Crimson Rain

by Meg O'Brien

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was drifting.”

  “Well, don’t drift so far you lose sight of shore,” Al warned. But he smiled. “I wanted to know if you want everything on yours.”

  “On what?”

  “Your hot dog,” Al said, rolling his eyes. “Lunch. I’m paying.”

  “Sure, I’ll take everything. In fact, I’ll fix it myself, thanks,” he said to the vendor. “Al, did I hear you right back there? Were you saying what I think you were saying?”

  “That I plan to spend the next three weeks—or hopefully less, if things go well—finding that little gal of yours? Hell, yes. I’ll be on vacation. What else will I have to do?”

  Paul concentrated on taking his hot dog and piling it high with condiments. He didn’t look at Al, and hoped the detective wouldn’t see the grateful tears in his eyes. Damn, it was annoying how close he was to breaking down these days.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

  “Not to worry,” Al responded promptly. “I know just the thing. Buy Old Lazybones a toy. Something flashy and red.”

  “Let me guess,” Paul said. “Old Lazybones is your cat?”

  “Yeah. She punishes me something fierce when I’m gone too long.”

  “Really?” Paul, who was more of a dog man, said. “Cats do that?”

  “Every time. Well, she learned it from my wife. And the worst of it is, I can’t divorce Old Lazybones.”

  14

  Duarte left Paul at his car in the parking lot, after they’d finished their lunch. He was already burping his up. He reached into his pocket for a Tums as he walked down the thickly carpeted hallway to Apartment 803 in one of Seattle’s best high-rise condo buildings.

  Pretty nice digs, he thought to himself. Wonder what makes a woman worth all this? Or was it just that Paul Bradley had so much money, he couldn’t resist sharing it?

  Either way, he had a feeling this little arrangement was nearing its end. Bradley was too decent a guy to keep carrying on this way, especially under the present circumstances.

  He rang the bell and listened for footsteps crossing the room inside but didn’t hear a thing. Good construction, he thought. Or she’s not wearing shoes.

  He couldn’t stop thinking like that—figuring things out as he went along. Most cops he knew did the same thing. It was a trick they learned early on, so as not to be taken by surprise under any circumstances.

  He knew, for instance, when she was on the other side of the door, looking through the security eye. He was careful to stand in front of it and hold his badge up where she could see it. In his experience, people got nervous if you stood off to the side, even a little, and the subsequent interview could go downhill from there, because they never quite trusted you.

  The doorknob turned and the door opened wide. “Detective Duarte?” Lacey said, extending a hand. “Nice to meet you! Paul’s told me a lot about you.”

  He shook her hand, noting how soft and white it was. “Thanks for making time to see me, Ms. Allison.”

  He had to look up, she was so tall. And with that outfit on—the black workout tights and bare midriff sweater—she looked as long and slender as a vanilla pod.

  Yikes. He hadn’t thought of a woman in terms of food in years. In his heyday, that was a sure sign his appetite was on the point of rampage.

  “Oh, please, call me Lacey.” She smiled. “C’mon in. You say you want to see that Web site I found?”

  “Right,” Al said, though seeing the Web site was only an excuse to get his foot in the door and see what Paul Bradley’s squeeze was all about. “I thought there might be some clue there that’s been overlooked.”

  She led him over to the computer desk and pulled up a black-and-white zebra-striped chair. Duarte noted how different the rest of the room was from the house Paul Bradley shared with his wife. He must have set it up this way on purpose, to strike a line of delineation.

  “Have a seat, Detective,” Lacey said. “After you called about coming over, I brought the site up for you.”

  Duarte looked askance at the furry black-and-white chair, but figured it probably wouldn’t bite. He sat down facing the computer and wondered if animal prints were Paul’s choice, or hers.

  God knows she’s young enough to be on the wild side, he thought, and then immediately reminded himself not to go down that road. Even if she weren’t already taken, and even if she would entertain his interest—an unlikely scenario—this was more woman than he could ever handle.

