again, Cliff!”
“What’s happened?” he said gently, while Stokes, Claude, and I stood and listened.
“Somebody killed a woman and left her in my office!”
Cliff’s dark eyes bored into Claude, another large white male.
“Is this true?” he asked, as though Tamsin often made up fantasies of this nature. Or as though he wished she had.
“I’m afraid so. I’m the police chief, Claude Friedrich. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure?” Claude extended his hand, and Cliff disengaged from Tamsin to shake it.
“Cliff Eggers,” he responded. “I’m Tamsin’s husband.”
“What do you do, Mr. Eggers?” Claude asked in a social way, though I could practically see Detective Stokes twitch.
“I’m a medical transcriptionist,” he said, making an obvious effort to relax. “I believe your wife is one of my clients. Mostly I work out of our home, my wife’s and mine.”
We must all have looked blank.
“Doctors record what they find when they examine a patient, and what they’re going to do about it. I take the recordings and enter the information into a computerized record. That’s paring my job down to the bare bones.”
I had no idea Carrie employed a medical whatever, and from his face Claude had either been ignorant of it, too, or had forgotten; he wasn’t happy with himself. I was probably the only one present who knew him well enough to tell, though.
“You live here in Shakespeare?” Claude said.
“Right over on Compton.” Cliff Eggers’s big hand smoothed Tamsin’s hair in a cherishing gesture.
I was about to ask Tamsin if she’d heard anyone leave the building before our group had broken in, when I heard a voice calling, “Lily! Lily!”
I peered around the parking lot, trying to find its source. Full dark had fallen now, and the lights of the parking lot were busy with insects. The people buzzed around below them, looking as patternless as the bugs. I was hoping all the police were more purposeful than they appeared. Claude was no fool, and he’d sent everyone in his department through as much training as he could afford. No wonder he was so quick to snap up a detective from a big force, one who was sure to have more experience than anyone he could hire locally. And though he’d never spoken to me of it, I was aware that Claude had quotas he had to meet, and his force was probably always trying to catch up on the minority percentage, especially since Shakespeare had had some racial troubles about eighteen months ago.
“Lily!”
And there he was; the most handsome young man in Shakespeare, prom king, and thorn in my side, Bobo Winthrop. My heart sank, while another part of me reacted in a far different way.
I turned a hose on myself mentally.
“Bobo,” I said formally.
He disregarded my tone and put his arm around me. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Claude’s bushy eyebrows escalate toward his hairline.
“You okay?” Bobo asked tenderly.
“Yes, thank you,” I said, my voice as stiff as I could make it.
“Is this your friend, Lily?” Tamsin asked. She’d recovered enough to try to slip back into her therapist role, and the neutral word
“This is Bobo Winthrop,” I told her. “Bobo: Tamsin Lynd, Cliff Eggers.” I had done my duty.
“What happened here?” Bobo asked, giving Tamsin and Cliff a distracted nod. I was glad to see that Detective Stokes had drawn Claude away to huddle with him on real police business.
I wanted to be somewhere else. I started walking to my car, wondering if anyone would stop me. No one did. Bobo trailed after me, if a six-foot-tall blond can be said to trail.
“A woman got killed in there tonight,” I said to my large shadow when we reached my car. “She was stabbed, or stuck through somehow.”
“Who was she?” Bobo loomed over me while I pulled my keys out of my pocket. I wondered where the rest of my therapy group had gone. The police station? Home? If Melanie didn’t tell the police the identity of the corpse herself, they’d find it out pretty quick. She’d look bad.
“I didn’t know her,” I said accurately, if not exactly honestly. Bobo touched my face, a stroke of his palm against my cheek.
“I’m going home,” I said.
“Jack there tonight?”
“No, he’s on the road.”
“You need me to be there? I’ll be glad-”
“No.” Clipped and final, it was as definite as it was possible to be. Dammit, when would Bobo find a girlfriend or stop coming home during the summer and the holidays? There must be a special word for someone you were fond of, someone who aroused a deep-rooted lust, someone you would never love. There was nothing as idiotic, as inexplicable, as the chemistry between two people who had almost nothing in common and had no business even being in the same room together. I loved Jack, loved him more than anything, and reacting to Bobo this way was a constant irritant.
“I’ll see you around,” he said, abandoning his hope that I would prolong our encounter. He took a step back, watched me get into my car and turn the key. When I looked out my window again, he was gone.
Chapter Four
When Jack called that night, he sounded weary to the bone. He was following the trail of a sixteen-year-old runaway from Maumelle, a boy from the proverbial good home who’d become caught up in the subculture of drugs and then prostitution. His family hadn’t seen him in a year, Jack told me, yet they kept getting hang-up phone calls from different cities and towns around the South. Convinced their son was on the other end of the phone, sure the boy wanted to come home but was ashamed to ask, this family was getting into seriously shaky financial shape in their search for him.
“How can you keep it up?” I asked Jack, as gently as I could.
“If I don’t look, they’ll hire someone else,” he said. Jack sounded older than thirty-five. “People this driven always do. At least I’ll really try my best to find the boy. Ever since we found Summer Dawn Macklesby, I’m the guy to see for missing kids.”
“Have you even had a glimpse of this kid?”
“Yes.” Jack didn’t sound happy about it. “I saw him last night, in the Mount Vernon area, on Read Street.” Jack was in Baltimore. “He looks awful. Sick.”
“You didn’t get to talk to him?”
“He went off with a man and didn’t come back. I’ll be out there again tonight. I might have to pay him for his time, but I’ll have that talk.”
There was nothing to say.
“How is the surveillance going?” he asked, ready for some good news.
“She won’t bend over. She’s wearing a neck brace and walking with a cane, and any bending she does, she must be doing it where I can’t see her. Maybe Bonnie Crider’s really hurt. It would be nice to find an honest woman.”
“Not a chance. All the warning signs are there. She’s a fraud. We gotta think of a way to catch this woman. Put your mind to it.”
“Okay,” I said. I said it very neutrally, because I am used to taking orders, but I am not used to taking them from Jack. However, I reminded myself in a flattening way, he was my boss now.
“Please,” Jack said suddenly.
“Okay,” I repeated, in a more agreeable tone. “Now I have a thing or two to tell you.”
