by Shannon Hill
“I live with my parents,” she pointed out. “Of course it’s not okay. What’s with the interrogation?”
“Bad night,” I said quickly. If I had to go by moods alone, everyone on my list was looking better by the moment. We were a town full of touchy grouches. “Didn’t mean to interrogate. It’s a habit.”
“Which is why I’ll never marry a cop,” Kim muttered. “Don’t know how Tanya puts up with it.”
Before I could reply, the telephone rang. It was Randy Rush. He’d locked himself out of his car. I told Kim I’d take it, and went out to my cruiser to be sure the slim jim was in the back. It wasn’t. I came back in to retrieve it from the bottom drawer of my desk and caught Kim worrying at a fingernail. I’d never noticed her biting a nail before. She took pride in her nails. She got a manicure every two weeks at Bobbi’s salon.
I grabbed the slim jim and headed out. Life would be a lot easier if you could put on magic glasses that showed you a little “guilty” sign over people’s heads.
***^***
Randy Rush safely in his car and lectured on spare keys, I rolled by Bobbi’s salon. She smiled but said crisply, “I’m booked solid, hon, can it wait?”
“Just saying hi,” I said, and went to the Food Mart like I’d meant to do that. I’d forgotten I had Boris trotting at my heels. The assistant manager, Jess Spivey, just waved when she saw us. Worse than cat hair gets tracked into the Food Mart.
I made it back out to the parking lot with a box of granola bars before I was hailed by anyone. The black sheep of the Campbell family, no less. Roger’s niece Amanda. A pharmacist down in Gilfoyle, she’d gotten on everyone’s bad side for never marrying the father of her three children. She’d never lived with him, either. Somehow that was much more immoral to people than forcing herself and her kids to co-habitate with a guy whose idea of a good time had turned out to be lots of other women.
“Sheriff!”
“Yes, Amanda?”
“Look, I’m sorry, I heard about Miz Turner and all…You don’t really think Uncle Roger did something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said as diplomatically as I could. “Your ice cream will melt,” I added stupidly, pointing at her bags. It was about forty out. The ice cream had time.
“It’ll re-freeze,” she said briskly. “It’s just…I’ve known Jeannie for years, y’know? She’s not that kind of person. Neither is my uncle. Or my cousin.” Her earnest puppy-dog eyes flashed at me. “From what Jeannie said once, her brother’s always been the bad apple, y’know?”
I held onto my temper. “I picked up on it, yes.”
She rattled on obliviously. “We were all at school together, y’know? That’s how Jeannie meant RJ. My cousin,” she clarified, in case I hadn’t realized Roger’s son was RJ, short for Roger Junior. “He was a real asshole, even then. Craig, I mean, not RJ.”
My head hurt. “School?” I said blankly. The McElroys were from a whole different county. She couldn’t mean high school.
“Community college,” she clarified. “Y’know? In Lynchburg? We all went. That’s how RJ got started on his degree, and that’s where he met Jeannie, and we met Craig and all that, and I got my pre-reqs.”
If God had hit me with a lightning bolt, I’d have gone grateful for the reprieve from Amanda Campbell’s half-breathless rambling. “So Craig was never much good, okay,” I said, and tried to edge closer to my car.
“It’s just, Uncle Roger’s so nice and I know he really likes Miz Turner, and I didn’t want you to think…” She flapped her hands helplessly. She didn’t know what she didn’t want me to think. Fair enough. I was clueless, too.
“Amanda, I need to go,” I said desperately.
“Sorry,” she winced, “but….I know y’all haven’t found the other guy yet.”
That was putting it mildly. “And?” I prompted.
“Did anybody talk to Doug?”
I was getting a severe headache. “What Doug?”
“Doug Winston? Craig’s cousin? They were always hanging out together. Back then, I mean. I don’t think I’ve seen any of them since RJ got married.”
“I’ll look into it,” I told her, and ran.
