Close to Home

by Lisa Jackson

  But there was no reason to dwell on it now, not when her damned car was finally repaired.

  “We have to leave right now and pick up my car,” she announced. “It’s done, and Hal’s like leaving in twenty minutes!”

  Mom looked up from her plans. “Sure,” she said, though she sounded anything but. “Okay . . . I guess we can make it.”

  “We have to make it,” Jade insisted. There was no “guessing” about it. “I’m driving to Aunt Dee Linn’s party.”

  “We’re all going together,” Sarah said.

  “Then I’ll follow you there,” Jade said, already reaching for her coat. She couldn’t believe that finally, after what seemed an eternity, she’d be able to drive her own car again. Freedom! Finally!

  “We’ll go get your car, okay, but we’re going together to the party. There’s a second girl from around here who’s gone missing, and I want us to stay close.”

  “This is not how I want to spend my Saturday night! I’m not a baby,” Jade argued hotly.

  “Neither were the two girls who were taken.”

  “No one knows if they were kidnapped, Mom. Maybe they just decided to take off for a while,” Jade declared.

  “And not tell anyone, including their friends or parents?” Sarah slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder. “The police are worried, and so am I.”

  “Mom—”

  “You’re not going alone. Come on, Gracie!”

  “But I don’t want to go pick up the car,” Gracie protested, and their mother actually sighed.

  “Really? Didn’t you hear what I just said? Come on. Get your jacket.”

  “I could stay here with Xena,” Gracie protested.

  Mom wasn’t buying it. “Move it.”

  Hurrying out the front door and sprinting across the grass to her mother’s Explorer, Jade glanced over her shoulder and confirmed that Sarah, Gracie in tow, was only a few steps behind.

  The dog romped after them and bounced into the backseat. Well, fine.

  In an ironic twist of fate, Jade thought, as their mother got into the car and started toward town, Gracie was now the one who was pouting, pissed off that she had to give up her research on the ghost of Blue Peacock Manor or whatever. It all sounded so Nancy Drew. But Jade didn’t care. She was getting her Civic back, and by the end of the weekend she intended to see Cody. One way or another. If he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, drive to Stewart’s Crossing to visit her, maybe it was time to visit him at his apartment in Vancouver.

  A drip of dread slid into her heart, and she reminded herself that she might not like what she found when she surprised him.

  Too bad, Either he loved her or he didn’t.

  She deserved to know the truth.

  Bellisario felt as if she were onto something as she drove into the parking lot of the Sheriff’s Department. Most of the way back from the Stewart place, she’d been caught up in her thoughts about the case, and they had come full circle back to Roger Anderson. No matter how many times she tried to convince herself he wasn’t involved, she couldn’t shake the idea that he had a part in this.

  If not Anderson, then who?

  You have nothing on him, Just your gut instinct, Not exactly first-class detective work, Lucy, You need a helluva lot more,

  Halfway to Stewart’s Crossing, she’d called her sister back, the call she’d missed when she’d been at the Stewart house. Lauren was worried, explaining that their mother had taken a fall. Mom was okay, Lauren assured her, but she sounded overwhelmed. Dealing with a parent with Parkinson’s disease was tough on a seventeen-year-old. Hell, it was tough on Bellisario, and she was thirty-five. After being assured that the part-time nurse was on hand, and that her mother was indeed resting and comfortable, just feeling more embarrassed than anything, Lucy told her sister she’d be home as soon as she could after work. She sometimes felt guilty that her job took up so much of her time, but it was the nature of the beast, and she really wouldn’t change things.

  Anyway, she knew what would happen when she got to Mom’s. She and Lauren would have another discussion about their mother, who was only sixty-four but already needed full-time care. Lucy knew it, and Lauren was definitely on board, but Landon, their brother, the middle child—who conveniently lived in Tacoma, far enough away that he didn’t have to deal with the situation except a few times a year—was certain Mom was “fine.”

  If Mom remained stable, they’d all probably let it go again and get by, but any way you cut it, the day was coming when their mother would need a lot more help.

  Parkinson’s was a bitch.

