The bell above the door let out a shrill and she looked up.
A couple of young girls came in followed by her man.
Kelly recognized Adam by his headshot from the website. He was a black man, wearing a blue plaid shirt, dark pants and hipster glasses. He was five six, maybe a hundred and fifty-five pounds and in his late twenties. He had clean-cut afro tapered hair with unusually pale blue eyes that made him stand out. He wore a smile, and appeared to know several in the store as he nodded, and waved.
Adam cast a glance around the room and Kelly raised a finger. He asked for a dark black coffee before weaving his way around tables over to her. She’d taken a booth in the far corner; somewhere they’d have some privacy.
“Ms. Armstrong?”
She extended a hand and nodded.
After a brief greeting, Adam sat down at her table directly across from her and laid down a light brown laptop bag.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.
“It’s not a problem. How are you enjoying Telluride?”
“Haven’t seen much of it but what I have so far, it’s beautiful.”
He clasped his hands together and glanced around. “Yeah, it has a lot of charisma.”
A waitress came over and handed him his coffee.
“Thanks, Elle.” He took a sip and set it off to one side. “So you mentioned you were from the San Francisco Chronicle looking into the disappearance of Dana Grant, was that right?”
Kelly nodded. “She worked for us before she came here. Her departure was abrupt you might say. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Zodiac killings that happened a year and a half ago.”
“The copycat killer. Yeah, it made national news. That was quite some investigative work by your city.”
“Dana’s son was one of the murder victims.”
His jaw went slack. She could already see headlines for articles spinning in his eyes. Every reporter was the same. They were always on the hunt for a meaty story, and intrigued by anything they might have overlooked.
“I wasn’t aware of that. That would certainly make a person want to up and leave.” He stared back at her. “You don’t think the fire was something to do with that, do you?”
“I’m not sure. What I’m interested in besides finding Dana is her boyfriend Jack Winchester. I gather that’s who he was?”
Adam’s brow furrowed as he reached for his drink. “I wasn’t aware that she even lived there until I spoke with a few people here in town. We got word of a raging fire about a week ago and I was called out in the night to record it, take photos and then write up a piece on it. Usually when these kinds of things happen, the family is either found inside dead, or they managed to escape. No one was there. Jack, specifically, wasn’t around and even for a few days after, he didn’t show up. Let’s put it this way, it was very unusual.”
“So they never found a body inside?”
“I followed up with a friend of mine who works for the fire department, it was clean.”
“Did they say how it started?”
“Electrical malfunction. Nothing unusual.”
“But Jack eventually showed up?”
“Well that’s where it gets interesting. Apparently, and don’t quote me on this, he showed up a week later at the police department asking about her whereabouts. Unless he was lying, he didn’t have a clue. He was away on some trip when the fire started.”
“And you haven’t seen him around town?”
“Nope. And believe me I tried to locate him. As soon as I caught wind of him asking around town I contacted all the inns and hotels in the area but he never booked into any. My guess is he either knows more than he told the cops and that visit to them was some kind of ruse to secure his story or he genuinely doesn’t know what happened and he’s gone looking for her.”
She nodded and took another drink of her coffee. “What do you know about him?”
“Not a lot. I’d seen him around town. You tend to see the same faces after a while but until the fire he wasn’t even on my radar. After, I asked around and found out that he used to do jobs for people. He’d install a fence, paint a room, install a dishwasher, and go fetch items you wanted from the store. But get this. He never charged anyone. Can you believe that?”
“Help me to understand that. He lived in that huge house, did work for people for no payment?”
“Yeah. Must have fancied himself as some kind of philanthropist.”
“Interesting. And what about Dana?”
“I didn’t know her either. I used to see her working on her laptop in this shop every day but I never had a conversation. You’d probably best speak with Cathy over there. She was a friend of hers.”
“I assumed you already have.”
He chuckled. “Listen, I don’t know how they run things down at the Chronicle but here we don’t get paid a lot to waste our time. Sure if my boss had his way I would be working all hours of the day and night, chasing down leads, parked outside homes doing surveillance. Nope. Not me. I showed up, I took photos, I called around to a few of my sources and contacted the lodgings in the area but that was it. Where these people have gone