***^***
Finding Doug Winston took about twenty minutes, most of it spent on the phone with Kurt Danes. He faxed over Winston’s criminal record. I grabbed it eagerly. It was refreshingly brief: Two minor traffic offenses. Both, I noticed, tickets on a 1977 Ford LTD. Now that was a car with trunk space. Hell, it was practically a tank. I’ve seen cars like that roll down an embankment and suffer nothing worse than busted glass.
The question Danes couldn’t answer was, “Where is he now?”
“No one’s reported him missing, and he works for himself. HVAC. He could be gone a while without anyone noticing.”
I studied the faxes, passed them to Punk. Winston was six-three. He qualified as tall. Could have been Tall. Besides the LTD, he also had a Chevy van registered in his name. Nothing on it.
I could nearly smell a break in the case. “Chief,” I asked Danes when I’d called him back, “can you find Winston?”
“I’ve sent a unit by his house.”
I possibly had my Tall, assuming McElroy had been Shotgun. About Kim’s age, I noticed. Younger than me. Well, I was heading fast for forty.
Straddling a chair backwards, Punk glared at the fax. He flipped it back to me, and Boris pounced on it, rolling over to show his tummy in a bid for a fight. I dangled his squirrel tail and he happily began gnawing at it. I rescued the papers under him, looked up to find Punk staring at me with dark sympathy. “What?”
He shook his head. “Where’d Kim go?”
I shrugged. “Lunch, probably.”
“Did she see this fax?”
I had to think it through. “No. What’s wrong?”
Punk’s voice cracked on urgency. “She left right after we, you, called Danes, didn’t she?”
That feeling of a Big Break started to turn sick. “Spill it,” I said tightly enough that Boris stopped playing to stare at me.
“She went to the same community college. Graduated the same year as Doug Winston.”
My head turned. I stared across the room at the little diploma Kim had hung with pride on the wall behind her desk. I walked to it. She’d gotten her degree as an administrative assistant. I’d known that. I’d just never known it with such a sense of dread.
I speed-dialed Aunt Marge. “I’ve got a possible emergency,” I clipped out. “I need to know who Kim Lincoln dated when she was at community college, and if anyone suspects she’s dating someone now, and I need to know where she is right this minute.” I could hear Roger in the background, and gave up. Even if he was involved somehow, I’d never break Aunt Marge’s heart by telling her. “And have Roger call around, too. His niece Amanda might know.”
I sat down in Kim’s chair. Boris ambled over and leapt onto my lap. He head-butted me in the chin, his version of a hug. “Jesus,” I said numbly, and it was definitely more a prayer than a swear. “What was she like when I was…gone?”
Punk had paled. “Stressed, but we all were.”
Aunt Marge called back. She sounded like I felt. “Lil? Dear? Naomi says Kim came in about fifteen minutes ago and left about two minutes later with her big purse. She can’t remember anything about Kim’s boyfriends, but she and Matt do think she’s been sneaking around with someone. They thought maybe someone married, but they didn’t ask her about it. She’s so prickly lately about her love life.”
“Roger?”
“He left a voice-mail.”
“Tell him to leave another. Tell him to have Amanda call me directly, on my cell.”
I slid my phone back into the holster on my belt. It rested between my little air horn and my pepper spray. Kim had once joked I’d get distracted one day and end up macing my ear.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, comforting. When I looked up, Punk dropped his hand, quietly commented, “It might not be her, Lil. Lot
ta people went to that college.”
I nodded. A lot of people had. But how many knew me, my house, my routine, my cat? And how many graduated the same year as Doug Winston, known relation and friend of Craig McElroy?
My legs felt hollow when I stood up and went back to my desk. Harry Rucker had a law school classmate up in New York. I’d ask Harry to call the man, see what New York knew about Steven Clay. Ask him to get a subpoena on Doug Winston’s phone records.
I held it together until Aunt Marge came through the door. She rushed to me like she had when I was little, and had fallen off my bike or out of a tree. “My poor Lil,” she crooned, and swept me into her arms.
Behind me, as I tried not to cry into her shoulder, I heard Punk asking Lieutenant Breeden to put out an APB on Kim.
13.
