Paranoid(92)

“Oh. Wow.” Hart glanced at the badges and swallowed hard. “He. Um. Mr. Moretti’s not in right now.”

“Do you know where he is?” Cade asked, shoving his wallet back into his pocket.

“No. I mean . . . Oh, geez. Is he in trouble?” Will asked.

“We just want to talk to him,” Cade said.

Voss repeated the question: “Do you know where he is?”

Will shrugged. “He didn’t say.”

“But he called you?” she said.

“Yeah.” He was nodding frantically, obviously unnerved at the presence of the police in the store. “But . . . it was kinda weird. First of all, he never misses a day of work. Never. And he left me the message at, let me see”—he fished a cell phone from his pocket and flipped through the screen—“three forty-seven in the morning. Like, who texts then?”

“What did it say?”

“Just that he wouldn’t be in today. That he was feeling sick.” With some trepidation, he handed the phone to Cade. The message was simple: I’ve been up all night. Stomach bug. Open up and Wendy will be in around noon.

Sure enough the time was noted as 3:47 a.m.

Hart’s response at 8:13 was: OK

Ryder was tempted to scroll up, but didn’t. “Who’s Wendy?”

Hart’s mouth pinched. “My coworker. She’d better show.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

He glanced over his shoulder as if he expected someone might be listening even though there was no one else in the store.

“Because she’s a slacker, that’s why. Has she shown up? No. Has she answered any of my texts? No. Do I think she’s going to come in and relieve me? Take a guess.” He glanced at the clock, which read 12:28. “She’s already late. My guess: she’s not coming in.” His eager, wanting-to-please attitude was quickly disintegrating.

“Well, if Nate calls in, let him know we’re looking for him,” Voss said and slid her card across the counter.

“I will,” Hart said, dropping Voss’s card into the back slot of the register just as the front door opened and a white-haired man wrangling a woman in a wheelchair backed into the store.

Cade held the door for him, and the man, in baseball cap and jeans with suspenders over a plaid shirt, spun the chair as he entered.

“Thanks,” the woman said. She was in her late seventies, it seemed. With short, snow-white hair, she was wearing a housecoat and one leg was in a cast, propped on the footrest.

“We’re looking for Nate,” the man said as he rolled his wife to the counter, where Hart waited.

“Get in line,” Voss said under her breath as the door swung closed behind them. “Let’s go see if good old Nate is home in bed, nursing a bad tummy.” She threw a glance at Cade. “Who knows? Maybe he’s not alone.”

They knew his address and as Voss keyed it into her phone for a GPS readout, Cade slid behind the wheel of the Jeep, a department-issued Jeep that was short on comfort and big on technical equipment. Despite Voss’s preference for her phone, he punched the address into the GPS of the Jeep’s computer, then wheeled out of the lot of the strip mall.

The fog had settled in rather than dissipating and Ryder, though he wanted to gun it, had to drive slower than usual, knowing though not seeing that he was paralleling the river and that somewhere out there in the mist the old cannery, now invisible to him, lay rotting. He told himself that he was reaching, trying to connect the death of Luke Hollander with the homicides that were happening now; but he couldn’t discount the fact that “KILLER” had been scrawled in paint across Rachel’s door or that the text she’d received suggested that it had come from someone close to Luke, if not from her stepbrother himself, who was long dead.

Kayleigh was right—some sick prick was behind it, but why? Who would get his rocks off by terrorizing her?

His hands gripped the wheel more tightly and from the corner of his eye he thought he spied the cannery, a behemoth of a building, holding its own secrets, but, of course, that was just his imagination. He couldn’t see fifty feet in front of the Jeep, much less across the acres that separated the cannery from the road.

He saw the change in direction on the screen, just as Voss said, “Turn left up here . . . there.” She pointed at a crossroad and he waited, making certain no one was coming from the opposite direction.

He headed upward through the hills on the county road, and the fog became less dense. Fir and spruce trees gave way in spots to fields that had been cleared, and fence posts stood like sentinels rising in the mist.

“What d’ya bet he’s hiding out?” Voss said. “He knows we’re on to him. He’s got to know that we’d find her phone and start looking at him. God, can we get a little heat in here?” She fiddled with the control. “End of May and still colder than a well digger’s butt.”

“You think Moretti’s the killer?”

“Who else? If you ask me, they planned to meet at the school yard, things get a little rough, out of hand, and she ends up dead.” She nodded, as if agreeing with herself as she peered through the windshield. “Probably a sex game gone wrong.”

“Then how does the murder tie to Violet Sperry?”

“Not convinced the homicides are linked.”