by P. J. Tracy
Walt’s face broke into a genuine smile. “You’re right about the mosquitoes, and I wouldn’t think of sending you outside, ma’am. What I want to show you is Marla’s room.”
The mood shifted to things more grave as Annie and Grace followed him up a narrow flight of wooden stairs to the second floor and led them to a closed door at the end of the hallway. He didn’t even touch the doorknob, and Grace wondered if he’d been in this room since Marla had disappeared.
“Rummage around all you like. Everything from her apartment in Minneapolis is in there, mostly still in boxes. Dishes and clothes and so forth. But she did keep a handwritten daily journal, which I put in the center drawer of her desk, if you think it would help. Mostly she wrote about newborn calves and kitten litters and such, but she had a way with words, that gal, and she was funny. You can get to know her a little bit by what she wrote.”
Grace noticed that Walt had referred to his daughter in the past tense. “We’ll take a look. Thank you, Walt.”
He sucked in a breath, then blew it out hard. “There’s no way we can figure this out, I know that. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time and somebody bad and dark either took her or killed her. Happens all the time, doesn’t it?”
TWENTY-FOUR
While Roadrunner and Harley uploaded the cache of mostly unproductive reports and seemingly meaningless photos of the woods and the base of the tree where Marla’s ring had either fallen off or been intentionally left, Jacob sat motionless on a side sofa, looking down at his hands. He’d gone over those photos a million times himself, but seeing them enlarged and displayed on the enormous overhead computer screen amplified his memories of that horrible night and made them so much worse.
“There was no scent of Marla beyond where you found her ring, right?” Harley asked.
Jacob lifted his head, keeping his eyes averted from the screen. “The dogs couldn’t find one. Any trace of Marla stopped right there.”
Roadrunner rocked back and forth, heel to toe, watching the screen scroll at warp speed through the evidence Harley was uploading. The computer was programmed to mark and briefly freeze-frame anything that it determined was an anomaly, either in documented evidence or photos. It stopped on a shot of a littered area of forest floor. There were empty beer cans, a used condom, cigarette butts, a couple of balled-up fast food bags. “What’s all this junk?”
Jacob forced his eyes up to the screen. “Party detritus. Teenagers, lowlifes, anybody who can’t party in public finds somewhere private to do their thing. And they leave their sh . . . stuff behind. We ran every single scrap of it through the BCA. DNA tests on the used condom, the cigarette butts, the beer cans, the whole shebang. We were hoping something would match up with the blood we found on the road by Marla’s car, maybe take us a step closer, but nothing matched him or anybody else in the system.”
Harley paused his work and looked over his shoulder at Jacob. “Where did your search perimeter end?”
“Where we lost Marla’s scent. Officially, anyhow. But volunteers and search crews were out all over the woods and surrounding fields for days. Their reports are all in what I gave you.”
Harley clapped his hands on his knees. “You’ve given our equipment plenty to chew on, Jacob. If there are any missing links, we’ll find them.”
“You have my gratitude. And Walt’s.”
“You and Walt are close.”
“I’ve known him since I was a boy. Marla and I pretty much grew up together.” He stood up wearily, his shoulders stooped, just like any man carrying a heavy weight. “I’ll be in touch. Call me if you need anything, day or night.”
—
For the first half hour in Marla’s room, Grace and Annie had been mostly silent. Annie finally pushed herself away from the desk she had been sorting through drawer by drawer, mostly because her stomach was sweating and that had never happened before.
“Lord, Grace, pretty soon I’m going to have to take a break and go downstairs to sit in front of that window AC.”
Grace looked up from a framed picture of Marla in a high school cheerleading uniform, her arm around the waist of a handsome young football player in full regalia. “Go sit for a while in the Chariot. Harley keeps the computer room at sixty-five degrees when all the equipment is working.”
“I don’t think so. That poor sheriff is just about the saddest man I ever did see, and looking through all that evidence again is going to make it worse. I don’t think I could bear to watch it.”