We searched Kim’s room at her parents’ house. She had left her clothes. She had left her jewelry, such as it was. She had left everything, but there was no sign of her laptop. Her mother assured us she had one, and we found the manual for it in a drawer of her very cheap desk. No flash drives. No paper trail to anything. Kim didn’t have a credit card. Or a debit card. Naomi Lincoln explained, flustering, that Kim had chosen to go cash-only a few months ago. “She said she was tired of the fees.”
That gave me a time frame for a change in her life, her patterns. We’re creatures of habit and pattern, we humans. About as bad as cats. “What about a checkbook?”
Punk held it up. “Dresser,” he explained, and started flipping through it. “Cell phone, mostly.” He turned to Naomi, wide-eyed in the brown-carpeted hall. “She pays rent?”
“No,” whispered Naomi. “She shares the utilities.”
“Nice of her,” commented Punk kindly, and went on with the dresser. I was in the closet with Boris. “Naomi?” I called.
“Yes?”
“Where’s her overnight bag? The one she always takes to the Outer Banks?” I knew the bag well because Kim often left right from the office.
“I don’t know.”
There’s this about my job. It’s got its routines, its rhythms, and those are bizarrely soothing. I carefully shined my flashlight into every inch of the closet, following an imaginary grid. I retreated, frowning, and started poking under the bed. Shoes in their boxes. A plastic storage box full of summer clothes. Dust bunnies. I nearly cried from frustration. I couldn’t find any evidence to support Kim’s involvement, and I couldn’t find any against it. I’d have paid gold for either, just to get something.
“Please,” Naomi begged, “what is this about?”
I thought of Aunt Marge, who tried very hard to teach me tact, and did not fully succeed. “Kim may have given information about me to the kidnappers.”
Naomi whitened, and swayed. I caught her arm and steered her to a chair down the hall, in a weirdly shaped alcove by a bay window. “Oh God,” she moaned. “Oh God.”
“Lil!”
I left Naomi with her head between her knees. Punk held out a small box of a particular blue I knew well from Aunt Marge’s jewelry collection, with which I had played dress-up as a girl. “Tiffany’s,” I breathed in awe. “Holy crap. She can’t afford Tiffany’s.” I had to shake my head hard to hide that my lip was wobbling. I returned to Naomi, who quickly denied that she and Matt had bought the earrings not currently in the box.
I hunkered down by Naomi. I could hear Boris chirping to himself in Kim’s closet, the only sound in the house besides our breathing. “Naomi, I know this is hard, but it might be nothing. You know as well as I do cops chase down leads all the time and those leads go nowhere. Okay? Now, did Kim say where she was going?”
Naomi’s whole body shook. “Oh God. No.”
“Do you know where she is right now?”
“No.”
I patted Naomi helplessly.
Punk came into the hall. “Boris is stuck or something.”
I went into the closet, where Boris was indeed stuck, having gotten his head through the handle of a shopping bag full of what I’d thought were old three-ring binders. After I’d freed a near-panicking Boris, I saw they were photo albums. I snuggled Boris while Punk began a rapid scan of the photo albums’ contents, and started a closer search of that corner of the closet.
I found what Boris had been seeking. A package of his favorite gourmet tuna treats, almost empty, in the pocket of an old winter coat I’d knocked off a hanger.
“Lil,” said Punk. “Got something.”
Kim’s bedroom light chose that moment to pop a bulb. Punk and I took the album to the window and flipped through. Near the middle we found some photographs of Kim around college age. We recognized Kim, Amanda Campbell, RJ, Jean McElroy, two men, one of whom was enough like Jean to be Craig. It was a camping trip, to judge by the tents.
We went into the hall, and I held out the photo album. “Naomi?” I asked softly. “Who’s that guy?”
Weeping, Naomi twisted away. “It should be on the back. I taught her to label photographs.”
I slid the photograph out. On the back were the names. The unidentified man was Doug Winston, with a little heart dotting the letter i.
My cell phone rang. It was Kurt Danes. “No sign of Winston at his house or anywhere in town, but I might know where to find him. Should I go look?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off that photograph. Doug’s arm was around Kim’s waist. She was leaning into him the way a woman does when she’s infatuated, and has been having sex with the man to boot. “Go get him. Thanks.”