  She parked in her favorite space near the department’s rear door, her thoughts turning back to the case. Heading inside the brick edifice, she felt her stomach rumbling. She’d missed lunch and had picked up a prepackaged sandwich and Diet Coke at a deli on the outskirts of town, which she figured she’d eat at her desk.

  Inside, the building was bright, the glow of fluorescent lights reflecting off floor tiles that had recently been polished, light coming through arched windows that had stood the test of time and paint so new there were few scrapes or scuff marks visible.

  Yet.

  Hundred-year-old buildings tended to show their age, no matter how recent the paint job.

  Past the lockers and lunchroom, she headed into the wing housing the detective unit. In her office she peeled off her jacket and kicked out her desk chair. She still wondered if she were on the wrong track, if her obsession with Roger Anderson was completely unfounded. So he was skipping out of meetings with his parole officer. So he hadn’t shown up at the family home. So there were “sightings” of him in town. He had a record. Yeah. But never for kidnapping.

  Muttering under her breath, she unwrapped her sandwich with one hand and scrolled through her e-mail with the other. Without really thinking about it, she opened the ham and cheese, scraped off the excess mayo with the plastic wrap the sandwich had come in, and read through her messages. Maybe a security camera somewhere had found something, or a witness was finally coming forward or some damn thing.

  Nothing.

  In fact, she discovered that after further investigation by an assistant detective, the alibis of the other suspects had now all checked out. Even Lars Blonski could prove he wasn’t anywhere near either of the two girls. Her stomach burned a bit as it did when she was super-stressed, so she popped a couple of Tums with her diet soda and took a bite of her sandwich.

  Where the hell were they?

  Who the hell had taken the girls?

  She looked up when she heard footsteps approaching and saw Cooke walking into her office. “Could be we have more of a problem than we think,” he said.

  “More?” She swiped at the edge of her mouth with the napkin that had come wrapped with her sandwich.

  “Got a call from Turner in Missing Persons. Two more girls are missing.”

  “What?” She nearly came out of her chair, but Cooke held out his hands, fingers spread, indicating she should sit.

  “They’ve only been gone for a few hours, but their parents are terrified, panicking, probably overreacting.” But his eyes were dark, his lower lip protruding, worry evident in the lines of his face.

  “Let’s hope,” she said.

  “They’ll probably show up later at a friend’s house or something.” He didn’t believe it, she could tell.

  “They were together?”

  “No.”

  Bellisario didn’t like the sound of that.

  “But they do know each other; both go to Our Lady. The first, Dana Rickert, was shopping. Didn’t return. The parents found her car in the parking lot of the outlet stores down in Troutdale. Purse and cell missing.”

  “Probably with her,” Bellisario said. The outlet mall was about an hour west on I-84.

  “She left this morning. Was supposed to be home by noon.”

  Bellisario glanced at the clock on her desk, where the digital readout glowed a bright 4:47. “Alone?”

  “Ap
parently. She wasn’t even going to meet friends.”

  “Really?”

  “When she didn’t answer her phone, they drove out to the stores to investigate, thought maybe she had car trouble and the battery on her phone was dead or something. Found her car, talked to Security, and pushed the panic button. She was supposed to be home for her sister’s birthday party—a big deal, I guess. She’d been excited about it. Had some special present planned.”

  “Shit.” Bellisario leaned back in her chair, her sandwich forgotten. “GPS chip in the phone?”

  “There was. No more. She’s kind of a techie. Didn’t like her parents snooping. Disabled it.”

  “What about security tapes from the shopping mall?”

  “Getting ’em now.”

  Bellisario had hoped this was a false report, that the worried parents were, as Cooke had suggested, pushing the panic button before it was time. “Is she a friend of Rosalie Jamison or Candice Fowler?”

  He shook his head. “Not according to her parents.” Cooke frowned, suddenly looking older than his years as he stood in the doorway, one shoulder shoved against the frame. “The second girl, Mary-Alice Eklund, said she was meeting her boyfriend, a kid by the name of Liam Longstreet.”

  Bellisario nodded. “Soccer player,” she said. “For Our Lady. I’ve seen his name in the papers.”

