And Now She's Gone(43)
Searching in the bottom of the lockbox, Gray’s knuckles brushed against soft plastic.
It was a sandwich baggie filled with …
Fluffy tufts of brown hair and fingernail clippings.
She peered back into the box. There was another bag, also filled with hair and fingernails.
“If I took this…” she asked aloud. What would I do with it? No clue. But she’d let her imagination roam as free as a buffalo. Something good, that’s what her mind would find.
Gray put the lockbox back into the closet and the key back into the drawer. She stopped again in the bathroom. Yes, that was a black ring around the bathtub drain. She opened the medicine cabinet—orange vials of oxycodone, Demerol, ibuprofen, tubes of masks and creams and a bottle of Tylenol PM with the childproof wrapper still intact. Unopened.
Tea had said that, in her suicide attempt, Isabel had taken all the Tylenol PM.
Either Isabel had tried to overdose on a different bottle or …
“It didn’t happen,” Gray said. Just like Ian O’Donnell had said.
She crept back to the hallway, then slunk back to the staircase.
What was that?
She cocked her head to listen.
Scratching … somewhere … above her?
Eyes on the ceiling, she took one step down, then another, then paused.
No, the scratching was … in the wall?
Rodents. Mrs. Tompkins had mentioned using rat poison. That’s how Morris had died.
Gray returned to the breakfast counter and to that blank notepad. She flipped through it and came to a page toward the back.
BZE 11:55 12:30 12:55 AA
10:25 DEL UA 6:00
Flights? Was “AA” American? “DEL” Delta? “UA” United?
But what’s BZE? And when had these notes been made? And why had Isabel kept hair and nail clippings in a baggie?
Gray didn’t know, but she did know the reasons behind the pictures of Isabel’s injuries. Part of a victim’s safety plan, pictures of abuse played a crucial role in a plea to a judge for a new name without a public hearing. “He’d kill me if he found me,” with receipts. The judge, seeing the bruises in color, would be compelled to keep the victim’s new identity a secret.
“I need to leave,” she whispered.
Mrs. Tompkins was probably looking out her peephole to see if Gray had left to take Kevin his lunch.
And now Gray was also peeping out the peephole.
The breezeway was empty.
She hurried back to the Camry and threw herself into the front seat. She glanced in the rearview and side mirrors. Don Lorenzo Drive looked abandoned.
She plucked her phone from her bag to search the internet.
What is “BZE”?
The search icon circled. There were barely two bars of reception here. Finally …
BZE … Philip S. W. Goldson International Airport. Belize City.
23
Isabel was supposed to fly to Belize?
But the young woman must have abandoned her original, ordered plan to leave Los Angeles. That’s why she hadn’t taken those pictures or her birth certificate. No time. Harried and frightened, she’d thrown clothes into a suitcase, her heart banging in her throat as she rushed to the black truck and raced away, pulse still banging around her body as the plane taxied down the runway and landed, hours later, in Belize City.
Maybe.
But as Gray pulled into a parking space at the mall, a part of her kept shaking her head.
Why didn’t she believe this story?
Because Kevin Tompkins may have killed Isabel and could be posing as Isabel right now.
The Armed Forces Career Center was steps away from Panda Express. From broccoli beef lover to proud marine in less than twenty yards.
After her mother’s funeral, Gray had flirted with the idea of joining the air force—Victor had been an airman before joining the Bureau. She’d visited a recruiting center like this one and had sat across from a stern-looking white man with Charlton Heston’s jaw. He had pontificated about patriotism, commitment, and courage, and he’d thought she’d do best in the army, that it would be easier for her because, you know, test scores and education. But then she’d shown him her history degree from Fresno State, and then her high scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. She was qualified to join whatever-the-hell service branch she wanted. Which was, ultimately, none—her feeling of being lost and alone had become her “normal” again.
What would her life have been like had she joined? Would she have a flyboy husband named Jake? A son, Zach, and a daughter, Faye? Stars on her shoulders? Ribbons on her chest?
Inside the recruitment center, there were no future soldiers standing in front of monitors that showed a video of hard men jumping out of big planes.
Kevin Tompkins, dressed now in fatigues, spotted Gray standing in the doorway, and his eyes widened in surprise.
Gray smiled. “Isabel’s friend Maya, remember? Your mom asked me to bring you this.” She held up his lunch bag.
He shook his head. “Oh, no.” He took the bag from her. “Thank you.”
She pointed at one of the computer screens. “The test is digital now?”
“What do you know about that?”
“I got an eighty-eight on the AFQT.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “And?”