He looked out the window. “Hope so. I need my kid.”
Grace nodded. She pulled into a parking space behind The Melting Pot.
“Naomi drives a light blue VW,” she said, pulling into park.
“Yeah. That’s the one. Guess she’s working.”
Inside the restaurant they found Naomi Carlyle, front and center. She was an attractive young woman with long waves of blond hair and green eyes that flickered in the light of her workstation, the hostess podium.
After the detectives introduced themselves, the trio went to a quiet space in the back of the restaurant.
“I told the detective on the phone that I couldn’t think of anyplace Lisa would have gone. I mean, I can think of places she would like to go-Maui, for example. But I doubt that’s where she went. She would never have left that car of hers. She loved it. Plus, when you get right down to it that little bitch would have never gone anywhere good without me.”
“Little bitch? That’s kind of harsh,” Paul said.
Naomi laughed. “No. That’s just nickname we had at Stadium High. We were the little bitches-LBs. We ran that school.”
“I see. High school was a while ago,” Grace said. “You and Lisa have been close for a long time.”
“Yeah. Like sisters,” Naomi said. A waitress offered them water, but all three indicated no.
“Then you probably were around when she was dating Marty Keillor,” Paul said.
“Party Marty,” Naomi said. “Yeah, I was. The dude was fun but so wrong for her. He kept cheating on her. She’d break up. Go back to him. Break up again. You needed a tally sheet to figure out what their relationship was. Glad that’s over.”
“Was it a hard breakup?” Grace asked.
“No. Not really. I mean, look they had a yo-yo relationship. Each breakup and makeup was easy. By the end they were only a booty call anyway. What’s all this about Marty? He’s a dope, but he’d never hurt her. You should follow up on that capper she was talking to before she disappeared.”
“Capper?”
Naomi shrugged. “He had a broken leg or something. She was talking to me when she was going to her car and said she’d call me later, but I fell asleep. I never even looked to see if she called until the next day.”
“What did she say about the guy with the broken leg?”
“Just that he was a dork and she was going to help him. She used to be in a club that helped those people.”
“The ‘cappers,’ ” Paul said with obvious disdain for the young woman’s choice of words for handicapped individuals.
“Don’t be a judger,” she said, her eyes now icy. “Just do your job and find her.”
Grace cut the tension with a question. “What did she say about the guy?”
“Not much. She went to help him because he dropped his books. I guess some of our diversity training actually took root. I would have just let him struggle. I don’t believe in helping people who you don’t know.”
Naomi was a jerk, but she’d been the last one to talk to the vanished girl.
“Marty and Lisa’s mother seem very close,” Paul said.
Naomi shrugged. “I guess so. I’m sort of creeped out by the two of them.”
“Creeped out?”
“Yeah. There were a few times when I was over there in high school that I thought they were a little too close. I told Lisa and she didn’t care. She was just using Marty for his car anyway.”
Grace checked her messages when she and Paul returned to the car. None from the state crime lab. And thankfully, none from her mother. While the possibility was always out there that her sister’s remains would be discovered sometime, somewhere, Grace also knew that for many family members of the missing and presumed dead, there was never a final answer.
“Let’s go back to the office,” she said.
CHAPTER 6
Dismembering a human body was much harder than it appeared. It was messy, took considerable strength, and no matter how tough one thought he or she was, it took a very, very strong stomach to get the job done.
And yet, when the endeavor was part of the family business, there was no getting around it. It must be done.
The man looked down at his tool kit-knives, a handsaw, kitchen shears-and the oozing red that flowed like a sluggish river toward a rusted, hair-clogged basement drain.
He let out a sigh.
The Saw slasher films, the charming but bloody cable TV show Dexter, and assorted episodes of Criminal Minds had done him wrong. They’d not prepared him for the smell of torn human flesh. They’d done a poor job putting him in the picture to see what it felt like doing the necessary but nasty. He winced slightly as he moved the blade deeper into the widening crimson canyon of the dead woman’s abdomen. The vibration that came from a serrated blade against the impasse of a bone rankled him whenever the steel of the blade met one. Femurs were particularly resilient. He hated femurs because they called for the swinging of an axe.
Hoisting an axe overhead and driving it into his victim meant breaking a sweat.
He hated to sweat.
The young man had read everything he could on the subject, at least subjects that were parallel to what he was undertaking. He’d watched videos of hunters dismembering deer on YouTube. He’d even practiced on the turkey that his mother had served that Thanksgiving. It was a twenty-five-pound tom, fresh, not frozen.
A very uncooperative turkey at that.
“Poultry can be tricky. Aim for the joints,” his mother said, pulling all the air in the room through her cigarette. “The leg will come right off.”
He’d glared at her back then. Never a beauty, any looks she’d had were long gone. She was dour, with lifeless eyes. She had the kind of smoker’s mouth that looked more like a shrunken gash than a smile.
“Hmm,” she said, as the juices ran in the platter. “Might not be done,” she said, snuffing out her cigarette into raw giblets in the sink. “Looks red, not clear.”
He ignored her.
He liked red.
Everything was red.
That evening Grace and Shane Alexander shared a bottle of Riesling and a wedge of creamy Brie that she had somehow found the time to bake with pecans and brown sugar. It was gooey, salty, sweet, and completely decadent. Something wonderful that she thought would help take their minds off the long day. Shane had finished a weeklong special project for the bureau and wanted just to forget about all the politics that came with the job that he’d once thought was about catching the bad guys and making the world a better, safer place. Grace had office politics to contend with, too, and the crumbled marriage of Paul and Lynnette Bateman had been dissected over and over. There was nothing more to say about it. Besides, she had the concerns of the missing girl on her mind.
“So you think there might be some liability with the Lancaster girl’s investigation stalling because of Goodman’s accident?” Shane asked as they sat on the deck of their Salmon Beach home and watched the seagulls and boaters pass by.
“That’s what the mother thinks,” Grace said. “If Lisa’s been abducted and some scuzzball has her and kills her you can bet she’ll file a wrongful death on the department.”
Shane offered her more wine and she held out her glass.
“Any leads?” he asked. “That is, any you can tell me about?”
She smiled and shook her head. It was kind of a game they played. Their lives were about crime, murder, violence, and the cases that consumed them, but they pretended that the information they held couldn’t really be shared-not if it hadn’t already been on the news or disclosed by someone else. Bureau policy carried more weight than the edicts issued by Lynnette Bateman.
