Walk the Wire (Amos Decker #6)(35)

“But you didn’t,” said Jamison.

Susan could only shake her head.

Milton said, “We thought it would be a way to make her come . . . home.” He broke down entirely now and rested his forehead on the table, his body quaking. His wife didn’t look at him, but she did pat him gently on the back.

Decker eyed Kelly and said, “We’ll need to check her movements, friends, whether she had a job. Where she was staying and what if any connection she had to Hal Parker.” He stopped and stared over at Susan. “Before, you said that Parker never came to the Colony. But then you said that you had never required his services, which implies that you knew what he did for a living. Did you know Hal Parker, Ms. Ames?”

She glanced at her husband, who was still bent over, weeping quietly.

“I . . . I knew him, yes. Unlike Milton I . . . I have not always been here at the Colony. When I was younger, much younger, I lived in London with my parents. Hal was older than I was, but our families were neighbors, so I would see him a good deal when I was a child. I’ve . . . I know what he does for a living.”

Jamison said, “So did Pamela know him? Might she have gone to him for help when she left here?”

“It’s possible,” said Susan. “I don’t know for sure.”

Jamison frowned. “You didn’t keep in touch with her?”

Susan said defensively, “She didn’t have a cell phone.”

“I find that hard to believe,” said Jamison. “Even if she wasn’t used to having access to one at the Colony, it would be hard to do without one once she had left there.”

Kelly added, “And London’s not that big. Surely you could have gone to see her.”

“I chose not to see her,” snapped Susan. “She had made her choice. She didn’t want to be a part of our world anymore.”

Decker pushed off the wall, came forward, and said offhandedly, “So she might have been staying with Parker. And if someone came there to take him away and she was there, she might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Kelly nodded in agreement. “That could be, yes.”

Jamison said, “But, Decker, it’s a one-bedroom house. And we didn’t find any clothing or other things that would indicate that Pamela Ames was living there. And there was no vehicle other than Parker’s.” She gazed up at him, puzzled. “You know all that.”

Decker kept his gaze on Milton. “That’s right, Alex. So now maybe Milton can tell us what his wife doesn’t want us to know.”

All eyes turned to Milton as he slowly sat back against his chair. He rubbed his eyes and would not look at his wife this time.

“Unlike Susan, I did keep in touch with Pammie.”

“And?” said Decker.

“And she was working as a waitress at the big truck stop on the main road coming into town.”

“She told you this?”

“No. I heard it from someone else. A trucker who makes deliveries here. He knew Pammie. He told me she was there. I . . . I went there to see her. But when I saw . . .”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” said Jamison. “When you saw what?”

“Well, what she was wearing! What all the waitresses wore in that place. They were barely clothed. And all the men ogling them. It was . . . I just couldn’t believe that my daughter—”

Susan made a clucking sound and glanced at her husband with a scathing look.

Milton swallowed nervously and looked down.

“And you told her what you thought about it?” said Jamison.

He nodded, still looking down. “I . . . I told her I was ashamed of her and never wanted to see her again.”

On that, Milton broke into sobs and couldn’t answer another question.





DECKER LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW of his hotel room onto a street that was bustling with people and traffic. This fracking stuff, he thought, had really transformed parts of North Dakota from a flyover state to one of the world’s great economic booms.

He still didn’t know why Pamela Ames had been at Hal Parker’s. If she’d had a purse it had also been taken. Ditto for her cell phone. The gun that had killed Pamela was nowhere to be found. They had also found no trace of Ames having been in Parker’s truck, so how she had gotten out there was still unknown. Walt Southern would be doing the postmortem, and Decker was hoping something would pop from that.

They had spoken with the truck stop people. Ames had been working there. She had missed her shift that night. They had tried to call her phone, which they confirmed she had, but had gotten no answer. Kelly had tried to trace the phone’s location but gotten nothing. They were also trying to trace where Ames had been living but so far had gotten zip, and the truck stop people hadn’t known that, either. The company didn’t mail out paychecks, they just handed them out at the end of the week, her manager had told them. If she had moved around or lived in abandoned premises as some did here, it might be impossible to pinpoint exactly where she had been on any given day.

Decker checked his watch. He was due to meet Baker at the OK Corral Saloon in thirty minutes. He called Bogart’s personal cell, got the man’s voice mail, and left a message. How and whether Cramer’s death coincided with Pamela Ames’s murder and Hal Parker’s disappearance he didn’t know. And had Parker been abducted? Or had he killed Ames for some reason and then run for it?