by Beverly Long
“I got more than you. And it’s not good.” A.L. brought her up to speed.
“You think she’s back in Baywood?” Rena asked.
“I don’t know. But we know that Lauren didn’t call and tip her off. You just had that conversation, and she’s been gone since yesterday morning.”
“Now what?”
“We go back to Baywood and check her house. If she’s not there, I think we’re going to have to talk to her daughter. If she’s going to be in contact with anybody, it seems likely it’s going to be her parents or her daughter.”
“You said that her parents think she canceled her cell phone,” Rena said.
“There are other ways to make a call. And my money is on the fact that she’ll find a way to check in with somebody,” he said.
“I hate the idea of worrying her daughter.”
“I know.” A visit from the police about Jacqui would freak Traci out.
“We’ll have to bring Christian and the rest of the task force up to date tomorrow.”
He wanted to be able to tell them something more than he’d put a thousand miles on his car. “Hey, you know who we haven’t heard from?”
“Who?”
“Diane at Baywood Historic Preservation. She was supposed to send a list of volunteers. It’s been more than twenty-four hours since we talked to her. She said there were only twenty or thirty.”
“You’re right,” Rena said. “I’ll call her.”
A.L. drummed his index finger on the steering wheel while Rena made the call. She put it on Speaker so that he could hear the conversation.
“Diane, this is Detective Morgan. I’m following up on our conversation yesterday. You were going to email a listing of volunteers to us. I don’t see that I’ve received anything.”
“Really? I was sure I sent it. Let me check.”
Rena glanced at him. He could see the question in her eyes. Was Diane just ditsy, or had she hoped they wouldn’t circle back on the list request?
“I’m sorry, Detective. It’s sitting in my draft folder. I thought I’d sent it. I’ll do that right now.”
“Great. Thanks. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.”
Rena hung up. Then scrolled to her mail. Within seconds, she looked up. “Got it.” She opened the document, scanned the names. Held her phone out to A.L. “Halfway down,” she said.
He looked. The list was sorted alphabetically by first name. He saw what had gotten her attention. Marie Devine. He checked the date that she’d started volunteering. Within the last year. “What the hell?”
“Could there be another Marie Devine?” Rena asked.
“In Baywood? I don’t think so,” he said. “Jacqui had told me that she thought Marie Wallace was using her maiden name again. And we gave her the chance to tell us that. But she didn’t. Why the hell not?”
“I have no idea.”
He quickly reviewed the other names to see if anything else bounced at him. Two from the end he saw Violet O’Brien, their department secretary. He’d have thought she’d be too damn busy raising kids and working a full-time job to take on one more thing. But he was reminded about Sarah Waxell’s comment that there was a core group in the community who gave to everything. Maybe there was a core group, too, that volunteered for everything. “Did you see Violet’s name, too?”
She shook her head and took back the phone. “They said that volunteers sometimes went out in pairs. I wonder if Violet ever got paired up with Marie. It would be good to get another perspective on Marie so that we would know if the behavior we saw was normal or if something was off.”
“Agree. Call her.”
Rena made the call. Again, on Speaker. “Hey, Violet. How’s it going?” she asked.
“Besides my ankles being the size of your thighs, pretty good,” she said.
“When are you due?”
“Four days.”
“Well, hey, I’ve got you on Speaker and A.L. is with me. There’s something you might be able to help us with.”
“Hi, A.L. I’ll try. Although I’ve been off work for a week now, and every day my brain turns a bit more to mush.”
“You’ve got a mind like a steel trap,” A.L. said. It was true. Violet was excellent at her job. Good at anticipating what everyone in the department wanted or needed. “Do you know Marie Wallace?”
“I do. Has something happened to her?”
“No, not that we know of.”
“Good. She’s had a tough go of it these last couple years. I think it was finally turning around and would have hated for it to have gone south again.”
Everybody they talked to felt sorry for Marie Wallace. Was it because she made sure everybody knew her sob story, or because she’d truly been dealt a shitty hand? “Tell us more about that,” he said.
“I don’t know her that well, but we’re both volunteers for Baywood Historic Preservation.”
Bingo. A.L. and Rena locked eyes but said nothing.
“And a couple times, we’ve been at events together, so I’ve gotten to know her. I think her divorce was a rough one.”
Most everybody could say that. “She seemed... almost caustic when we talked to her,” A.L. said. “And she seemed to have an especially difficult time communicating with me.”
“Hmm. She—Get out of the refrigerator,” she yelled. “Sorry. We’re having dinner in fifteen minutes, and my twelve-year-old can’t seem to wait. Anyway, she can be a bit of a Debbie Downer, but the last time we volunteered together, which was probably four months ago, she was almost giddy. Said that she’d met a guy. A great guy, according to her.”
“Did she tell you his name?” Rena asked.
There was silence. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure I asked. I was just happy for her.”
That was consistent with Violet’s personality. “I’m a little confused, because it seems as if Marie uses both her married name of Wallace and her maiden name of Devine. Any knowledge of that?”
