“Tell us about the date,” the younger cop said. She looked at his name tag. Officer Rollins. The older one was Lieutenant Smith.
“He was supposed to pick me up at seven. I was dressed and ready by six fifty. I went downstairs to the parking lot to wait for him because I got tired of listening to Brittany, my roommate, tell me how I didn’t deserve Austin’s noticing me. She kept telling me how lucky I was he was even going to give a lowly freshman like me the time of day.” She gestured towards the absent Brittany’s bed. “Austin was running really late. He didn’t show up until seven thirty-five or so. Normally I wouldn’t have waited on someone that long, but I didn’t want to face Brittany to tell her he’d stood me up. She would have laughed all night,” Gracie shook her head ruefully. “Of course, if I had known what a lousy date it was going to be, I would have stayed home.”
The officers waited, looking impatient. Gracie was taking her sweet time getting to the lies. It was the next part that she dreaded. David had told her to tell the cops the truth, but she wasn’t sure how much of the truth she could tell before she started looking more guilty than innocent.
“By the time he finally showed up, he was half an hour late. I almost didn’t go with him, but he apologized, and I didn’t figure I had anything to lose. I really didn’t want to spend another night sitting around in this room listening to Brittany talk about which celebrity got a boob job this week.”
“You do admit you went out with Austin Putterling on Friday night before he disappeared?”
“Yes sir,” Gracie nodded. There was no point in denying the date. Too many people had known about it. “We left campus in his car, I think it’s a silver BMW. I thought he was taking me out to a nice dinner but instead he drove to Take-A-Taco and went through the drive-thru.”
“You got tacos?” Officer Smith asked.
“Actually, no.” Gracie hadn’t thought about it until he asked. “We never actually got the tacos. We got into an argument when we were in the drive-thru lane. He kept trying to stick his hand up my skirt, and I didn’t want him to. He got mad at said that if I wasn’t going to put out,” Gracie prepared herself to tell the lie, “he was going to put me out of his car.”
“He tried to put his hand up your skirt?” Rollins repeated.
Gracie nodded.
“You didn’t want Mr. Putterling to put his hand up your skirt?” Smith asked.
“I don’t sleep around. When someone invites me out to dinner, I expect to go out to dinner. Talk. Maybe go to a movie. I barely know Austin; I wasn’t going to let him touch me like he owned me. ” Gracie blinked back tears and bit her lip. She hadn’t expected it would be this hard to tell them what happened. She felt humiliated as Rollins handed her a tissue off of her own desk.
“You felt Mr. Putterling was touching you inappropriately?”
Gracie nodded. “Also, I think he was on drugs.”
“Why do you say that?” Lieutenant Smith didn’t look so bored all of a sudden.
“He was really jumpy,” Gracie told the truth. “He fidgeted constantly. I don’t think he ever stopped moving the entire time we were together. He kept rambling from conversation topic to conversation topic. He was just all over the place.”
“He was behaving erratically?” Officer Rollins clarified.
“Yes, sir. Erratic is a good way to describe how he was acting. For example, when I told him I wasn’t going to do anything with him, sexually, he drove straight out of the Take-A-Taco drive-thru without even picking up the food. He got mad and he just floored it out of there.”
“He left without getting the food?” Rollins appeared thoughtful.
“Right.”
“What happened after you left Take-A-Taco?” Smith asked.
“We argued some more. He’d said he was kicking me out of his car, but then he didn’t want to stop to let me out. He was driving really fast, easily 80 or 90 miles per hour. He kept turning down all these really rural back-roads. I didn’t know where I was, and I was scared he was going to smash us into a tree or a ditch. I wound up begging him to let me out of the car.”
“I assume he eventually let you out of the car?”
“He did. About 10 minutes after we left Take-A-Taco, he pulled over and I got out. He didn’t say anything else to me. He just said that if I wanted to get out, I could go. I got out and he took off down the road. I didn’t see him again.”
The cops seemed to mull that over for a moment. “Where did he leave you?”
“On some random dirt road a couple of miles away from Highway 27.” The question took Gracie by surprise. She answered with the truth because hesitating would have been a dead giveaway that she was lying.
“Do you remember which way he was going when he sped away?”
She shook her head. “He was heading away from the school, but I don’t really know where he went. I was just so upset. I must have sat on the side of the road and cried for twenty minutes.”
“Did you call the cops?” Smith asked. She could feel disapproval radiating off of him.
She shook her head no. “I wasn’t under the impression that ditching your date was illegal. I figured I’d just look stupid. I was scared and embarrassed. I couldn’t believe I’d let myself be put in that kind of situation. My Uncle Wally is the Sheriff of Coastal County. He’s always lectured me and lectured me on protecting myself, and I still ended up in a bad situation. I was so ashamed,” Gracie told them honestly.
She’s seen their eyes widen slightly when she mentioned she was Wally Hall’s niece. He’d been in law enforcement a long time. They had probably heard of him.
Officer Rollins nodded. “That’s a common reaction among women who’ve found themselves in bad situations,” he told her.
“How did you get back to campus?” Smith asked, not appearing to be too moved by her story.
