“I agree. Born and raised here.”
“So you get it. And Candace would never be happy living here for the rest of her life. And I guess, well, I loved her too much to push her to stay and didn’t love her enough to follow wherever she went.”
Pretty astute observation from a twentysomething.
“All I know,” Regan said, “is what the media reported, what her roommate said, what her sister said. But you really knew her.”
“No one really knew Candace. I might have known her better than most, but even I suspected she was different around me than she was around others, if that makes any sense.”
“A woman of a thousand faces.”
“In a way. Excuse me.” He stepped aside to refill a pint for an older guy at the end of the bar and to ring up a tab for another customer. He returned a few minutes later. “So what do you want to know?”
“Why didn’t you respond to Lucas Vega when he reached out to you?”
Richie shrugged. “I didn’t know what he planned to do, and I’m actually pretty busy. I work here full-time and work on ski patrol in the winter. And I didn’t want him to use me to create some sort of, I don’t know, tell-all about my dead girlfriend. She deserves more respect than that.”
“So you’re saying he didn’t make it clear what the podcast was about.”
“Right. All he said was that he was doing a project for his capstone about Candace’s murder and wanted to interview me.”
“Now that you’ve listened, do you have a different perspective?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Where do you think Candace was that week?”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot, but other than her sister, she wasn’t all that close to anyone. She had a lot of friends, but no close friends.”
“Did she have a friend that she might have visited? Maybe just a casual friend? In or around Kingman?”
“Yeah. I thought about it after I listened to the caller who saw her there. One of the Sigma Rho girls who had already graduated lived there, and I wondered if she was who Candace had visited. Now that I think about it, they were pretty tight—it wasn’t the first time she’d driven out there. But not so close that Candace talked about her a lot.”
“Do you know her name?”
“Sorry, I never met her. Candace might have mentioned it once or twice, but I don’t remember.”
It should be pretty easy to find a sorority sister from Kingman.
“So that caller didn’t surprise you.”
“No.”
“What about the library? I walked through there this morning, and there are several places she may have hidden.”
“Hidden? Like, you’re thinking she spent the night?”
“Yes.”
“I guess it’s possible, but why?”
Million-dollar question, she thought.
“I’m trying to think like her, figure out what her plan was, if she even had a plan. Or if she might have been scared or intimidated or worried. You were close to her.”
“I really wasn’t,” he said quietly. “I wanted to be. But Candace didn’t let anyone inside. I guess three years ago I didn’t care all that much. She liked me, we had fun, sex was great, she was smart, and I always had the feeling she came over to my place because she wanted to get away from her sorority.”
“Do you know if she was having problems with any of the girls there?”
He shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you.”
“Taylor James?”
He frowned.
“You know her.”
“Not well.”
“But?” she prompted.
“They used to be best friends, but something happened, and Candace said Taylor wasn’t the person she’d thought she was.”
“What about Kimberly Foster?”
“Don’t know her.”
“Annie Johnston?”
“Candace’s roommate? Real sweet. Kinda on the wholesome side. Annie was the only one who Candace brought here, like when she’d stop in here to see me. She’d come alone or with Annie.”
“Do you know if Candace had a second phone? Or access to a vehicle that wasn’t hers?”
“Now that you mention it, I saw a flip phone in her purse the last time I saw her. She was here, had her purse on the bar, and I commented on it. What happened to your phone? I think I said. She said it had a cracked screen so she got a prepaid one until she got it fixed. Something like that. It was in passing.”