  “I showed Paul the page where she wrote about her love for antiques,” Lacey said, standing behind him. “But except for the travel desk, I don’t think you’ll find much. It’s the bio that really caught Paul’s and my interest. And of course there’s the e-mail page for people to contact her from the Web site. I’m sure he told you about that.”

  She leaned over his shoulder and moved the mouse, changing the pages so that he could see each one in turn. As Lacey had said, the travel desk that had been sent to Paul was pictured on the Antiques page, as if to say Yes, it was me. I sent it to you.

  Angela—or Rachel—must have been pretty sure Paul would eventually see this, Duarte thought. What if Lacey hadn’t come across it? Was there anyone else in Paul’s family who was familiar with Web sites? Someone who might have been expected to find it and bring it to Paul’s attention?

  The grandmother. Roberta Evans, the one he hadn’t talked to yet. She was the one who’d told Paul that the police could get the server to turn over the name of the owner of the site.

  “Did you by any chance send her an e-mail?” Duarte asked, looking at that page.

  The green eyes widened. “You mean Angela? Me, send her an e-mail? Heavens, no. It’s not really my place to do that. Besides, what would I say to her?”

  Duarte shrugged. “Maybe, ‘Your father is looking for you’?”

  “Oh.” She shook her hair back. “I…I guess I never even thought of doing that.”

  “What about Paul, when he was here and you showed him the Web site? Did he send her an e-mail?”

  “Come to think of it, no. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, if you or he had sent one, you might have gotten an answer from her by now. That could have been a real big help.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Lacey said, frowning. “How stupid of me to not even consider that. Do you think I should send one now?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” Duarte said. “I’d do it myself, but I’m all thumbs when it comes to typing.”

  Lacey leaned farther over his shoulder, saying, “No problem.” He watched her slender white fingers on the keys as she tapped out a message. Dear Angela, Please let me know where you are. She signed it simply, Paul.

  Pausing, she turned to Duarte. “Is that enough, do you think?”

  “That should do it,” he answered, trying not to react to her closeness and the fresh, clean scent of her perfume.

  “By the way,” he said, “did you ever meet Rachel?”

  “No, I never did. From everything Paul says, though, she’s a wonderful girl.”

  “It’s a shame about this other kid, though,” Duarte said. “Angela, I mean. He told you what happened to her?”

  “Yes. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain Paul’s been in all these years. Gina, too, of course.”

  She clicked on the button that sent the e-mail. Despite himself, her perfume did a number on Duarte that he hadn’t felt for a long time. He wondered if she noticed that he’d expanded a bit since sitting down here, but she seemed perfectly nonchalant as she told him, “There, it’s done. Now all we have to do is see if she sends us an answer.”

  She turned to him and laid a cool hand on his forehead. “Detective, are you all right? You seem a bit flushed. Paul’s always complaining that I’ve got it too hot in here.”

  I’ll bet he is, Duarte thought. That doesn’t have anything to do with the thermostat, though. Down, boy. And holy crap—who knew you were even still alive?

>   “I’m fine,” he said aloud as she touched his cheek with the back of her hand. The hand was cool, yet he felt burnt to a crisp, as if he’d been standing in water and a bare electric wire had fallen and wrapped itself around him, frying him from head to toe.

  “So,” he said, clearing his throat and moving back from her hand, “this is it? There’s no address for her or anything?”

  “Well, no, people don’t usually put their addresses on a personal Web page. The whole point, usually, is to be able to say what you want to say without anyone knowing how to reach you. There are a lot of weirdos out there, you know. Some of them might take issue with some point you’re trying to make. You wouldn’t want them coming to your door.”

  Somehow, Al found the strength to push back from the computer and get to his feet, but not without brushing up against Lacey Allison’s left breast. Her sweater was made of some kind of furry stuff—cashmere, he guessed. Suddenly he was getting all weak again.

