pictures of Miranda had been her lips—twisted unnaturally, the kind of bizarre facial expression sometimes captured in the awkward timing of a bad snapshot. Stacy still could not believe that Miranda had died with her mouth frozen in that state.
She painted over the mouth in putty gray, using the tip of her brush to sketch more angular lines that she would eventually trace over with color.
That blond detective had lectured her about the dangers of what she was doing. She had tried to manipulate her into “changing her lifestyle,” as she put it. And she’d used the horrible things that had been done to Miranda in an attempt to persuade her. She could still hear that tough and somehow slightly condescending tone in the detective’s voice when she’d told her, “The next time, it could be you.” The detective even forced Stacy to add her cell number to her phone so she’d have it any time she needed—“even just to talk, Stacy.”
Using her name with her, like they were friends. Ironically, it was a move Stacy used with her dates—or at least the ones who seemed to want some semblance of intimacy.
Well, the detective was wrong. Miranda didn’t deserve what happened to her. No one did. But Miranda had never been street-smart. She didn’t have that intuition that could tell her right away if a guy was a problem or not. Stacy did. She was a good judge of character. And she was smarter than Miranda.
And she knew the police were full of shit because they also warned her to stay away from Heather. Maybe Heather—or Tanya from Baltimore—had bolted. But there was no way she had anything to do with those heinous things that had been done to Miranda. She probably just got scared when she saw Miranda’s picture on the news after she was killed. She probably decided to give up the life and get the hell out of Dodge—sort of like what that blond detective wanted for Stacy.
She walked back to her bed and typed the reply e-mail. She attached a photograph of herself, the one in a bikini and a cowboy hat.
She hit the send key. Easy money.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
4:15 P.M.
Words—tiny, meaningless details scribbled on yellowed sheets of paper—could make all the difference. Beneath fresh light, the trivial can become significant. Cold can grow hot. And thin reeds of data can blossom and expand into indisputable evidence.
Ellie had lost count of the number of times she had come across that one nugget—that one piece of the picture that pulled the entire mosaic together—in some dusty, old, long-forgotten police file. Now she and Rogan were scouring Tanya Abbott’s decade-old prostitution file in the hope of a lucky break.
It was only a two-page report from the Baltimore PD and a few pages of notes they had managed to obtain from the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office, not like the bulky cold-case murder books, so rich in detail, that Ellie had grown accustomed to searching. But this thin stack of fax paper was the one and only piece of Tanya Abbott’s history they could count on. They would start with what they knew about her ten years ago and work their way forward.
Rogan was learning what he could about the psychiatrist whose name had been jotted down so haphazardly in the court’s dismissal of the prostitution charge against Tanya. “DM’d,” the judge had scrawled in large block letters, followed by the cryptic notation, “in counseling, per Dr. Lyle Hewson.”
While Rogan was tracking down Hewson, Ellie was trying to get a bead on Tanya’s family. When Tanya was arrested, she listed a Baltimore address, as well as a corresponding telephone number. Ellie tried the number first, but the Asian woman who answered managed to explain in broken English that she’d had the number for two years and had never heard of anyone named “Saundra” Abbott. Then Ellie had called Baltimore’s Office of Land Records and learned that the address Tanya had given to the arresting officer had been sold three years earlier by the estate of Marion Abbott.
Her next attempt had been to call the new owner of the property. The man who answered knew no more about the former occupants of his home than had the Asian woman who’d inherited their telephone number.
He was also only slightly easier to understand, thanks to a thick southern accent.
“Abbotts? No, can’t say that rings a bell, but I can’t swear it would. I dealt with some realtor. Lady said the owner bought the farm and the family needed to sell. Had a big debt on the place, she said, so it was a good deal for me—except for the parts that were falling over. You might check with some of the neighbors around here, though. There’s some old-timers…Names? Nope, can’t help you there.”
Ellie thanked the man for his time, hung up the phone, and opened Google Maps on her computer. She typed in the old Abbott address and then hit the link for “street view.”
Her screen displayed a street-level view of what had once been Tanya Abbott’s home. The house was a nondescript single-level ranch. The exterior’s beige paint looked fresh enough, but from the aluminum ladder and the loose stacks of roofing tile visible in the driveway, Ellie guessed that the current owner had bought himself a fixer-upper.
She used her mouse to do a virtual walk to the south and then clicked on the house next door to the former Abbott residence. The neighbor’s street address popped up at the top of her screen. After a quick detour to the reverse phone directory, Ellie dialed the number.
She knew that Google used still panoramic photography to replicate her online stroll through Baltimore. Even so, as she listened to the trills through her handset, she caught herself watching the photo on her screen as if she might actually spot the person inside answering the phone.
“Hello?”
It was either a little kid or a woman with a really stupid voice. She started to ask whether Mommy was home, but thought better of it, just in case she was dealing with a Betty Boop.
“Is this the person who owns the home? I’m calling from the police department.”
“The police? Am I in trouble?”
Definitely a kid.
“Nope. I just want to talk to one of your parents. Are they home?”
“I only have a mommy.”
“Well, is she home?”
“Yes.”
“Can you go get her?”
“She’s exercising in her room.”
“Okay, well, can you go get her for me?” This kid was one tough customer.
“I’m not supposed to bug her when she’s exercising.”
“What’s your name?”
“Benjamin.”
She made a mental note to scold Benjamin’s mother for her failure to cover the whole don’t-talk-to-strangers terrain. “This is very important, Benjamin. I’ll tell her it was my decision to get her, okay?”
“But she has someone in there with her. And she told me never, ever, ever go in there again when she’s exercising with someone.”
Ellie had a good idea of the kind of exercise Benjamin’s mom was doing in her bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, and she didn’t want to be responsible for the baggage the little guy might carry around for life if he opened Mommy’s door right now.
“How long have you lived in your house, Benjamin?”
“A long time. Like, forever.”
“Were you born there?”
“I don’t know. I think babies come from the hospital. But my big brother’s sixteen and he measured himself on the same door as me, down in the basement, and I’m taller now than he was when he was seven.”
So Benjamin’s mom had lived in the house for at least nine years.
