Joe’s shoulders sagged. “She’s bound to be working late. I’m probably worried for no reason.”
He turned to go, but the clerked stopped him with a “Wait. Sir?”
“Yeah?”
“I could leave a message on the phone in her room. Maybe her cell battery died, but if there’s a message on her room phone, she’ll see the light flashing as soon as she walks in.”
“That’ll work. Thanks a lot.”
“No problem.”
The clerk dialed Faye’s room as Joe walked away, then called out again. “Wait. Sir?”
Joe turned around again. The clerk said, “I’ve got her roommate on the line,” and handed him the phone.
Joe tried not to snatch the phone, but he grabbed it pretty damn quick. “Hello? This is Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth’s husband. I drove up here from Florida to surprise her. Do you know where she is?”
A young woman’s voice came out of the receiver. “A surprise? That’s so sweet! You’ll have to wait a little while for the surprise, though, ’cause she’s at the funeral. It’s been a while, so she shouldn’t be gone much longer.”
Of course, she was at the funeral. That’s exactly where he should have expected Faye to be.
A man who wasn’t on edge and nearly frantic would have had his anxieties eased by this information. He would have thought, “Great. I’ll take Amande for a nice dinner and we’ll see Faye soon.”
But Joe, whose edginess was rising by the moment, thought, “I don’t like the sound of ‘It’s been a while.’ It’ll be dark soon and they don’t bury people in the dark. I’m going out there.”
Once again, he quizzed the young woman, whose name he should probably have asked. “Do you know where they had the funeral?”
“Some old church out in the country. I heard it was where Frida’s—that’s the dead woman—it’s where her great-grandparents used to go. I don’t know the name of it.”
That was all Joe needed to know. This woman might not know where the old church was, but the Internet did. His daughter knew how to make the Internet sing, and, despite Amande’s insults, Joe thought he was pretty good, himself. The website for the Memphis newspaper would have run articles on the murder that would tell him the name of the poor dead woman. With the name, he could find her obituary and that would tell him the location of the funeral.
“Would you do me a favor?” he asked. “If she comes in or if she calls, would you please, please, please tell her to call her husband?”
Before he used his phone to track down his destination, he called Amande and told her that he was going out and that she needed to stay put. The last thing he needed was to lose both his daughter and her mother on the streets of Memphis.
Faye had crawled around a rocky parking lot until McDaniel returned. Now he was telling her to have a seat so he could help her bandage her bloody knees, but she wasn’t where she wanted to be. She wanted to be too far away to hear, running headlong through briars and underbrush, looking for a little girl who couldn’t be found.
McDaniel handed her a bottle of water, keeping another one for himself. “I know you won’t be sitting here long, but please rest here and drink this before you go running off. That’s what I’m going to do.”
She didn’t want to sit still, because then her brain would be free to think. She pulled her phone out of her pocket, hoping someone had texted good news, but all she saw was a voice mail from Joe, and she was too antsy to take the time to listen to it. She needed to tend her wounds and go back to looking for Kali. Joe would understand if it took her a little time to call him back.
This was the advantage of long-term relationships. Most conversations could wait.
She surveyed their work. Four band-aids on each knee were doing a pretty good job of protecting her wounds, but they still stung. The scrapes on her shins were going to have to go uncovered, because she’d given all the other band-aids to her crew. The first-aid kit she kept in her glove compartment had fallen short and she didn’t have time to wait for McDaniel to raid his.
“The search-and-rescue team will be here any minute,” the detective said as he settled onto the garden bench beside her, facing the woods where Kali must still be.
The ornamental bench with its curves and molded scrolls looked just right in the shady garden behind the church. Its concrete was cool on the backs of her thighs. McDaniel looked like he needed something cool on his sunburned cheeks.
“I hope they hurry,” she said, “and I hope they have lights. It’s going to be dark soon.”
“They’re hurrying and they have lights.”
“Tell me they have dogs,” Faye said, dabbing again at her bleeding shins with a ball of cotton dripping with antiseptic.
“They have dogs.”
“If my husband were here, he wouldn’t need a dog. He could track her.”
“I find it hard to believe that he could do a better job than a dog. No human has that kind of nose.”
“Joe doesn’t use his nose. At least, I don’t think so. He uses his eyes. And when he gets close, he uses his ears. I can’t tell you how he does it, but he does it. If we don’t find her soon, I’m calling him and telling him to get on a plane.”
McDaniel looked doubtful. “Well, right now, we’re all we’ve got. You and your people have checked under all the cars?”
“Yes. And in the trunks. You?”
“I’ve looked in every cranny of the other parking lot. Nothing under the cars. Nothing in the trunks. But don’t you worry. We’re going to find that girl, and I’m bringing in all the people we need to
