“Her choice. I was as good a father as she let me be. You being a cop, you probably know how bad drugs can mess with a kid’s head these days. I’m the one who about went broke paying for her rehab, you know. Bet she didn’t mention that.”
“I’m not here to judge your parenting skills,” Mak said. “But I am kind of surprised that you haven’t already asked me about your wife, or that you didn’t bother to return any of my phone calls telling you there’d been a new development in the case.”
“I follow the news,” Ragan said. “If Lanier had turned up, I’d have gotten an alert on my phone. But she hasn’t, has she?”
“No. But we have a couple of new leads I wanted to discuss with you. First, of course, I’m wondering why your wife’s billfold was found in the wall of that house on Tybee.”
“You got me,” Ragan said. “If your next question was whether Lanier was ever there, the answer is yes. When the Creedmores owned the house, they had the whole team and the coaching staff and their families there for cookouts and stuff like that. I guess we were there at least four or five times over the years.”
“Any idea whether your wife was ever there without you?”
“I don’t know. I guess she could have been.”
“I understand Lanier was tutoring a few of your players that fall? At your request?”
Ragan fixed him with a hard stare. “This shit again? Yeah, I’ve heard the rumors, that she was messing around with one of my players. I can’t disprove it, and I can’t prove it, because she’s not around, is she?”
“No. She’s not. I’d be interested in hearing your theories about what happened to your wife. Emma told me you once accused your wife of ‘whoring around.’ Is that accurate?”
“One time. I caught Emma sneaking in the house after she’d stayed out all night with her boyfriend. She was fifteen, for Christ’s sake. I was trying to scare her. Maybe I got a little overly dramatic. I’m telling you, I don’t know what happened to Lanier. We came home from a Super Bowl party. When I woke up the next morning, she was gone. That’s it. Seventeen years have passed and that’s still all I know.”
“That’s not exactly how Emma remembers things. She told me today that she woke up in the middle of the night—because it was storming, and she was afraid, and when she went to your bedroom, both you and Lanier were gone.”
“No,” Ragan said flatly. “Never happened.”
“She ran around the house, looking for both of you, terrified and crying, because she was alone. And that’s when you came into her bedroom. Wet. You told her something about hearing a tree limb fall on the house, and you told her to go back to sleep.”
Ragan leaned over, his hands clutching the side of the table. “How come she’s just now remembering that? Huh? All those years of school counselors and therapists—how come she’s just now coming up with this fairy tale of hers? Emma was three when her mom disappeared. What kind of memory does a three-year-old have of anything? You tell me.”
Makarowicz waited until Ragan had finished. “In all the old police reports, I saw that you told investigators Emma was only three when Lanier vanished. Emma herself says that at the time she was four. I checked with the state department of driver services, and she’s telling the truth. She’s a tiny little thing, isn’t she? I’m betting the cops didn’t question her at the time because she looked so young. And because you told them she was three.”
“My wife had just disappeared!” Ragan said, his face growing red with rage. “Maybe I fuckin’ messed up her age. Who cares?” He slapped the tabletop with the palm of his hand. “Do you know what happened to my life? My career, after Lanier disappeared? At first, everyone was so concerned. Poor Coach. Poor little Emma. There were search parties and prayer vigils. Casseroles. My God, I thought I’d never look at a noodle again. And then the rumors started. The next fall, my starting quarterback tore his ACL, two of my seniors got pulled over for DUIs and got expelled, and nothing seemed to gel. At the end of the school year, the headmaster called me in and told me I’d become a ‘distraction’ at the school, and my contract wasn’t being renewed. I won the state championship just the year before. That same year three of my guys signed to play at Division One colleges and I was prep coach of the year. But none of that meant anything, because I was a ‘distraction.’ I had to scramble to find another job—assistant coach and teaching driver’s ed at a crappy public school the next county over. I’ve been hustling and scraping to keep it together for seventeen years. And why? Because my wife—the sainted Lanier Ragan—decided she didn’t give a shit about me or our kid.”