“I think I know why.” Grace handed her the photograph, and Annie’s eyes grew wide as she examined it.
“That’s Sheriff Emmet, isn’t it?”
“I think so.”
Annie clucked her tongue. “Well, that explains a lot. The pictures in this house certainly have stories to tell, don’t they?”
“Pictures always do,” Grace said, thinking of the complete absence of any photos in her own house, which also told a story. It wasn’t because she hadn’t had time to get them framed and displayed; there were simply no photos to frame. Nothing from childhood and nothing from adulthood, save for a single picture of her with Harley, Annie, and Roadrunner from their college days in Atlanta that she kept in a locked drawer in her office. If she ever disappeared, investigators might conclude that Grace MacBride didn’t exist at all. And she hadn’t, until twelve years ago.
She stepped away from the dresser she’d been investigating, where many other photos were carefully arrayed, just like they were on the breakfront in Walt’s living room—Marla as a toddler, Marla as a gap-toothed youngster, Marla with a mother and brother who had been lost before she was. It was a meticulous account of the lives that made up a family; a record that they had existed.
It suddenly struck Grace that if something happened to her during childbirth, her baby would never even know what she looked like. Just like she’d never known what her own mother had looked like. The realization horrified her, and as much as she shunned cameras, she was going to have to get over it.
“Grace?”
“Just thinking. Did you find anything useful in the desk?”
“Not really.” She held up a leather-bound journal. “It’s just like Walt said, this journal is filled with things about animals, Walt and the farm, her job at the vet clinic in Minneapolis. There are a couple entries about people at work . . . how nice, how compassionate, what a skilled vet Dr. Swanson is, the summer softball league she was looking forward to joining. What a stirring homily about resurrection Pastor Van gave on Easter. No writings about a secret love affair with a bad boy. No writings about any love interest at all. I’m telling you, up until now, I hadn’t completely dismissed the idea that Marla was a very good girl who’d gotten tangled up in something over her head, or maybe got tricked by some Web predator, but now I don’t think so. Marla Gustafson was about as pure of heart as you can get.” Annie passed the journal to Grace. “Take a look for yourself.”
Grace carefully leafed through the pages as if it were an ancient artifact from which she could somehow decipher a mystical rune of truth. “Wrong place at the wrong time,” she murmured, not even realizing she’d vocalized.
“What?”
“Sorry. I’m just repeating what Walt said earlier. Marla was most likely in the wrong place at the wrong time. Call it fate, call it bad luck, call it whatever you want.” She paused on a page near the end, then read it out loud. “‘I thought I saw Angel today when I was grocery shopping, how crazy is that? I didn’t say anything, though, it’s been so many years. Besides, it couldn’t have been Angel, probably just my mind playing tricks on me.’”
Annie tapped a sparkly silver nail on her lower lip. “Angel. Sounds like a stage name for an exotic dancer, if you were to ask my opinion.”
“It’s probably nothing, but let’s go ask Walt about it.”
Annie stood and unsuccessfully tried to smooth the
wrinkled front of her dress. “That’s very cop-like of you, Grace, chasing after every possible lead, even when you know it won’t go anywhere.”
“With all the time we spend with cops, something’s bound to rub off.”
Walt was in the kitchen, elbow-deep in soapy dishwater when they came downstairs. He turned and gave them a nod. “Find anything up in Marla’s room?”
“Not really, but there is an entry in her journal that mentions somebody named Angel. Was that an old friend of hers?”
Walt frowned and a strata of lines creased his forehead. “I don’t think so. She did have a deaf white cat she named Angel when she was a girl.”
“She was talking about a person.”
“Huh. Nothing springs to mind, but I’ll think on it.”
They heard the clump of heavy shoes on the porch steps, then the squeak of the screen door opening. “Came to say good night, Walt.”