I don’t pray much, but I prayed a little then. That Danes would find Winston, that Winston would have answers, that I owed Kim one hell of a big apology.
***^***
Wherever Kim had gone, she’d gone without anyone noticing. Her car these days was a tan sedan, a few years old, nothing to make it stand out, not even a vanity plate. I found records of the payments in her checkbook. Whatever had been going on with her, she hadn’t stopped paying her bills on time.
We ransacked her desk at work. I found a lot of chocolate, our shared weakness, and a few bottles of old nail polish in one drawer. The rest of the drawers held office supplies, forms, nothing personal at all. I paced restlessly, waiting for Breeden to call and tell me he could get a trace on her cell phone, or for Harry to call and tell me we could have her phone records in the next ten seconds. Instead, I got a telephone call from a New York City area code. I pounced.
“Sheriff Eller.”
The man’s accent wasn’t exactly New York, had hints in it of New England. “This is Steven Clay.”
I put him on speaker, gesturing for Punk to come near. Tom hovered in the background. He hadn’t stirred since he came in and found out we were hunting the woman he’d had a crush on for years. His open, good-natured face had shut down, gone queerly dead.
“You are the Steven Clay who handles the kidnap and ransom policy for Robert Eller’s family and for Eller Enterprises?”
“Yes. Now may I ask why someone from the district attorney’s office has told me to call you? The matter of the policy has been settled. We are satisfied with the documentation, reimbursement has been authorized, and I do not see any need for…”
Punk was shaking his head. “That ain’t him.”
Somewhere in my head, pieces of that puzzle were starting to click together.
“I am most certainly Steven Clay,” snapped the man on the telephone. “What is going on?”
“Sir,” I said as ingratiatingly as I could, “I am going to ask you a favor. Could you fax me your driver’s license, enlarged so we can see the photograph clearly?” I read off our fax number, and I heard him muttering under his breath. “And, sir, I’m going to ask a very strange question now.”
“Oh? That will make a nice change.”
His sarcasm went right to my hindbrain, but I didn’t have time to play stupid monkey games. “Sir, did you have your ID stolen back around Christmas sometime? Cell phone, too?”
Punk hissed in a breath. Tom cursed, very
quietly and very, very profanely.
Steven Clay didn’t spot the bamboozle because Steven Clay—the one who’d come to Crazy, at least—had been the bamboozle.
It was nice, having something finally make sense.
Clay’s voice on the phone lost some of its New York, trended heavily to Massachusetts. “How did you know that?”
“Is it policy for your company to send K&R experts to the family?”
“Only if requested.”
I scribbled that hastily. I was going to have a whole new interesting set of questions for my relatives. “Did the Ellers request your assistance?”
“Look, lady,” he said, and now he’d lost all his Manhattan. “I advise on the policy, I counsel people on how to handle K&R so we don’t end up having to pay out too many policies, sometimes I sell a few policies. There’s not a lot of private sector jobs for someone from my background.”
I took a guess, though I can’t say why I had that particular suspicion. “Hostage rescue with the Bureau maybe?”
“Something like that,” he hedged. I got the picture, or rather, didn’t get it. Not the Bureau, then. But he’d likely dealt in negotiation and, most probably, extraction. I made a note to look up that company online. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they had some fat contracts with companies that did a lot of business overseas. The kind of companies that make Eller Enterprises look like junior varsity.
He was pushing buttons on a machine. I could hear the little beeps behind his breathing. “Look,” he said tensely, “I like my job, okay? Better hours, much better pay, I can even afford a pool in the back yard. If this is going to come back on me, I want to know.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” I replied. “Did you get your ID and cell phone stolen around the holidays?”
“Just wait, okay?” he murmured, and I heard the movement of air, the click of a door closing. “Okay, yeah, I lost my wallet and my cell phone at the gym. A few people did. Locker room got robbed. It happens. You know how long it took me to get all that straightened out? I had to get a new license, everything. It was right after Christmas, too.”