him.”
“Enemies?” Evon asked.
“Turned out Zeus had a passel. Pretty sharp elbows when it came to business. There was the Greek mob, too, not to mention the husbands and boyfriends of the girls he was always after. Even turned out that some of the boys from the North End warned him not to run against Rafe Demuzzio in the primary. FBI was looking at that.”
“And when did Cass come into the investigation?”
Tim said the police had spoken to Cass as part of the initial canvass, but he claimed to know nothing. At the start, Zeus was sure Cass was uninvolved, and cops being cops, they were reluctant to suspect a police cadet. About three weeks in, the phone company produced the toll records from Dita’s phone and Cass was reinterviewed briefly, but Cass said he and Paul weren’t home and Dita had merely left a short message on his answering machine, which he erased that night.
“Cass, he would have been the last person I’d have thought of, to tell the truth. Him and Paul were in high school with my middle daughter, Demetra, and I knew them from church. Solid kids, in my book, both of them. But you know,” he said, “it’s the ones you think you know that fool you.” Tim thought about that and squeezed his lips with his hand.
“About a month along, we had a big meeting, every investigator, just to see what we’d missed, which was quite a bit. By then two, three of Dita’s girlfriends had said she’d made up her mind to drop Cass, she was sick of all the trouble with his family. So I go over and take a peek at Cass’s employment file in McGrath Hall,” said Tim. “Blood type B. His prints are on file, too. I ask the Greenwood PA for a subpoena and sure enough, the prints match out with the doorknob and a lot of other lifts around the room. So now we’re thinking, maybe the call at 10 was to whistle his butt over there so she could tell him adios .
“Anyway, the Greenwood prosecutor, he wants to question Cass in the grand jury, but Cass hires Sandy Stern who won’t let him talk. There’s a lot of cat-and-mousing for a month. Stern is like, ‘Those fingerprints mean nothing. Cass was climbing the drainpipe every night to tickle her fancy.’ And the same girlfriends who said Dita was going to eighty-six Cass, when we push, they give that part up, too.”
“Cass was jocking Dita right down the hall from her parents? Doesn’t sound like my idea of fun,” Evon said.
Tim closed his eyes and let his head revolve loosely, like a leaf in a breeze. Who knew what folks thought of as fun, especially in that department?
“Zeus, of course, that was the one thing he went off about, when I told him that part. No boyo was making time with his little petunia right in his casa . But I’m suspicioning it’s probably true.”
“Really?”
“Sure, cause if Cass was climbing up there to make whoopee, that meant he knew how to get in there the night she’s killed. So I get the PA to subpoena his credit card records, and we put together a little task force to check out every pair of shoes he bought in the last year, and sure enough, about a week into that, we find he got himself a pair of Nikes whose tread matches the impressions in the flower bed. Those tracks down the hill could have come from the Bridgestones on Cass’s old Datsun, too, except there’s ten thousand cars in the Tri-Cities with the same tires.
“But we issue a search warrant, for his clothes and shoes and vehicle, and for a physical exam, to see if we can find the scar where he was cut. We get the shoes we’re looking for. Nothing turns up with the clothes, but Luminol in the car shows blood traces, type B again. By now, Stern won’t produce Cass for the physical exam, instead files a bunch of motions, and then when he’s just about run out that string, Sandy comes in and offers to plead Cass. He wants manslaughter, ten years’ minimum security. Zeus and Lidia, the twins’ mom, they go back to smooching in the choir room at
“Enemies?” Evon asked.
“Turned out Zeus had a passel. Pretty sharp elbows when it came to business. There was the Greek mob, too, not to mention the husbands and boyfriends of the girls he was always after. Even turned out that some of the boys from the North End warned him not to run against Rafe Demuzzio in the primary. FBI was looking at that.”
“And when did Cass come into the investigation?”
Tim said the police had spoken to Cass as part of the initial canvass, but he claimed to know nothing. At the start, Zeus was sure Cass was uninvolved, and cops being cops, they were reluctant to suspect a police cadet. About three weeks in, the phone company produced the toll records from Dita’s phone and Cass was reinterviewed briefly, but Cass said he and Paul weren’t home and Dita had merely left a short message on his answering machine, which he erased that night.
“Cass, he would have been the last person I’d have thought of, to tell the truth. Him and Paul were in high school with my middle daughter, Demetra, and I knew them from church. Solid kids, in my book, both of them. But you know,” he said, “it’s the ones you think you know that fool you.” Tim thought about that and squeezed his lips with his hand.
“About a month along, we had a big meeting, every investigator, just to see what we’d missed, which was quite a bit. By then two, three of Dita’s girlfriends had said she’d made up her mind to drop Cass, she was sick of all the trouble with his family. So I go over and take a peek at Cass’s employment file in McGrath Hall,” said Tim. “Blood type B. His prints are on file, too. I ask the Greenwood PA for a subpoena and sure enough, the prints match out with the doorknob and a lot of other lifts around the room. So now we’re thinking, maybe the call at 10 was to whistle his butt over there so she could tell him adios .
“Anyway, the Greenwood prosecutor, he wants to question Cass in the grand jury, but Cass hires Sandy Stern who won’t let him talk. There’s a lot of cat-and-mousing for a month. Stern is like, ‘Those fingerprints mean nothing. Cass was climbing the drainpipe every night to tickle her fancy.’ And the same girlfriends who said Dita was going to eighty-six Cass, when we push, they give that part up, too.”
“Cass was jocking Dita right down the hall from her parents? Doesn’t sound like my idea of fun,” Evon said.
Tim closed his eyes and let his head revolve loosely, like a leaf in a breeze. Who knew what folks thought of as fun, especially in that department?
“Zeus, of course, that was the one thing he went off about, when I told him that part. No boyo was making time with his little petunia right in his casa . But I’m suspicioning it’s probably true.”
“Really?”
“Sure, cause if Cass was climbing up there to make whoopee, that meant he knew how to get in there the night she’s killed. So I get the PA to subpoena his credit card records, and we put together a little task force to check out every pair of shoes he bought in the last year, and sure enough, about a week into that, we find he got himself a pair of Nikes whose tread matches the impressions in the flower bed. Those tracks down the hill could have come from the Bridgestones on Cass’s old Datsun, too, except there’s ten thousand cars in the Tri-Cities with the same tires.
“But we issue a search warrant, for his clothes and shoes and vehicle, and for a physical exam, to see if we can find the scar where he was cut. We get the shoes we’re looking for. Nothing turns up with the clothes, but Luminol in the car shows blood traces, type B again. By now, Stern won’t produce Cass for the physical exam, instead files a bunch of motions, and then when he’s just about run out that string, Sandy comes in and offers to plead Cass. He wants manslaughter, ten years’ minimum security. Zeus and Lidia, the twins’ mom, they go back to smooching in the choir room at
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