“Come on in, Sheriff,” Walt called out, drying his hands on a checked towel.
Grace noted the man’s subdued demeanor as he strode into the kitchen. She’d considered Sheriff Emmet’s face an affable one, but now it was stormy and morose.
Walt clucked his tongue. “You look like you need a snoot of whiskey, and fast.”
“Wish I could, but I still have to drive back to the office before I head home.”
“I won’t keep you, then. These ladies were just asking me about somebody named Angel. Does that ring a bell to you?”
The sheriff’s eyes drifted from Grace to Annie. “Ah, you took a look at Marla’s journal. The best I could come up with was the migrant workers’ kids. We used to swim and fish with them in Walt’s lake during the summer. There were a few kids named Angel, it’s not an uncommon name in Mexico. Maybe she thought she saw one of them. But that was twenty-some years back. Nobody looks the same after that amount of time has passed.”
Walt clapped him on the shoulder. “Go get some rest, Jacob. We’ll catch up tomorrow.”
After he left, Annie peered around the kitchen. “You finished cleaning up.”
“I did, and now I’m going to settle down in front of the TV with some popcorn and watch the Twins game before milking time. You’re welcome to join me.”
Grace nodded graciously. “Thank you, Walt, but we’re heading back to the Chariot to work.”
Walt got a funny look on his face. “That’s what you call that rig?”
“It’s what Harley calls it. I guess the name stuck.”
“Fair enough. And just so you know, I do my milking late, around ten, so don’t get spooked if you hear a commotion out by the barn, it’s just me and the cows.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The evening shift at Global Foods had been frenetic—there was the first rush between five and six o’clock, when the after-work crowd came en masse to buy last-minute meals for their dinner, then a second rush between seven and eight. Global Foods had more than its share of difficult, demanding customers—the more people paid for things, the more they expected, which seemed reasonable—but at the end of a day, some of them turned downright nasty, channeling their own day’s frustrations by venting on minimum-wage employees who didn’t deserve the brunt of their grievances and didn’t dare talk back.
In her normal life, Cassie would have made short work of these jackasses with a simple tongue-lashing, but her ruse didn’t allow her the luxury. It was infuriating, but it also kept her mind off the things she would be doing once ten-o’clock closing rolled around.
Sarah, the yippy Chihuahua, seemed to be suffering the worst of angry customers’ wrath, and Cassie found herself almost feeling sorry for her. But it made sense—as mouthy and judgmental as she was, she exuded a homing beacon of low self-esteem which made her a prime target for bullies who didn’t want to pick a real fight. Darwin at work. The strong survived, the meek got crushed. Cassie didn’t have a problem with survival of the fittest, but it was getting painful to watch. Besides, she had a new relationship to cultivate and nurture. Sarah was the senior employee here and Dalek trusted her. And if his paranoia ever found focus in Cassie, she needed Sarah as a defensive buffer.
After a particularly shrewish woman had chewed Sarah up and down for a leaky container of Castelvetrano olives before stalking off, Cassie gave her a sympathetic look, and not all of it was manufactured. “Sucks, doesn’t it? Somebody has a bad day, so they run around ruining other people’s days like it’s going to make them feel better.”
She watched Sarah bob her head woodenly. Jesus, was she on the verge of tears? “Hey, you haven’t taken your break yet. Why don’t you take it now?”
“I can’t, it’s still too busy.”
“I can handle it. Besides, you had my back yesterday, so it’s my turn.”
Sarah blinked a few times and looked at her. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Okay. Thanks. By the way, I hope you’re feeling better today.”
“Much better. There’s always that one day of the month, you know?”
“Oh, yeah, I know. I won’t be long.”
Sarah wasn’t long, and when she came back from her break, Cassie observed a difference in her demeanor. Nothing major, but her stiff, guarded posture seemed to have relaxed just a little. Even more alarming was the fact that she would actually make eye contact with Cassie for more than the briefest second.
