The Book of Cold Cases(4)

“Shea. You’re home?” he said. Michael knew a lot about my paranoia, though he didn’t know the reason. He didn’t seem to find it strange; he often checked that I was home safe when we talked.

“I made it,” I said. “Where are you?” Michael was usually somewhere interesting. As a private detective, he lived the kind of life that would be way too much for my anxiety to handle.

“Right now I’m in a parked car,” he said, “waiting for someone. Where I’ve been since noon.”

He did, in fact, sound bored. “Waiting for who?”

“You know that’s classified.”

I felt myself smiling. Everything Michael did was classified, according to him. At least the interesting stuff was. “If you’re doing a boring stakeout,” I said, “then you had time to read the article I sent.”

“I did.” I heard him sip something. I pictured him in a car parked at the side of a road somewhere, the misty rain dripping down the windows. Maybe he was waiting for a cheating spouse or an embezzler. In my mind, the car was a big, boxy seventies thing, even though it was 2017. Michael gave off that old-school vibe.

Not that he was old. As far as I knew, he was somewhere in the second half of his thirties, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. Good-looking, most women would think. Women who weren’t closed off like me. I’d only ever seen a photograph of him, which he’d sent me early on; we’d never met in person.

I wasn’t very good with meeting strange men in person.

“What did you think?” I asked him.

“If you want to know what I think about the article, it was excellent. If you want to know what I think about the case, then the husband did it. With the father’s help.”

“There’s no evidence,” I said.

“When they find her, there will be. Because she’s definitely dead.”

Something inside me that had been coiled tight loosened for the first time all day. I loved Esther, but she didn’t really get me. Our parents lived in Florida, and they definitely didn’t get me. My coworkers didn’t get me. My ex-husband didn’t get me.

Michael got me. I didn’t know how or why. He just did.

No one in my life wanted to talk about this stuff except him.

“What about the mall footage?” I asked him.

“Inconclusive. My guess is it isn’t her. The killers caught a lucky break with that.”

“The husband and the father working together is unusual.”

“Unusual, but not unheard of. It’s going to be difficult for them to maintain. One of them will probably make a deal, giving up the other one.”

“But the husband, really? Everyone says they were a loving couple.”

“Everyone always says that, and everyone is always wrong.”

“You’re a cynic,” I said, scrolling through the article again, looking for typos. “That’s a good quality to have.”

“My ex-wife would not agree.”

I paused. He hadn’t mentioned an ex-wife before; we didn’t usually get personal. “Then she can call my ex-husband,” I said, trying it out. “It sounds like they have a lot in common.”

“They’d probably get along just fine.” He paused. “I think I see some movement. I have to go. Put the article up. It’s good.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Good luck.”

When we hung up, I put my phone down and did a circuit of my place, checking that the doors were locked, the windows fastened. Singles Estates had a security guard at the entrance to the complex, but that didn’t mean much to me. Anyone on foot who was determined to get in could find a way. I was on the third floor—no way was I taking a ground-floor apartment—and I had a security system just in case. Locks on the windows, no fire escape, no easy-to-pop screens. One of the few things I missed about marriage was the everyday presence of a man in the house, keeping the bad things away without even knowing it.

But I didn’t have that anymore, so I had to be careful.

Everything was in place. When I was finished, I sat down in front of my computer again. I tapped it awake and logged in to the Book of Cold Cases. And I started tonight’s journey into the darkness.





CHAPTER FOUR


September 2017





SHEA


I was tired at work the next day, because I’d stayed up later than I should have, working on the Book of Cold Cases. The bus had been ten minutes late, I’d dropped my bus pass, and I’d gotten to work out of sorts. I was on autopilot.

Our office was in downtown Claire Lake, and our patients were mostly rich, or at least well-to-do—Claire Lake on the whole was well-to-do, a town of chic kitchen specialty stores and French bistros laid out along the ocean shore. The spectacle I saw from the safety behind my Plexiglas was never that of people digging their nails in for survival, doing their best to get through every day. Instead it was often the foibles of the rich, the ones who had the money to make their aches and pains go away.

For a few minutes, I thought the woman who walked in might be someone famous. Her face was familiar in a way I couldn’t quite place. She was an actress, maybe, one who had been on TV several decades ago. She was tall and stately, likely over sixty. Her skin was nearly flawless, with creases around the eyes and the mouth to give her character. Her hair was fashionably cut, with long bangs sweeping to her eyebrows and layers falling to her shoulders in light and dark shades of gray. She wore a black turtleneck sweater and sleek black pants under a trench coat. To me, the glamour wafting off her was worthy of Isabella Rossellini or Helen Mirren, though the woman seemed unaware of it. She looked distracted, and after slipping her ID beneath the Plexiglas to Karen, she took a seat, pulled out a pair of stylish reading glasses, and started reading a dog-eared novel.