“Nope. She was definitely Marie Wallace when we were volunteering together. I remember because my college roommate’s last name was Wallace. We chatted about it. No relation.”
“Okay. Last question, we promise,” Rena said. “As part of your work with Baywood Historic Preservation, did you ever collect signatures on a petition to save the Gizer Hotel?”
“I’ve never collected any petition signatures for them.”
He and Rena exchanged a glance. That did not mean that Marie hadn’t. “Okay, thanks, Violet. Sorry to call you at home,” he said.
“No problem.”
“Good luck with your delivery,” Rena said.
“It’ll be fine. Now I know to ask for drugs early on. Bye-bye.”
Rena put her phone down. “Marie never said anything about volunteering for Baywood Historic Preservation.”
“We never asked her,” A.L. said. There had been no reason to.
“Pastor Rife didn’t say anything about Marie dating.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know. I might be wrong, but it seems as if Marie wants people to feel sorry for her.”
“Is it possible that you’re projecting here?” Rena asked.
“What?”
“You know. Like, so what she’s divorced. Lot of people are. You are. She should just suck it up and move on, like you did.”
“I’m not projecting. I just don’t have a lot of empathy for people who are wallowing in self-pity.”
“We may need to talk to her again,” Rena said.
That would be fun. “Maybe. Can I see that list again?”
Rena pulled it up and handed it to him. “What are you looking for?”
“I want another look at the dates people started volunteering. I’m most interested in people who have started within the last year. Looks like Marie Wallace and three others.”
“We should talk to all of them.”
He nodded. “We need to find out what prompted their sudden interest in BHP and if it had anything to do with BHP’s interest in the Gizer Hotel.”
Rena took back her phone and looked at the list. “Diane said that she created the spreadsheet when BHP got interested in the Gizer. That was in October. Marie signed up to be a volunteer several months before that.”
“As Marie Devine. But sometime later, she’s again using her married name. And when we asked for her maiden name, she gave us no indication that she’d recently dusted it off and started using it again.”
“The name thing is bugging you, isn’t it?”
“I guess it is,” A.L. admitted.
“So we talk to her again. The other three people all started after October so they definitely warrant a visit.”
“Agree. Our focus has to be on who might have a beef with saving the Gizer Hotel. That’s the glue that’s holding this together. All of our victims publicly stated, if you will, that they wanted to save the building. It seems the most logical reason they were targeted. And the number ten is important. Why, I have no fucking idea. But it is.”
“We should probably talk to other merchants around the area, see how they feel about the property, whether they want it in the hands of Baywood Historic Preservation or would rather see the property developed into something new.”
“That’s a good idea.” A.L. started the vehicle. “Let’s go home.”
“Want me to drive? You’ve put a lot of miles on today,” Rena said.
“I’m okay,” he said. “We’ll stop and get some coffee on the way.”
The drive to Baywood took just under two hours, with one coffee stop and one bathroom break. A.L. drove past Tess Lyons’s ranch house, staying two miles under the speed limit. The house was dark. He went around the block. Parked in front of the house whose yard backed up to Tess’s. “We’ll check first to see if her vehicle is in the garage. Frankly, I’m really not expecting it to be. We’ve got a warrant and we’re going in.”
“I’m thinking the garage window is our best option,” Rena said as they got out of the SUV.
A.L. opened the back of their vehicle and rummaged in their equipment bags. He came out with thick gloves and a towel. They both already had small flashlights in their hands. They kept them pointed toward the ground, so as not to attract unwanted attention.
When they got to the garage window, A.L. looked inside. No vehicle. “It would have been too fucking simple for her just to have driven home,” he said. He used his light to examine the window. There was a screen that was easy to remove. Then he put his gloves on and used the butt of his gun to knock a hole in the glass big enough for his arm. He wrapped his arm in the towel and reached in. Took just seconds to locate the window latch. Could feel that it was just like the ones he had at his house. He flipped it. Then, with both hands, he pushed up the window.
Unwrapped the towel from his arm and used it to make sure that any glass fragments were out of his way. Then he braced his arms on the sill, jumped, got a leg over and sort of fell the rest of the way in.
“Are you okay?” Rena whispered.
He stood, brushed himself off. “I’ll get the back door for you.”
The attached garage led through the laundry room, past a half bath and into the kitchen. There, A.L. opened the back door for Rena. They did not turn on any light, choosing instead to sparingly use their flashlights. The blinds were all drawn, so A.L. thought there was little chance that someone would notice them in the house, even if they were watching. There was a great room with a big-screen television. He took a quick glance at the pictures—they were mostly of a pretty brown-haired girl at various ages. Marnee, he was confident.
The hallway led to three bedrooms and a full bath. Two of the bedrooms were outfitted with beds, and it was easy to see which was Tess’s room and which belonged to her daughter. The bright purple walls, the posters hanging on them, the stuffed animals on the shelf, all screamed teenager. Tess’s room was a much-softer sage green with a flowered bedspread. He looked closer. Yup. One of those duvet things that Jacqui and Traci both loved. There were no clothes on the floor or draped over a chair or hanging over the end of a bedpost in either room. He suspected the daughter had cleaned up before leaving for school. Tess had done the same before leaving.
