Creedmore pressed his fingertips to his eyes. The championship ring gleamed from the ring finger on his left hand.
He looked up at Makarowicz. “She broke up with me, you know? Said it had gone too far, and she was ashamed of what we’d done. She said I should be with a girl my own age.”
“When was this?”
“After we won the state championship. She’d left me a note in my car, but that night, after the game, I went over to her house, and waited outside. And we kind of got back together.”
“Had sex, you mean,” Makarowicz said. “Out here? At the beach?”
“No. In my car at a park around the corner from her house. And then she said it was the last time, and she really meant it.”
“Classy,” Mak muttered. “Talk to me about Super Bowl night.”
He was staring down at the ring again, twisting it around and around. “For a while, after that, she ghosted me. I texted, left notes in her car at school, went to her house, but she wouldn’t come out. Then, the day of the Super Bowl she texted me. She was pregnant.”
It was Makarowicz’s turn to stare. “And it was yours?”
“Yeah. Frank had a vasectomy. After Emma. I mean, what the hell? I was supposed to be going to Fordham, to play ball. I was fucking nineteen years old. What the hell am I supposed to do with that information?”
“So that’s why you killed her. To keep anybody from finding out.”
“No!” Creedmore shouted. “How many times do I have to say it? I didn’t do it. She was supposed to come out to the house that night, so we could talk, but she didn’t. I was waiting in the dock house, freezing my ass off, but she never fucking showed up. Eventually, I fell asleep. I woke up, drove home sometime before sunrise. And I never saw her again.”
“You’re lying,” Makarowicz said calmly. “I know you were with her. Frank Ragan heard Lanier leaving the house. He followed her as far as Victory and Skidaway.”
“See?” Creedmore shouted. “I told you it was Frank. He must have followed her all the way out to the house and killed her. He did it. I swear to God, I never saw her that night.”
“Explain to me how Frank Ragan could have known about that septic tank in your backyard,” Makarowicz said. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Go ahead. I’ll wait.”
Creedmore’s head drooped to his chest. “I want my lawyer. Now.”
49
A Mother Knows
Makarowicz went to the door of the interview room.
“Wait. What happens now?” Creedmore demanded. “What about my lawyer?”
“Call him, you piece of shit,” he said. He opened the door and started to walk out of the interview room, leaving Holland Creedmore to, as his late mother would have said, “stew in his own juices.”
“I don’t have my phone.”
“Too bad.”
* * *
Makarowicz left the police station and drove directly to the Ardsley Park home of Dorcas and Holland Creedmore Sr.
This time Creedmore answered the doorbell. He opened the door, then started to close it again, but Makarowicz held out his badge. “Mr. Creedmore, you need to know that we have recovered skeletal remains at your property and they’ve been identified as Lanier Ragan. I am holding your son for questioning. You and your wife need to be forthcoming with me about what you know, or I will also take you into custody.”
“Dorcas!” Creedmore bellowed.
She walked into the living room from the back of the house, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
“They found a body out at the beach house. It was Lanier Ragan.”
She dropped the dish towel to the floor and sank down into the nearest chair.
Dorcas Creedmore glanced nervously at her husband. “We don’t have to talk to him, do we?”
Makarowicz answered for him. “You don’t. This is strictly a courtesy visit. I thought as upstanding citizens of this community, you might want to help us find who killed Lanier Ragan.”
“How would we know something like that?”
“The body was found on property your family owned for decades. You told me yourself that she and her husband attended parties there. And then, there’s the matter of your son, a teenager at the time, who was sleeping with Mrs. Ragan.”
Dorcas gasped. “Where did you hear a thing like that?”
“Holland Junior told me himself. I picked him up this morning. He admitted to me that he and Lanier Ragan had a sexual relationship that was ongoing, up until the night of her murder.”