He stepped closer. “I’ve got a three-day missing person. It’s pretty straightforward on the surface, but when Ronny Moore did the interviews, he thought there was something hinky about the whole thing. I want to bring a homicide officer with me to the second interview.”
She shrugged. “It feels that wrong?”
“Well, the husband says she’s only been gone for three days. The parents say that she usually calls every day, but she hasn’t in a week. They filed the report.”
She put her circulars into a file folder and stuck it into a desk drawer. “Let’s go.”
The house was a low bungalow painted green with a roofed porch in front. It seemed identical to most of the others on the street, but this one had a chain-link fence along the sidewalk. Catherine had been a police officer long enough to open the gate cautiously and wait to see what sort of dog responded, but Cerino said, “The dog belonged to the previous owner.”
Cerino knocked on the front door, and a man came to open it. He was small but muscular, with sandy hair combed to the side over his balding head and the sort of expression that Catherine classified as habitually dissatisfied. He was wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeved pullover that seemed tight over his biceps. She manufactured a smile. “Are you Mr. Olson?”
“Yes,” he said. He was somber, but she noticed that he looked relaxed and well rested.
“My name is Sergeant Hobbes, and this is Sergeant Cerino. We wondered if we could come in and talk to you.”
He opened the door and let them in, then went to sit in a worn wing chair in the living room. The gesture made Catherine almost feel reassured about him, because it was so human: he was in a nightmare, and he instinctively went to the chair for comfort. But there was something about his movements that made her uneasy. His limbs seemed to be rigid, mechanically stiff. “Have a seat,” he said.
Cerino sat on the couch to the left, and Catherine moved to the chair directly in front of Olson. She kept her back straight and both feet on the floor.
“You found her body, didn’t you?” said Olson.
Catherine looked into his eyes and she knew. She had no evidence yet that this call concerned anything more than a woman who had taken three days off from a lousy marriage. The missing woman’s parents had told Ronny Moore, the first officer on the case, that she had gotten into arguments with her husband and left him before, so this could easily be just another spat. But Catherine knew it wasn’t.
She shifted almost imperceptibly in her chair to keep the back of her coat from impeding her reach for her gun. “No,” she said. “We’re just conducting a preliminary inquiry. We’re hoping that she hasn’t come to any harm. Usually if somebody’s missing for only two or three days, they come back on their own.” She paused. “Do you know if there is any reason to believe she might not have left of her own free will?”
His face assumed an expression of frustration, as though he were trying to make himself understood by people who barely spoke the language. “She left here on her own. She went grocery shopping. She should have been home two hours later at the most, but it’s been three days. What I think happened is that there was a guy in the parking lot waiting for somebody like her. She went to put her bags in the trunk or something, not paying attention to what was going on around her, and there he was behind her with a gun.”
Catherine kept her face attentive and sympathetic, and recognized that she had just heard the story he was going to be pushing. She knew too that when his wife’s body was found, it would have bullet holes. “I certainly hope that’s not what happened,” she said. “Please excuse this, but we have to ask some personal questions. It’s part of the procedure. Has she ever left you like this before?”
“No,” he said. “She hasn’t left me now. She’s missing.”
“I mean, has she ever gone away without explaining where she was going, and possibly stayed away overnight?”
“I just answered that. She hasn’t ever done that. Three days ago she said she was going to the supermarket, and never came home.”
“Which one?”
“The Safeway, on Fremont Street. At least that’s where she usually goes.”
She turned to Cerino. He answered, “We’ve checked the lot and all of the parking areas nearby.”
She turned back to Olson. “Did you have any kind of disagreement during the day or two before she went shopping?”
“No. We didn’t. We always got along just fine.”
“You never had arguments?”
“Once in a while. But never anything that mattered much, and nothing that day,” he said. “Look, if I had any reason to believe that she had just gotten pissed and run off, I wouldn’t call the police and embarrass myself, would I?”
“
“Well, no. I guess her parents called first, but I would have today.”
“But you had thought she would be back in an hour or two. After a day passed, weren’t you scared? Afraid for her?”
“Yes. But I always heard the police don’t consider anybody missing unless they’ve been gone for at least three days.”
“So you didn’t call us. What
“I called some other people. I drove around to the store to see if her car was there. Things like that.”
“Whom did you call?”
“Let’s see. Some people she worked with. The neighbors across the street.”
“Did you call her parents?”
“Yes. No. I think they called me first.”
She handed him a pen and a piece of her notebook paper. “Can you write down for me the names of all of the people you called?”
“Gee.”
“And if you can remember their phone numbers, that would help too.”
He frowned and began to write, then crossed something out, then wrote some more. “This isn’t as easy as it looks. I was in a real panic, and I’m probably forgetting some.” He glared at her. “What’s this for, anyway?”
She took the paper. There were only three names, one of them crossed out. “If you think of anyone else, you can add the name later.”
He shrugged. “Why aren’t you out looking for her?”
“There are other people doing that,” she said. “They’ll be interviewing lots of people, asking questions and comparing notes.”
“Oh, I get it. I’m going to be the suspect, right? Whenever somebody gets killed, it’s the husband.”
“I certainly hope not,” she said. “Most of the time when we receive a missing person call, it has a happy ending. People get depressed. They get upset or overwhelmed by something in their lives. They go off by themselves for a while to think. Those are possibilities we always have to look into.”
“All right. I understand. I’m just worried about her, that’s all.”
Cerino took his turn. “Was your wife on any medication? Insulin, lithium, antidepressants, anything she had to have regularly?”
“No.”
“No recreational drug use? Alcohol wasn’t a big factor?”
“No.”
“You said your marriage is in good shape,” Cerino said, looking down at his notebook as though he were checking off items on a list. “Does that include all aspects? Neither of you had a sexual relationship outside the marriage that you know of?”
“Absolutely not.”
Catherine caught Cerino’s eye. “I’d like to look around a bit.”
Cerino turned to Olson. “With your permission, we’d like to examine the house to see if there’s anything that will point us in a new direction.”
Catherine watched Olson. His shirt was tight across his chest, and she saw his breathing stop for a moment,
