it was, it had been going on for a while.”

“Is Jeff Feeney still around?” Dorsey asked.

“Yeah. I saw him a few weeks ago at the Little League field, coaching one of his boys.”

“You got an address for him?”

“No, but he’s usually down at the hardware store, Feeney’s, right on Main Street. He took over from his father. And the chief’s widow is still around. Jeff is her nephew, her brother Jed’s oldest boy. She’s still pretty active around town, still living in that big house she and the chief bought and fixed up after her old man died and left her all that money.”

Brinkley stared at the floor for a while as if lost in thought, trying to comprehend it all. Finally, he looked up and said, “That agent they sent down here back then to head up the investigation…”

“Agent Ranieri.” Andrew tensed.

“Yeah. I see him on TV sometimes. Seems like he made a big career for himself after this case was over.” Brinkley scratched the side of his face. “Anyone tell him about Shannon?”

“He’s been told.”

“What’s he got to say?”

“He was as surprised as you are,” Andrew said simply.

“I’ll just bet he was. Ranieri. Yeah, I remember him.” Brinkley nodded. “Seemed like a decent guy. Course, I didn’t have much contact with him, but he seemed like a nice guy. Guess we won’t be seeing him much anymore.”

“What do you mean?” Dorsey frowned.

“On the TV. After this, who’s going to want to have him come on and talk about how the cops should investigate a case?”

“Jeremy, do you know what happened to the police file?” Andrew changed the subject swiftly.

“Is it missing?”

“Chief Bowden can’t locate it.”

“Miz Taylor might know. I think for a time they kept some stuff in the garage, back when the department was being moved.” He shrugged and averted his eyes.

“To the best of your knowledge, was there ever another suspect?” Dorsey asked. “Anyone else who maybe should have been a suspect, anyone who might have had something to do with Shannon disappearing that night?”

“Not as far as I know, uh-uh.” Jeremy paused, as if reflecting. “You know, everyone thought Eric did it, just accepted it. Looking back, I’m thinking maybe because his family was such trouble, people expected him to be trouble too. Funny thing, though, Eric always seemed to be different from the rest of the Beales, you know what I mean? Smarter. But maybe people didn’t know that. Maybe that’s why no one really questioned that it was him. It was just, Eric did this. Eric killed her.”

“And the case was built from there,” Dorsey said.

“Pretty much, yeah. Everyone was talking about how Eric used to follow Shannon around, but she was just a freshman, you know? All her friends said how he had a thing for her but she was only interested in him as a friend. So it wasn’t a secret, you know, that he had the hots for her.” Jeremy got up and took a sip from the glass of water. “Then, when Kimmie swore she saw them heading out of town and no one ever saw her again, well, that pretty much sealed it.”

“There was a break-in at the church the night Shannon disappeared.” Andrew changed the subject.

“Right. The money from the carnival was stolen.” His head bobbed up and down. “When I got in to work on Thursday morning, the chief said he’d gotten a call from old Mrs. Randall-Mrs. Randall, senior, I mean-after he got home the night before. Said there’d been some money stolen, but we could wait until the morning to come out to make the report.”

“Is that usual?” Dorsey asked.

“Not unusual. Mrs. Randall said her husband had already locked up the church after choir practice and she didn’t want to disturb him to go back over and open the church back up again. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Do you remember what you did the next morning?” Andrew backed Dorsey off with a glance.

“Sure. We met Mrs. Randall at the church around eight thirty. She showed us around the reverend’s office, showed us the drawer.”

“You take any prints?”

“Yeah. As I recall, they were pretty blurred. Nothing distinct, there were just too many of them. Some were the reverend’s, some were Mrs. Randall’s, we knew that, but if there was someone else’s prints there, we couldn’t have told you back then who they belonged to.”

“What areas did you dust for prints, besides the office?”

“None, that I recall. We were just finishing up on the desk when we heard screeching and yelling from the community center where the senior citizen’s breakfast was taking place. We ran down and there was Mrs. Randall, Shannon’s mom, yelling at her husband that she couldn’t find Shannon anywhere.” Brinkley shook his head. “At first, there was so much screeching, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Then she talked to the chief, and they started searching for her. They searched around the house, the church, all around the town. Mrs. Randall had called all Shannon ’s friends but no one had seen her since the night before.”

“Anyone question Franklin Randall at the time?”

“About what?”

“About the fact that his daughter had gone missing and no one seems to recall seeing him between the time he left the church and eleven thirty or so when his wife arrived home from an evening out with her sister.”

“I’m sure we did question him, we questioned everyone. Did we at any time think Reverend Randall had anything to do with Shannon ’s disappearance? No.” He paused and looked at Andrew long and hard. “Are you saying you think the Reverend had a hand in whatever happened to her?”

“I’m saying someone did and it looks like it wasn’t Eric Beale. I was just wondering if anyone talked to him.”

“Yes, we talked to him.”

“What was his demeanor?”