Mean Streak(22)

“Thanks, Wes.”

He got up and made it as far as the door. “Oh, almost forgot. Late Friday—you’d already gone for the weekend—I got more info on the soccer coach in Salt Lake City. He’ll walk, but he’ll never kick another soccer ball. Coaching days are history.”

“The coach tell you that?”

Greer shook his head. “I tracked down the osteo specialist who pieced his femur back together. Took a lot of Super Glue, he said.”

“Was he being euphemistic?”

“I’m not sure. He said the bones were splinters.”

“What did the coach have to say?”

“Nothing. Soon as I identified myself, he hung up. Just like the others.”

Jack looked down at the file. “Can’t blame them. They’re afraid to talk.”

“I would be, too.”

“Any idea who’s next?”

“Working on it,” Greer said. “But you know, things stack up.”

“For now, stay on Seattle.”

Greer left him. Jack stared absently at the closed door for several moments, then his eyes moved down to the folder. Pushing aside the photo of Rebecca Watson, he looked at the one beneath it, the one of her brother.

The picture had been taken before the man had grown angry and bitter and had lost his will to smile. In the photograph, there was a suggestion of a grin at the corner of his mouth. But if one studied it as often and as closely as Jack did, one would detect the faint lines already there, bracketing his lips, virtually foretelling the curse he would place on himself at Westboro.

Jack muttered the question he’d asked a thousand times. “Where are you, you son of a bitch?”





Chapter 9



Jeff, who’d been channel surfing, dropped the remote to answer his cell phone. “Hello?”

“Jeff? It’s Dr. Butler, calling from the clinic.”

Dammit! “Uh-huh.”

“I’m on speaker phone with Dr. James. We’re calling to check on Emory. She didn’t come in this morning, and we haven’t been able to reach her either on her cell phone or at home. Is everything all right?”

He sat up and swung his legs to the side of the bed. “She went out of town for the weekend.”

“We’re aware of that. But our understanding was that she would be back by this morning. She had appointments scheduled. At first we thought she was just running late, which isn’t like her, but the receptionist juggled appointments, trying to cover. It worked for a while, but now the waiting room is overflowing. The receptionist will have to start rescheduling Emory’s appointments if she doesn’t come in soon.”

“You’d better do that. Reschedule, I mean.”

“For tomorrow?”

“On second thought, you might want to hold off until…until we know for sure when she’ll be back.”

He could hear Emory’s two colleagues in whispered conversation, but he couldn’t catch what they were saying. Finally, Dr. James said, “We don’t know how else to ask this, Jeff, except to come right out with it. What’s going on? Emory’s personal life is none of our business, but not showing up for work, standing up patients, that’s not like her. We checked at the hospital to see if she’d made rounds this morning. We were told you’d called there yesterday asking for her and expressing some concern. Have you spoken to her yet?”

“No.” Realizing he could no longer put this off, he imparted the troubling news. “The truth is, I haven’t heard from her since Friday evening. But,” he rushed to say, “we’d had an argument Thursday evening. A doozy, actually. When she didn’t call over the weekend, I figured that she considered us not to be on speaking terms. Foolishly, I decided to wait her out.”

“Oh.”

One syllable, and Neal James applied it like the blade of a guillotine. He’d always been a prick toward Jeff, having an air of superiority that was as obvious as his honker of a nose.

Trying not to sound defensive, Jeff continued. “I wasn’t alarmed because Emory hadn’t been specific about when she planned to come back. She mentioned staying over Saturday night, too. So I didn’t become worried until yesterday afternoon when I still hadn’t heard from her.”

“You’ve had no contact since Friday evening?”

“That’s correct.”

Dr. Butler’s shocked response was to ask if Jeff had reported Emory’s unexplained absence to the police.

“Yes. I drove up here—the town is called Drakeland—yesterday and started looking for her at the motel where she spent Friday night. She ate an early dinner at the café next door. She called me from her room telling me that she was in for the night. The trail stopped there.”

“She was doing her run on Saturday morning, right?” Dr. Butler said. “Did anyone see her leaving the motel?”

“No, but you know her. She likes to get an early start, so she probably left before daylight. The desk clerk had imprinted her credit card the night before when she checked in, so there was no need for her to stop there before leaving.”

“And she didn’t return to the motel Saturday night?”

“No. She didn’t plan to either. She took all her stuff with her when she left.”