“Too calm?”
“Deliberately calm.” She rubbed the heel of her hand between her breasts as he knew she did when struggling for calm herself.
“As if he didn’t want to show any sort of excitement or interest,” she explained. “Maybe I’m projecting, but that’s how it feels. And he didn’t tell me anything because he didn’t want me to react exactly the way I am.”
She closed her eyes, took a breath. “It’s a good thing I have a full afternoon. I can’t obsess.”
“Yes you can. It’s what you do.” Reaching behind her, he gave the tail of her braid a tug and tipped the topic to take her mind off her nerves. “Are you washing my clothes, Mom?”
“I’m washing mine.” She spoke very primly. “There may be an item or two of yours in there, too, just to fill out the load.”
He poked her in the shoulder. “Watch it.”
She fisted her hands on her hips as he strode away. “I’ve already gone radical. I changed the sheets on the bed.”
He shook his head, kept walking—and made her laugh.
Tawney and his partner took Eckle’s last known residence first, a small three-level apartment building within walking distance of campus. Their knock on 202 went unanswered—except for the crack in the door across the hall.
“She’s not home.”
“She?”
“Just moved in a couple weeks ago.” The crack widened. “Young thing, first apartment. What do you want?”
Both agents took out their ID. And the door opened all the way. “FBI!” Her tone might’ve been the same on
Tawney gauged the woman as early seventies with bright bird eyes behind silver-framed glasses.
“I love those FBI shows on TV. I watch them all. Cop shows, too. Is that little girl up to something? You couldn’t prove it by me. She’s friendly and polite. Clean, even if she dresses like most of them do.”
“We were actually hoping to speak with Francis Eckle.”
“Oh, he left right after Christmas. His mother took sick. At least that’s what he
Mantz raised her eyebrows. “Ms.... ?”
“Hawbaker. Stella Hawbaker.”
“Ms. Hawbaker, could we come in and speak with you?”
“I knew he was funny.” She pointed a finger. “Come on in. You can have a seat,” she told them and walked over to shut off the TV. “I don’t drink coffee, but I’ve got some for when one of my kids comes by. That and soft drinks.”
“We’re fine,” Tawney told her. “You said Mr. Eckle left after Christmas.”
“That’s right. I saw him hauling out suitcases, middle of the day when hardly anyone’s around but me. So I said, ‘Going on a trip?’ And he smiled the way he does that doesn’t look you in the eye and said he needed to go help tend his mother, because she’d had a fall and broke her hip. Now, he’d never once mentioned his mother in all the years he lived across the hall. Course he hardly mentioned anything. Kept to himself,” she added with a knowing nod. “That’s what they say about people who go out and chop people up with an ax. How he was quiet and kept to himself.”
“Did he mention where his mother lived?”
“He said, because I asked him straight out, she lived in Columbus, Ohio. Now you tell me,” she demanded, pointing her finger again, “if he had a mother out east, how come he never went to see her before this, or how come she didn’t come out to see him?”
She tapped the finger to the side of her nose. “Smells funny. And it smells funnier seeing as he never came back. Left his furniture—or most of it from what I could tell when the landlord finally got around to clearing the place out. Not much else, and I know he had cases of books in there—and they didn’t go with him. Must’ve sold them on eBay or something.”
“You pay attention, Ms. Hawbaker.”
She took Tawney’s comment with a sly smile. “That I do, and since most people don’t pay much to old ladies, I get away with it. In the past few months, I’ve seen him go out hauling shipping boxes or stacks of those mailing bags, and coming back empty. So I figure he sold those books, and whatever. Running money, I’ll bet. Never paid the rent from January on either. And, ’cause I talked to the landlord about it, I heard he quit his job and cleaned out his bank account. Every penny.”
Those bright eyes went shrewd. “I expect you know that.”
“Did he have friends, visitors?” Mantz asked. “Any girlfriends?”
Ms. Hawbaker made a dismissive sound. “Never once saw him with a woman—or a man either if he went that way. Not natural. Polite, I’ll give him that. Well spoken, but he wouldn’t say boo unless you said it first. What’d he do?”
“We’re just interested in talking to him.”
Now she nodded sagely. “He’s what you all call ‘a person of interest,’ and mostly that means he’s a suspect in something bad. He drove one of those little compact cars with the hatchback. That’s what he loaded up and drove off in that day. I’ll tell you something else, ’cause I’m nosy and I poked in—and the landlord and I talked about it. There wasn’t a single photograph in that place, or a letter or a postcard. He never planned to come back, that’s what I say. And he didn’t go to take care of his mother with any broken hip. If he had a mother, he probably killed her in her sleep.”
Outside, Mantz wrenched open the car door. “Now that’s an insightful woman.”
“I don’t think Eckle killed his mother in her sleep, since the records show his mother OD’d when he was eight.”
“She pegged him, Tawney. If that’s not our UNSUB, I’m a Vegas showgirl.”
“You’ve got good legs, Erin, but I’m looking the same way. Let’s track down the landlord, see what we can find out at the college, then I guess we’re going back to prison.”
Twenty-Four
One day, Fiona thought, she hoped to feel something other than dread when she saw Davey’s cruiser come down her drive.
“Uh-oh, we’re in trouble now,” one of her students joked, and she managed a stiff smile.
“Don’t worry, I have connections. Jana, see the way Lotus is circling? What do you read?”
“Ah, she’s in the scent pool?”
“Maybe. Maybe she’s trying to get a new gauge, work it out. Maybe she’s got a cross-scent and she’s trying to home in. You need to work it out, too. Work with her. Help her focus. Watch her tail, her hackles, listen to her breathing. Every reaction means something, and hers might be different from, say, Mike’s dog. I’ll be right back.”
She moved off, her heart banging against her ribs with every step as Davey walked to meet her.
“Sorry to interrupt your class—and it’s not bad news. How much longer are you going to be?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes. What—”
“It’s not bad news,” he repeated. “But I don’t want to talk to you with the audience. I can wait. It’s my timing that’s off.”
“No, we would’ve been done, but this group asked for an add-on cadaver-search cross-training. There’re only four of them, and I had the time, so...” She shrugged.
“I’ll let you get back to it. Okay if I watch?”
“Sure.”