The third bedroom was an office with a desk and a chair and a treadmill. He glanced at the papers on the desk briefly but didn’t see anything that gave any clue to where Tess might be. There was a stack of medical bills from an assortment of providers. If he hadn’t known about the shark attack, he’d have wondered about them, but now, they made sense.
“A.L.,” he heard Rena say.
He walked back to the kitchen where she was standing. She pointed at a cell phone on the counter. “I think this may be where your messages are piling up.”
She must have really wanted to get away from it all. Most people would rather give up a kidney than relinquish their cell phone. Seemed like more than trying to avoid a curious newspaper reporter.
He opened the refrigerator. There was no milk, no eggs, no cream for the coffee. It had the basic condiments—ketchup, mustard, steak sauce—but not a damn thing to put them on. “Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is bare.”
“It just confirms what we already knew,” she said. “She got a leave from her job, cleaned her house, said goodbye to her parents, got keys to her friend’s cabin and bolted.” Rena had her hands on her hips, turning in a semicircle, taking in the room.
“Listen, I’m going to find something to tack over that hole in the window. When she comes home, she probably won’t appreciate it if her garage is full of squirrels.”
“I’ll help,” Rena said.
They found a piece of plywood that would work and nailed it up. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. Unfortunately, when Tess pulled into her garage, she would know immediately that somebody had broken it. Might scare the hell out of her, thinking they were still in the house.
Hopefully, they would find her first and mitigate the surprise. “Let’s go,” he said.
Ten minutes later, he pulled into the station parking lot. His and Rena’s vehicles were less than fifty feet away. He looked at his watch. It was almost nine-thirty. The play had started at eight and ran two hours. He was going to be in the audience when his daughter emerged from the hot lights of stardom. Then he was going to go home and grab a couple hours of badly needed sleep. And then he was going to be right back at it.
A killer walked the streets a free person. And the next likely victim was MIA. It was a hell of a mess.
“We need to contact Marnee Lyons,” Rena said.
A.L. flipped open his notebook, found the contact number that he’d gotten from the file at Hampton’s Title. Dialed it. It rang four times before flipping to voice mail. He hung up. “I’m not going to leave her a message,” he said. “I’ll try her again in the morning.”
“I guess that’s the best we can do,” she said, sounding very weary.
“Hey. We gave it our best shot today. Look on the bright side. If we’re having this much trouble finding Tess, we have to assume Perp is also struggling.”
“That’s a very optimistic perspective,” she said. “And you’re not known for your optimism.”
“I’m not?”
She gave him a halfhearted smile but it faded quickly. “If we don’t catch a break, a week from today, Tess could be dead.”
Sixteen
Saturday, May 14, Day 4
The next morning, Rena overslept. Of course, that had something to do with the fact that late last night, after she’d fallen asleep, she’d been awakened by the ding of a text coming from Boyd Wonder telling her to check her email. She’d crawled out of bed and booted up her laptop. He’d sent two spreadsheets. One had been the names and othe
r demographics of people who had lived at the Gizer Hotel. The other, those who had applied but been rejected. She’d looked at both quickly but didn’t see anything that caught her eye. She’d forwarded both on to the analyst from the state who was crunching data, with instructions to focus on getting more information on the residents. After that, she’d gone back to bed but hadn’t slept well.
Now it was almost nine. She knew she’d be hard-pressed to shower, get the roast pork heated up and swing by the grocery store for fresh buns and still make it to the party by eleven. When she saw Gabe sitting in the family room, drinking coffee and watching some sports channel, she felt a brief flash of irritation. Tried to push it aside. It wasn’t his fault that he’d gotten a good night’s sleep. He’d already been in bed by the time she’d let herself into the house. “Can you go to the store for me and buy buns? We need three dozen.”
“We do not need any buns. My brother needs buns for his kid’s party. Why the hell can’t he get his own?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “We made the pork. We need to take the buns. One without the other is not a sandwich.”
“Which is why we shouldn’t have made the pork. Is he paying for the meat at least?”
“I’m sure he will. I do not know why you won’t cut your brother some slack,” she said.
“Everybody cuts Danny slack. I like to be different.”
“Please. Just do it.”
He stood up and turned off the television. Stretched so big that his T-shirt pulled up, and she saw his pale stomach, which was still pretty flat. When he walked by, he leaned in and kissed her. “Fine. Just don’t say I never do anything for you.”
They ended up only five minutes late. There were cars up and down Danny’s street. She wasn’t surprised. The Morgans turned out for birthdays. Inside, it was also what she expected. The women—his mom and three sisters—were in the kitchen. The men—the three sons-in-law and Danny—were in the front room, watching golf on television. The kids, who should have been outside playing on such a beautiful day, were in the basement.
It took less than fifteen minutes for the conversation to come around to Jane Picus, that poor dead woman. Gabe’s mother made the sign of the cross, like she was a ninety-year-old nun versus a sixty-four-year-old widowed furniture buyer, when she said that last part.