This is where things got sticky; Gracie took a deep breath and tried to tell it exactly how she and David had rehearsed.
“I didn’t come back to campus,” she said. “I was too embarrassed. The longer I sat there, the worse I felt. I couldn’t imagine having to face Brittany and tell her what had happened. I just wanted to be somewhere safe.”
“So?” Smith asked.
“I called David and begged him to come get me,” she said.
“David?”
“My boyfriend. From home,” she explained. “I told him a really quick version of what had happened and how sorry I was for doubting our relationship.”
“Your boyfriend from home,” Smith repeated, disbelievingly. “Did he come?”
Gracie nodded.
“You’re telling us that you waited on the side of the road for this guy to drive all the way up here from Coastal County?” Rollins asked.
She nodded again. They didn’t believe her. She didn’t even believe her.
“It took him about three hours,” Gracie said, trying not to cry and failing.
“You waited on the side of Highway 27 for three hours?” the cop repeated.
“What else was I supposed to do?” she asked. “I was in the middle of nowhere wearing four- inch heels. I don’t really have any friends here. I don’t have anyone here I trust enough to call, and I could only imagine what Brittany would say when I got back here.” She waved her arm around the dorm room. “I waited until David drove up here, got in his truck, and told him to take me home.”
“Home?” Rollins asked.
“Shiner’s Bayou.”
“You went all the way back to your hometown?” Smith asked.
She nodded. “I couldn’t handle being at the dorm. I just wanted to go home, tell David-” Cal... “Tell him how sorry I was for the way I’d been acting, curl up in a ball at his place, and not come back. Things haven’t been going great here anyway.”
The cops silently digested the information she fed them.
“You came back,” one of the cops said. Gracie mentally found herself admitting that David had probably been right about her having to
come back in order to solidify her alibi.
“You didn’t even come by the dorm to pick up any clothes before you left for the weekend?” the other asked.
She looked between them, unsure who to respond to first.
Rollins gestured to Smith. “You didn’t need clothes for the weekend?” he probed.
Gracie shook her head. “I have stuff I keep at David’s. Besides, he has enough money to buy me anything I need,” she added, recalling the four hundred he had handed her. Even after she’d filled up the Camaro this morning she still had two hundred left.
“Really?” Rollins seemed skeptical.
“David owns his own mechanics shop. It’s the only one in town,” she explained, realizing her age was probably what was making them question her comment about money.
“He’s older than I am,” she offered, wondering if it would ease the suspicious looks on their faces. “He’s one of my older brother’s good friends.”
Smith nodded. “He has plenty of money?” He seemed to have something on his mind.
Gracie didn’t know where he was going with this, but she confirmed it anyway. “More than enough to buy me clothes for the weekend. I think the shop does pretty well,” she said.
For a moment they all sat in silence.
“Let me just make sure I’ve got this straight so far. You’re telling us that your boyfriend came up here, picked you up off the side of the road, and drove you back down to Coastal County?”
Gracie nodded.
“Then what?” Rollins asked.
David had told her to tell the whole, complete truth about the rest of the weekend. Leaving out the part about disposing of the car and David’s own disappearing act after dark on Saturday night. “We went back to David’s place.”
“Can anyone confirm that?” Smith asked.
“You mean besides David?” Gracie could tell they were not wholeheartedly buying her story. She thought for a moment and then cringed. David had said it was okay to tell them about Cal, but she still felt uneasy about it.
Smith saw her pause and shot her a look. “Miss Malone, we need you to be completely honest with us and tell us everything.”
“This has nothing to do with Austin,” Gracie said. “The last I saw of Austin, he was speeding off down Highway 27.”
“Miss Malone, you do realize that even if your story is completely true, and that’s a big if, we still need to confirm all your details with as many people as possible.” Smith tapped his fingers against her desk.
She sighed and took a deep breath.
“Most people back home don’t know about me and David. He’s four years older than me. There are quite a few people, my parents included, who wouldn’t approve if they found out,” she said.
“David’s best friend is my ex-boyfriend. He still has feelings for me, even though we broke up during my senior year of high school.” She trailed off as more tears spilled down her cheeks. “Cal is a good guy, and neither one of us wanted to tell him about us because he’d be really, really, hurt by our relationship.”
Smith kept waiting, no expression on his face. He gestured for her to keep talking.
Gracie took a deep breath. “Right after David and I got back to the house, Cal showed up. His truck was acting up and he decided to take it to David’s house and deal with it in the morning instead of trying to get all the way home.”
The cops waited silently.
“Cal came walking in without knocking. I mean, he never knocks, but normally we know when he’s coming over, so it’s no big deal. He caught us together, if you know what I mean?”
Rollins frowned. “You mean having sex?”
“We never made it to the sex part,” Gracie felt herself blushing. “He came walking in before we could get to that. He flipped out. He and David got into a fight.”
“Verbal or physical?” Smith asked.
“What?” Gracie blinked at him.
“The fight?”
“Oh, both. Cal broke David’s nose.” Gracie wondered if the guilt she felt showed in her face.
Rollins frowned. “Pretty serious fight.”
“I felt awful,” Gracie said.
“What happened next?” Smith pushed her onward.
