“Listen, don’t be so hard on yourself. Life is all about living.”

“I suppose.”

“So tell me, how long has it been since you actually saw him?”

“Manny? A while. Let me think.”

Four years, Nick was thinking. It’s been four years.

“I know when,” McBean said. “It was right after I got the job at the body shop. Four years. Give or take a couple of months, it was four years ago.”

CHAPTER 8

“The police ruled it a suicide. But could it have been murder? Hello, all you Charlotte Night Owls. You’re tuned in to WMEW, 82.5 FM, home of the Rick Clemmons show, starring me, Rick Clemmons.” The rotund DJ, draped in an orange-and-white Hawaiian shirt, wearing loose-fitting cargo shorts and a straw cowboy hat, pressed a yellow button on the eight-channel mixing board, cuing his show’s signature heavy-metal guitar theme song. “For those of you just joining us, our in-studio guest this morning is Jillian Coates, from… Virginia?”

“That’s right. Arlington.”

“Jillian… do you go by Jill or Jillian?”

“Jillian… with a J.”

“Jillian with a J is a photographer and the sister of Belle Coates, the Charlotte resident and nurse at the Central Charlotte Medical Center who died three weeks ago in an apparent suicide from a drug overdose.”

“Nurse, Rick. I’m a nurse just like my sister. I just do photography as a hobby. Once in a while I sell a piece or have a show, but-”

“Yes. Well, the police called the death of Belle Coates an open-and-shut case. Our guest this morning, a nurse currently working at…?”

“Shelby Stone Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C.”

“… Shelby Stone Memorial Hospital, isn’t so sure. Separating fact from fiction is what the Rick Clemmons Show is all about, and this juicy tale has more twists to it than a Twizzler. Bogus suicide? Botched investigation? Delusional sister? Psychic connection? You be the judge. But you know that Rick Clemmons always gets to the truth. So remember, our phone lines are open. Call anytime, boys and girls. Let’s get to the bottom of this thing!”

Jillian balled her fists and reminded herself that media exposure was what she was after. You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas, her mother always said.

The weeks since Belle’s death had been a living hell. With one terrible call from the Charlotte police, Jillian’s life had come to an abrupt stop, and then made a sharp right-angle turn. Nothing would ever be the same. Not an hour passed that she didn’t think about her younger sister and imagine what the final minutes of her existence must have been like. It made no sense that Belle, though hurt by her decision to break things off with the philandering jerk she was close to marrying, would be despondent enough to take her own life. She was all about adventure, discovery, and a love of people. Even in the infrequent troublesome times of her life, she had never even hinted at suicide.

Jillian was the volatile, eccentric one-the lone eagle with the spontaneity, the artist’s eye, and the unpredictable temper. Belle was a warm breeze-a zephyr, making everyone’s life she touched feel better.

You lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Who in the hell could have done this to her?

When Jillian agreed to come to Charlotte for the radio show, Rick Clemmons’s producer made it clear that the host, though genuinely caring, made his living by being outspoken and feeding the insatiable schadenfreude appetite of his audience. But at this instant, having to endure the man, she wished that he could know exactly what it felt like to lose somebody whom he loved as much as she did Belle. She wanted him to feel his stomach knot up at seeing his loved one’s photograph-to endure a sadness so profound it threatened to stop his breathing.

Sadly, out of more than a hundred requests she had made to local, regional, and national media outlets, Rick Clemmons was the only broadcaster who agreed to air her story. Like it or not, she had to play by his rules. As desperate as she was, she probably still shouldn’t have come. But she had to do something. There was no way she could just turn and walk away. This was her sister… her best friend. Somebody, someplace, had to know something. What else could she do but keep looking, even if it meant having to deal with a bottom-feeder like Rick Clemmons?

Clemmons pressed Mute on his mixing board, then turned to her and asked, “You ready to keep going, little lady?”

“I am,” Jillian said, adjusting her headphones.

“We gotta share a mic, remember. The AKG is on the fritz. Means you gotta lean in real close, now.”

His gaze traveled downward and Jillian could feel him unbutton her blouse with his eyes. She was used to men staring at her and flirting, but something about Clemmons made her itch. To distract herself, she again fiddled with her headphones and politely nodded.

Despite his show airing at the obscene hours of 1 A.M. to 6 A.M., Jillian had held out hope that Clemmons would actually have someone in his audience who could help her. Those hopes took a direct hit when she pulled her rental car into the station’s dirt parking lot, abutting a barren, litter-strewn stretch of Highway 27 between Charlotte and Paw Creek. The producer had said nothing to prepare her for the ramshackle trailer from which WMEW broadcast.

When she first knocked on the rust-speckled trailer door, she half expected a crazed, toothless old man, shirtless in his overalls, to leap out and grab her. She knew going in that WMEW was small-market radio, but hell, this was bordering on microscopic. She wondered how a photographic study of the place would fit in with her current project on America’s back roads. It wasn’t surprising that Clemmons had to resort to tabloid radio to maintain competitive ratings, especially competing in such an ungodly time slot. But she was frustrated to the point of desperation, and it was either play this game, or don’t play at all.

“Okay, Jillian,” Clemmons said into the one working microphone. “Now, if I’m getting this right, some of the evidence you have that your sister was murdered is in her diary?”

Jillian paused to compose herself.

“Not exactly. After the police had completed their evaluation, I came to Charlotte to collect her things.”

“What things?” Clemmons asked.

“Everything. Photographs. Clothes. Files. Her computer. I boxed everything up and hired a moving company to move all of her things to my place. I wanted to go through it all one last time before I… before I started throwing things away. The police didn’t need any of it. According to them, there was nothing for them to investigate.”

“Except maybe murder,” Clemmons threw in.

“There was a diary-more like a journal, actually-but there wasn’t much in it that I didn’t already know. As you can tell, my younger sister and I were very close. Our… our parents were killed in an auto accident twelve years ago, when she was fourteen and I was twenty-four. We lived together until she started nursing school-the same school I had gone to in Washington. During vacations and summers, she stayed with me in the condo I bought with my half of the sale of our parents’ place.”

“Exactly what did you find in this diary that led you to believe the suicide note she left was somehow bogus or forced by another person?”

“First of all, I want to say that I am a psych nurse in one of the best departments in D.C. I’ve been in that specialty for a long time. It’s my job to know when someone is suicidal, and believe me, Rick, Belle was not suicidal. Not in the least.”

“The diary?”

“It wasn’t a deeply personal, from-the-heart diary; more like a journal of events in Belle’s life. It wasn’t locked up or hidden away. I found it on her nightstand while I was boxing up her things.”