  Weak in the head, he told himself firmly. Get this over with and get the hell out. He still had to meet with the mother-in-law, and God help him if she didn’t turn out to be some frumpy old lady with no more sex appeal than a turnip.

  “About that anonymity thing, though,” he said, “there really isn’t as much as people think. Just about any law enforcement agency is able to get the Web site owner’s home address and phone number from the server.”

  “Really?” Lacey said, the green eyes widening again. “They can do that? Good grief! Well, I’ll have to be very careful not to do anything illegal if I ever have a site of my own! Either that, or I’ll need friends in high places.”

  She touched his arm and smiled. Like you, the gesture seemed to say, but only in a teasing way.

  Al smiled back. The thought occurred to him that Paul’s girlfriend, who knew so much about computers, might have put this Web site together herself. He’d known women who, for various twisted reasons, did things like that in the middle of an investigation. They would go to extraordinary and sometimes criminal lengths to show how much they knew and how much help they could be, in the hope that this would enhance their importance to the men in their lives. In doing so, they often set up problems, just to be able to solve them—like some super-woman detective who knew more than the police or the FBI.

  Lacey, however, had revealed no tendencies in that direction. From what Paul said, she had found the site the way anyone with some computer skills might have—by searching Angela’s name. And she hadn’t gone any further than that. No e-mail to Angela, no suggestions for finding her…

  No. Lacey Allison, in short, was beautiful, sexy and just a bit of a tease. But other than that, she seemed to have no other agenda but to be honestly helpful.

  Which, for Paul Bradley’s sake, Al had to be grateful.

  He had other questions he had meant to ask her, but after the many changes his body had just been through, he couldn’t remember them now. Luckily, he’d written them down.

  He took a notepad out of his pocket while she sat at one end of her long white sofa, pushing aside a small bag from a local pet store, a potato chip bag and some magazines. Opening the notebook, he read practically verbatim the questions he’d written down, in order to get them over with as quickly as possible.

  “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm Rachel Bradley? Any friends of the Bradleys? Relatives? Before this, has Paul Bradley ever told you anything about Rachel that would lead you to believe she was in danger—or that she might have some reason to disappear on her own?”

  To all of his questions, Lacey simply shook her head and smiled. “I wish I could have been more help,” she said as she stood. Taking his arm, she led him to the door. “If there’s anything else, please feel free to call or come over. Anytime.”

  She knows what she’s done to me, he thought. And she’s getting a kick out of it.

  Once outside the door, he leaned against the wall to gather his composure, then let out a deep sigh of relief.

  Not that Lacey Allison had really meant anything by all that laying on of hands and stuff. A lot of women were like that, he knew, especially when they were already secure in a relationship with a man. It was all just a game with them—a test, to see if they still “had it.” Besides, what would somebody like her want with an over-the-hill guy like him?

  Al shook his head to clear it. Paul Bradley sure has his hands full with that one. Gina Bradley is one of the nicest women I’ve ever met. Talented, too. Even so, Lacey Allison’s kind of body heat has to be a hard thing to give up.

  If he’d expected to be able to relax while interviewing Roberta Evans, Al soon realized he was dreaming. Roberta, Paul had told him, was sixty, which made her a few years older than him. But unlike the tired old lump he’d become, she was one hot firecracker. If she didn’t have Lacey’s brazenness, she made up for it with a sharp intelligence that made Duarte wonder if her daughter and Paul really knew her. Sometimes parents were put in little mental compartments labeled Good Cook, Reliable Baby-sitter, Can Be Counted On To Show Up In Times Of Trouble. Or, as Paul had said, “Can Be Counted On To Stir Up Trouble.”

  Roberta Evans, he thought, might be all that. But she was also something else—and he for one couldn’t wait to find out just what that something else really was. The only thing he knew for sure was that she wasn’t the woman she pretended to be. No woman this side of Broadway could be so incredibly odd. Could she?