“Cal took David’s truck and went home. He said it was our choice what we did but he wasn’t happy about it. David and I went to bed.”
She hoped this was the end of it, but Smith gestured for her to continue.
“You want to hear about the whole weekend?” She asked him.
“Every detail,” Smith replied.
“Okay,” Gracie shrugged and hoped they couldn’t see how nervous they were making her. This interview wasn’t going well at all. They didn’t believe her.
“David and I went and got Cal’s truck when we woke up Saturday morning. Cal showed up a couple of hours later and he and David spent almost all day trying to get it running right. I think David said there’s something wrong with the electrical system?” Gracie shrugged. “I cleaned the house. At one point, my brother stopped by and he got mad about David and Cal getting into a fight over me. He didn’t know David and I were together either, but he took it a lot better than Cal did.”
“Your brother?”
“Yes,” Gracie nodded. “He’s the Game Warden in Coastal County. His name is Addison Malone.”
“What happened after your brother showed up?” Smith seemed determined to hear every detail of the weekend.
“Cal got his truck fixed and he left. David and I took showers, and we went into town,” she said. “We went to Canterville though, not Shiner’s Bayou.”
“Why Canterville?” Smith asked. “I thought you were from Shiner’s Bayou.”
“I am, but I didn’t want to run into people we knew and Canterville has a Walmart.”
“You went to Walmart?” Rollins asked.
Gracie nodded.
“You went to Walmart and then what?” Smith pressed the issue. He seemed bothered by something.
“We went out to dinner at a local Italian place; it’s called Italiano’s. Then we went home, watched a couple of movies, and went to bed.”
“What movies?” Rollins asked, seemingly out of left field.
“Gone with the Wind and Cars,” she said with a shrug. She had no idea why they would care what movies she had watched. “We have kind of weird taste.”
The officers didn’t comment, so she went on.
“Sunday morning, I slept in until eleven when my Mom called. I lied my ass off and told her I was still up at school having a great time and after lunch, David drove me back.”
“That’s a long drive for one person to make twice in less than 48 hours,” Smith commented.
“David loves me,” Gracie smiled prettily at him, willing him to believe her. “Oh, and if you need proof that David brought me back to school, we got written up for a public display of affection by my RA on Sunday night.”
Lieutenant Smith actually laughed. “You violated the family-friendly dorm policy?”
“Evidently,” Gracie shrugged her shoulders. “I forgot it was a social night; we came right into the dorm still making out. I think there are something like 100 witnesses.”
“Nice.” Lieutenant Smith shook his head.
“And Monday?” Rollins asked. “Anything interesting happen to you yesterday?”
“No sir. I went to class. Everything was back to normal until y’all showed up.”
“How did you feel about the comments Mr. Putterling made about you online?” Rollins asked her. “I do assume you are aware of them?”
“My roommate showed them to me on Sunday when I came back to the room after being written up,” Gracie admitted with a shrug. “It kind of stung, and it was embarrassing, but whatever. He didn’t put my name on it. Not that many people even knew about our date. At least I never slept with him. I’d be more embarrassed if I had done anything with him and then he’d said nasty stuff about me.”
The officers sat and watche
d her for a moment. She felt exhausted. She’d had no idea lying was such hard work. Her nerves were on edge.
“Miss Malone, I assume you can give me phone numbers and last names for everyone who can verify your whereabouts this past weekend, correct?” Smith asked.
Gracie nodded.
“Then do it.” He handed her a pencil and miniature notebook he had extracted from one of his pockets.
She scribbled David, Cal, and Addison’s information down and handed it back to him. “Anything else?” she asked.
“Yes,” Rollins said. “We’ll need you to come down to our office tomorrow to give an official statement.”
Gracie grimaced.
“Is there a problem with that?” he asked her.
“Am I a suspect in anything?” she asked him bluntly.
“Not yet,” Smith was frowning at her. “But we’ll be in touch, and we need that statement in the meantime.”
Gracie felt like crying again as they let themselves out of the room.
*
“What movies?”
David scowled as the cop on the other end of line asked another question. He wracked his brain trying to remember what movie Gracie had put in before he’d left to get rid of frat boy’s body.
“Uh, that cartoon with the talking race cars, I think it’s just called Cars and shit, what was that other one?” He frowned into the phone, glad Officer Smith couldn’t see him through the phone as he walked over to the DVD player and tried to figure out which cases had the least amount of dust on them. Gone with the Wind was sitting on top of the TV. “Gone with the Wind,” he said.
The cop made a clicking noise. “Then what?” he asked.
“We went to bed, slept in late, then I took her back to school.”
“Mr. Breedlove, how do you feel about your girlfriend dating other men?” The cop asked. It was the third time he’d rephrased that question and David was getting tired of the interrogation.
“Like I already told you the first two times you asked, officer, it was her decision.”
He had a bred in dislike of cops, and this one was getting on his last nerve.
Frat boy’s family definitely had big money to make the cops go all out on missing person’s investigation. David sighed and wished he could reach through the phone and strangle the officer on the other line.
Feeding Gators: Book 1 in the Shiner's Bayou Series Page 24