She frowned and then picked up her phone and sent Mack a text. Did you find the vehicle my lawyer was driving?
When she got no answer, she sent another message. The green Jaguar.
He sent her a response, but it was a short and cryptic question mark. ?
She shrugged and sent a short missive of her own. Well?
Not for you to worry about.
That was his poor excuse for a response. She snorted at that and sent him another message. Maybe not, but I won’t sit by and do nothing.
Immediately her phone rang.
“Doing nothing related to this case is exactly what you should do,” he warned. “Remember? You’re already on the suspect list.”
“I might be on a suspect list,” she said, “but nobody in their right mind would think that I did it. I have no motive.”
“Are you kidding? You are the scorned woman for one thing,” he said, “and Robin also wronged you professionally and cost you a boatload of money in the divorce.”
“Yes,” she said, “but she’d already gotten a dose of her own medicine, since my ex had apparently kicked her out already. Besides, he’s the one who should be on the hook for this. Not me.”
“Is he the kind to kill?”
“We already decided that he was, just not with his own hands,” she reminded him.
“But a woman?” he asked. “A lot of people will kill someone, but it won’t be a female. Some guys draw a line there and won’t cross it.”
“I doubt he has drawn such a line, and, if he did, I suspect he’s crossed it already,” she said. “Remember? My ex has no morals, no healthy conscious to stop him.”
“Got it,” he muttered. “I’ll check and see if we’ve spotted the Jag.”
“Well, if she was found stabbed at the Welcome sign, and her car wasn’t there, then surely she was moved. She was probably either in a hotel or someplace where the vehicle was close by.” She heard papers shuffled on Mack’s end.
“Well, her rented vehicle was found near a coffee shop not too far away,” he said. “Just off the main highway.”
She winced. “Well, that’s not very good,” she muttered. “That’s not good at all.”
“Nope, it isn’t,” he said, “but that’s what we must deal with.”
“I got it,” she said. “So, will you check out the vehicle? For hers, for any rentals? If she rented the Jaguar, surely she rented it at the airport, so she must have flown in,” she muttered, her mind now starting finally to think. “But I don’t know what hotel she was staying at.”
“If she was staying at a hotel. It’s not that far of a drive from West Vancouver to Kelowna,” he reminded her.
“But still, what? Four and a half or five hours to drive that distance? And just one way? Both ways on the same day would be a lot of stress.”
“It might be a lot of stress,” he said, “but people do it all the time.”
“The flight is only an hour. She had money. She had absolutely no reason to make that road trip and to make it take so long. She could have flown here, rented the Jaguar, thrown her temper tantrum, then turned around and flown back out of here, without even thinking about it.”
“Maybe that’s exactly what she did,” he said. “It’s really not that easy to know for sure yet.”
“Well, it should be,” she said. “You just need to focus on it a little bit more,” she muttered.
He broke into a laugh. “Well, thanks for that,” he said. “We really do know how to carry out our jobs.”
“So you say, and I get that, but now it’s a different story. It’s my neck on the line, and I can’t have this case unsolved, with me sitting around, doing nothing.”
Once she hung up, it wasn’t like she would let it go because she was finally getting somewhere. “Okay, now let’s track her,” she said, “starting with the times.” She checked into the airlines and, with a quick phone call, managed to find out that their victim was set to fly home that evening. She quickly sent the information to Mack. So, no hotel needed.
He didn’t respond, and she figured that was a good sign. Okay, so that woman loved Chinese food. And armed with a photo of Robin, Doreen hopped into her car, leaving all the animals behind, then headed to the four or five Chinese food places that she knew were close enough, based on Doreen’s location and where Robin’s car was found, that Robin could have walked to and from. But then, since Robin flew here, she could well have rented her vehicle at the airport. Making a quick decision, she turned around her vehicle and headed to the airport, where she went to the car rental desk. There she held up the woman’s picture and asked if Robin had rented a vehicle.
“Oh my, yes,” the young woman said. “The cops were here asking about her earlier. Because we didn’t get the car back.”
“Right,” she said. “I understand that. Did she say anything? Did she say how long she needed it for?”
“Only for a day. She said she was flying out that night.”
“Right, and she was booked on the nine p.m. flight.”
“It’s so terrible what happened to her,” the woman said. “Are you a friend of hers?”
“I was, indeed,” she said quite honestly.
“But time is amazing,” the rental car clerk said. “And it just goes by so fast, and we never know when we don’t have any more time ourselves.”
“Yeah, I’m trying to track my friend’s whereabouts to see who could have been involved in all this.”
“Oh,” the clerk said, with a shiver. “That’s so scary.”
“It is, but the sooner I have a little bit of knowledge, the