  Paul’s mother-in-law wore a long caftan of some sort of bright reddish-purple material, with gold braid trim on the neckline and sleeves. Once she had seated him on an overstuffed orange sofa with a cup of espresso in a small gold-rimmed cup, she took up pacing from one end of the living room to another and talking nonstop. She continually raised a long, silver cigarette holder to her lips and lowered it just as quickly. There was no cigarette in it, and thus no smoke emanated from it. Her hair was dark red and full, in tight curls down to her shoulders. Her lipstick was green—although it seemed to change to purple and back to green again, right before his eyes—and her cheekbones were sharp and tinged with a blush that matched her red hair.

  Al was mesmerized. He sat facing a broad window with a knockout view of Gig Harbor, but after the first second or so, he hadn’t even looked at the view. The show in this room was worth more than the price of the surrounding real estate.

  What the heck was this woman hiding?

  Something, he was sure of that. Beneath the fascinating camouflage lay all kinds of stories she’d rather not let anyone know. Even her conversation was shrouded, revealing little of the kind of information Duarte was seeking. Within five minutes he’d heard more about the history of Gig Harbor than he’d ever known or wanted to know. He knew that she didn’t think much of the Gig Harbor area law enforcement, but he wasn’t certain what her complaint was. He knew that her daughter, Gina, didn’t want to hear her opinion about the disappearance of her granddaughter, and that this was nothing new. Gina and Paul, it seemed, never wanted to hear her opinion about anything.

  It was she, Roberta told him, who knew enough about computers to tell them to find out who owned that Web site, and she who’d had people looking for Rachel long before Paul and Gina had been willing to make her disappearance known to the public.

  It was at this point that Al snapped to and stopped her.

  “You told people that Rachel was gone?”

  “Well, of course I did! One does not sit around and do nothing when a child is lost.”

  “It wasn’t my impression that any of us were sitting around doing nothing,” Al said with an edge.

  “And how would I know that, when no one tells me anything?” Roberta argued, standing in front of him with her arms crossed.

  “Who did you tell about Rachel’s disappearance?” Al asked irritably. “Didn’t it occur to you that telling the wrong people might harm Rachel in some way?”

  Roberta’s eyes flashed. “I would never do anything to harm that child.”

  “I’
m sure you wouldn’t, knowingly,” Al countered. “But you just said yourself that no one tells you anything.”

  Within moments, her demeanor changed. “When I said no one, I meant Gina and Paul,” she said quietly. “I did not mean that I don’t have my own…connections.”

  “And by connections, you’d be talking about—?” Al broke off midsentence as a thought struck him. “Ms. Evans, have you been in touch with Angela?”

  “Now, what on earth makes you think that?” Roberta said.

  “Look,” Al said worriedly, “I know you had a hard time accepting it when Angela was sent back to Saint Sympatica’s.”

  “Did Paul tell you that?” she snapped, glaring.

  “No, Gina told me, the other night. We talked in her kitchen when we were waiting for Paul to return from Saint Sympatica’s. She told me how close you were to Angela, and how much you disapproved of her having been sent away.”

  “It—it wasn’t that I thought she should stay here,” Roberta said. “It was the way they did it, overnight, and without ever letting me see her again.”

  She sat in the chair across from him, the few lines in her face deepening. “I don’t expect you to understand that.”

  “No, I don’t imagine anyone could fully understand the pain you’ve been in,” Al said gently. “And you know, it’s understandable too that if Angela has come back to Seattle, you’d want to be in touch with her. Make up for lost time, so to speak.”

  If he thought he could draw her out—get her to confide in him about whether she knew where Angela was, or if she’d talked to Angela about Rachel—Al had underestimated Roberta Evans.

  Roberta’s mouth trembled and tears filled her eyes. The proud, haughty woman who had met him at the door less than a half hour ago seemed to crumple before him now. She covered her eyes with her hands and shook her head back and forth. When she looked up again, she said, “I like to think I can handle things better than anyone else. I’m the mother, after all. I should be able to handle things. But I can’t anymore. I don’t have it in me.”