Last Girl Ghosted(81)

I don’t know how much time has passed when my phone vibrates again.

It’s a series of directions and simple commands: Write this down. Delete all traces of me from your text messages. Destroy your phone.

My skin tingles as I scribble the directions on to a pad of paper Joy has left for me. There’s something quiet about it, final, that placing of pen to paper. I tear the sheet from the pad.

Then I leave without saying goodbye to Joy, get in my car and start to drive.



thirty-eight


“I want you to come in, Bailey.”

Nora was annoyed with him, and he could understand why. He’d failed her. Failed his client. Failed a girl who had, in all likelihood, fallen victim to a predator.

“I have a lead. A solid one.”

“Tell me.”

He told her about the Realtor, about the client looking to buy the Carson property, about how he had an address and was sitting outside the Realtor’s house that very minute, ready to go knock on the door.

“It’s almost midnight.”

“Since when does that matter? There’s a missing woman, a ticking clock.”

She issued a sigh. “Look,” she said, her voice tinny over the car speaker, “Thorpe fired us. He’s hired someone else. So you’re officially costing me money right now.”

She didn’t care about that. Neither did he.

“Just one more day. Twenty-four more hours.”

Silence.

“I’ll take it as a vacation day.”

The neighborhood he’d stopped in was modest; tidy houses, well-kept, tree-lined. Nothing special, no grand McMansions, no run-down shacks. Basketball hoops and late-model cars in the driveways. It had the look of an organized neighborhood—block parties and coordinated decorating, maybe candles in brown bags at the curb on Christmas Eve. What did they call those things? Luminarias, that was it. It reminded Bailey of the way he grew up—a kind of all-American, ride your bike out to meet your friends, home when the streetlights came on, soccer on Saturdays, picnics, vacations to the beach upbringing. Rick Javits’s house was a neat little Craftsman with a picket fence and postcard-sized front yard.

Nora was talking again.

“You know, sometimes we get wrapped up in these things for our own reasons. It stops being about the client, and becomes about something inside us that needs resolving. And when that happens things get murky.”

“We’ve had this talk.” Whenever he talked to Nora late at night, which was often, he always imagined her in gray silk pajamas and a cashmere robe, drinking a glass of wine. He wasn’t sure why; he’d certainly never seen his boss in her pajamas.

“How much does this have to do with Wren Greenwood?” she asked.

A jolt of annoyed embarrassment. “She’s in danger.”

“You don’t know that.”

“He’s going to come back for her. He wanted something he didn’t get, and men like that don’t give up.”

“Have you developed feelings for her?”

“It’s not like that.”

Not like he’d been watching her for a while, digging through the layers of her life. Not like he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Not like he felt a kind of thrill to find her in his motel room. Not like he felt a deep and abiding urge to make sure nothing happened to her. That she didn’t slip into whatever black hole this monster had opened in the world.

“Then what’s it like?”

“She’s a good person. She deserves to have someone looking out for her right now. She—doesn’t have anyone else.”

More silence.

“You know, she lived through a nightmare, right?” he went on. “Then, instead of letting it ruin her life, she took on a role—the whole Dear Birdie thing—trying to help people. She doesn’t deserve this.”

“She’s not our client.”

“What about the lab? Anything on those items I sent in?”

“There was some DNA from the sweater, but it doesn’t match anything on CODIS or NDIS.”

He deflated a bit. He had high hopes for the items Wren had retrieved from the rental property.

An old man walked his little white dog up the street, didn’t glance in Bailey’s direction.

“Just one more day,” he said. “If he comes back for her, and I’m there, maybe we find Mia, too.”

“Did I mention we’ve been fired from the Thorpe case?”

“You did.”

“The job is no longer yours. Come in.”

“Okay.”

“Bailey.”

“I said okay. I’ll come in.”

Obviously, he had no intention of going back in. It just wasn’t going to happen, and Nora would let him get away with it because she didn’t have a better detective in her firm. All of this was unspoken between them. Because Nora was like Bailey. The work wasn’t about cases and fees; the work was about people. And when you took on someone’s case, those people became your people and you cared about what happened to them. Nora’s partner, Diana, was a different story. She was the money woman; she balanced the books. And right now, in the case of Mia Thorpe, the numbers didn’t add up. Honestly, Bailey got that, too.

And then there was Wren Greenwood—wild, delicate, stubborn, kind. A fire to her, a softness. He thought about her. Too much.