During an interview or an interrogation, that was a tell that the subject you were working on was starting to humanize you and was entertaining the idea of trust; and trust, even the flimsiest, made for cooperation and looser lips.
She didn’t know if Sarah would ever be cooperative with anybody, but she sure loosened her lips. She started out tentatively, making innocuous comments here and there, and the more Cassie showed interest, the more encouraged she became, until she was chattering like a songbird.
During the last hour before closing, Cassie learned a lot about Sarah through idle chitchat and had begun to construct a preliminary psychological profile. Her initial assessment was that she was one of those people who had a persecution complex, perceived herself as a victim, and felt much better about herself when she could help another victim. She was lonely—her life outside Global Foods revolved almost exclusively around her two rescue cats, Butters and Sugar, who provided her with unconditional love. Her bitchy facade was just a protective mechanism.
By no means was the woman a total wreck, but when you broke down anybody like that, they seemed beyond hope. But in Cassie’s opinion, if there was a single redeeming human characteristic, it was a love for animals, and Sarah definitely had that going for her. She might actually find her way in the world, probably running a rescue shelter.
“. . . and then Sugar made this weird, loud meow in my ear and dropped a dead mouse right on my pillow at three a.m.!”
Cassie was staring at the wall clock, which was ticking off the last four minutes before ten. “You must have had a heart attack. . . . Wow, I can’t believe it, it’s closing time already.”
“Thank God.” Sarah started cleaning and organizing her station and gathering her personal things in preparation to leave for the night. In a few minutes, Cassie would be totally alone in the store to do what she needed to do and get out. Focus, focus, focus.
But then Sarah paused. “I can stay and help you close up if you want. It’s not hard, but if it’s the first time you’ve done it and you don’t feel comfortable . . .”
Cassie’s jaw tightened, but she put on a winning smile, desperately fearing her deceitful overture of friendship had backfired. “Thanks, Sarah, thanks for everything, but you go home. I know you want to get back to your kitties. You had a long shift today and they must be so lonely by now.” Mentioning beloved pets languishing alone at home was manipulative gold. Cassie hadn’t learned that at Quantico, it was just a fact of life.
“You’re sure?”
<
br /> “Positive. Besides, you already helped me with the hard stuff. All I have to do is set the alarm and lock up. No problem.”
Sarah looked genuinely cheerful for the first time since Cassie had known her. “I’ll give Butters and Sugar a kiss from you.”
“Why don’t you grab a couple bags of those new organic cat treats on your way out? I’m buying.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Okay! I will. Thanks! See you tomorrow, Cassie.”
Cassie let every muscle in her body relax when she saw Sarah finally leave with her cat treats in tow. She locked the front door behind her, then remotely activated the sneaky little virus she had installed in the security system a few days ago to black out the store’s main-floor security cameras temporarily without raising suspicion. She had five minutes.
She picked the lock on Dalek’s door easily and let herself in. The office was dark, but she didn’t need light. The laptop was gone, but the desktop was still there, so she took another flash drive out of her pocket and started uploading those contents.
She fought her nerves, fought the incessant prickling of adrenaline by staring at the monitor, watching the blue progress bar creep forward against a black screen as it counted down the endless seconds until the upload was complete. And then she sensed something that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, made her stomach writhe and her breath stop.
On the screen, she suddenly saw the reflection of a man’s face. He was standing behind her, a wire wrapped around the thick fingers of each hand, stretched taut. A garrote. Dear Jesus. She didn’t have her gun, she only had her skills.
She took a deep, silent breath the way she’d been taught.
If you see or sense an assailant behind you, do not reveal your awareness. All you have is the element of surprise. If they sense they have been spotted, your only advantage is gone.
So Cassie continued to stare at the monitor, breathing through her nose, and when the words “upload complete” blinked on the screen, she retrieved her flash drive and tucked it in her pocket, never taking her eyes off the reflection.