Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(51)
The trooper handed him another small slip of paper. “Cell phone number, that’s it. No address yet.”
DeMarco looked at the listing, then took out his cell phone, blocked his number, and made the call. Tracy Butler answered on the third ring. Her voice was throaty and slow, still groggy with last night’s Xanax. “Hello?”
“Annabel?” DeMarco said.
“Who, baby?”
“I’m looking for my Annabel. Are you her?”
“Not last time I looked. But it’s a pretty name, isn’t it?”
DeMarco pressed End, crumpled up the slip of paper, and tossed it onto Carmichael’s desk.
“Sorry,” Carmichael said.
DeMarco patted his jacket pocket. “No worries. I have her in here.”
Before leaving the building, he stepped inside his station commander’s office. “I’m headed north to check out a person of interest. She might know something about Thomas Huston’s current whereabouts.”
“How does she know him?” Bowen asked. “University stuff?”
“Whispers stuff.”
“Say again?”
“It’s a strip club just east of Pierpont, Ohio.”
“You telling me the man had a secret life?”
“Research for his novel.”
“That’s a handy excuse, isn’t it? Covers just about everything a guy could get into.”
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
“You taking a cruiser?”
“Not this time. Low profile.”
“Well, that piece of shit of yours is certainly low profile. Think it will get you there and back?”
“I’ll buy a Lincoln when I get your job.” He turned toward the hall.
“Hey!” Bowen said.
DeMarco looked into the room again.
“You taking 62 west to the Interstate?”
“I am not bringing back any fucking spinach rolls,” DeMarco told him.
“They make them one day a week. What’s the harm?”
“Do I look like a delivery boy to you?”
“You drive a delivery boy’s car.”
“Fuck you and die,” DeMarco said.
“If you go past the place. That’s all I’m saying.”
“If I go past,” DeMarco said. He turned away and started down the hall.
“And this time don’t forget the dipping sauce!”
Thirty-Six
With fewer than two thousand residents, Albion has three distinguishing characteristics. The B&LE occasionally rattles through the south end of town, loaded with coal and other freight on its way to the Lake Erie loading docks in Conneaut, Ohio. A medium-security state correctional facility opened for business just outside of Albion in 1993 and now housed a few hundred more adult male offenders than the town had residents. But the thing most locals remember Albion for happened on the last day of May 1985, the day forty-one tornados ripped across Canada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The F4 twister that swept the quiet streets clean of all cars, trucks, and Amish buggies hit Albion at 5:05 in the afternoon, two minutes after the warning was issued from the Erie National Weather Service. It obliterated a hundred or so homes.
DeMarco had heard all the stories. A man had been watching from his porch as the writhing black mass approached, only to have his leg sheared off by flying debris. House trailers were lifted off their foundations, spun through the air, smashed into the ground. A car was sucked two hundred feet into the funnel, heaved over top of a silo, and slammed into a field, a young woman and her dog inside. Bodies were found as far as two miles from where they had been yanked into the air.
The neighboring towns of Wheatland and Atlantic had also been laid flat. Dozens of lives lost, thousands forever damaged.
DeMarco thought about that twister, thought about the sudden, random violence of life as he drove into Albion an hour before noon on a sunny autumn day. He remembered what Samuel Butler had said, that life is a long process of getting tired. He and Laraine had laughed when she read that line to him out of Bartlett’s Quotations. But DeMarco knew now that Butler had had it wrong. Life is a long process of being destroyed, he thought. And not, in fact, a very long process at that.
Danni Reynolds’s apartment was on East Pearl Street, a street that had been wiped clean by the tornado and rebuilt in a hurry. The building was of post-and-board construction, two stories high, with slapdash balconies, railings and stairways that looked as if they could not withstand a heavy breeze. Where the yellow vinyl siding was buckled or missing in places, wisps of pink insulation stuck out like dirty cotton candy. Most of the windows were covered with towels, sheets, or heavy curtains to keep out the drafts.
DeMarco parked across the street and studied the building. Four apartments on the first floor, four on top. Apartments A and B in the front, C and D in the rear. Danni lived in the rear.
He drove around back to a paved parking area. No access from there to the next street behind the building unless she climbed a chain-link fence. She had two ways to get to ground level. Down the rear stairway to the parking area. Down the side stairway to East Pearl Street. He guessed that she owned a car, one of the five compacts in the parking area, none newer than four years old, none without a few scrapes or indentations. Chances are, he told himself, if she runs, it will be to her car. And if she ran, it would tell him a lot. Everything he needed to know.