  “There’s the problem. The kid said they had no plans to meet up, but her car was found parked behind the school, in a place where Longstreet said they’d get together sometimes. You know, to be alone.”

  “Let me guess. No purse. Not answering her phone.”

  “You got it. Longstreet got a weird text from her, but he was working for his dad, didn’t notice it for a couple of hours as the old man is death on texting and cell phones in general, especially when he’s on the job.”

  “And the text was?”

  “Why are you contacting me from this number?”

  “You’re saying someone was using another phone and claiming it was Longstreet?”

  “Looks like it. The good news is that her old man called the phone company and read them the riot act. He got the number of the phone that had called his daughter and dialed it, but no one answered.”

  “Shit. Tipped the guy off.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, Eklund gave us the info, and we got the name of the registered owner. A guy by the name of Evan Tolliver.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Owns Tolliver Construction. Out of Vancouver, Washington.”

  “Vancouver,” she repeated. “Where Sarah McAdams came from,” she said, her thought synapses snapping as she remembered Sarah saying as much, and Bellisario had taken notice of the Washington plates on her Explorer. “What the hell does Evan Tolliver have to do with this?”

  “Beats me.”

  She made a note. “I’ll talk to Sarah again.”

  “Good. Because there is a connection between Mary-Alice Eklund and Jade McAdams. Seems the McAdams girl was Mary-Alice’s charge. As a new kid, Jade was put under the wing of an upperclassman—in this case, Mary-Alice Eklund. But things weren’t going smoothly, according to Mrs. Eklund. The girls didn’t like each other, and Mary-Alice complained to her mother that Jade had threatened her, said she wished her dead or something like that.”

  “Kid stuff, probably. I met Jade McAdams today.”

  “Maybe, but there was also a jealousy thing going on. Mary-Alice was convinced the Longstreet boy was interested in Jade. He denied it when her parents asked him about it and said he only knew Jade from being a TA in one of her classes.”

  So two girls didn’t get along. That wasn’t exactly breaking news.

  “Do Mary-Alice Eklund’s parents have a GPS locator chip on their kid’s phone?”

  “Oh yeah.” Cooke didn’t seem too excited about it. “According to the last coordinates, the cell is somewhere in the Columbia River.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Bellisario said, and it was more a prayer than a curse. Could it be that the missing girls had been killed and tossed into the huge span of water separating Oregon and Washington? Would their bodies have been weighted down to sink to the bottom, or carried westward to wash up on the shores or batter against the huge dam downriver?

  “FBI’s all over it,” Cooke went on. “The Eklund girl was last seen sometime this afternoon. Her mother left the house around eleven, and Mary-Alice was still in her bedroom. Asleep probably. That’s when the timing gets a little iffy, as no one was home when she left, but when Mrs. Eklund got home around two, her daughter was already gone. The parents are worried sick she’s been abducted.”

  “It’s early for an AMBER Alert.”

  “Who the hell cares?” Cooke said. “Worst thing that happens, the kids show up and the department looks like it was quick to pull the trigger. A little egg on our face. FBI agrees.”

  “You’re right,” she said, tossing the remains of her late lunch into the trash. Her bad feeling had just gotten worse. “I’m on it.”

  Her first stop? A place she’d been not two hours earlier: Blue Peacock Manor, that god-awful monstrosity of a house, to talk again with Sarah McAdams and her daughter Jade, just to cover all her bases.

  And, oh yeah, she planned on having another face-to-face with Hardy Jones, the scumbag who had lied to her earlier. It was time for Hardy to come clean.

  CHAPTER 32

  As Sarah pulled the Explorer into the parking area of Hal’s Auto Repair, Gracie, still in a bit of a snit, said, “I’ll wait in the car.”

  Her immediate response was no, because of the missing girls, but Sarah realized she’d have a full view of her vehicle for the few minutes she’d be inside the shop. She pulled under the awning that stretched to a spot where gasoline pumps had once stood and was right next to the door and wall of glass that formed the front of Hal’s building—unconventional for the town, as there wasn’t anything the least bit Western decorating this glass-and-concrete building. “Fine.” Gracie could sit in the SUV and stew, she thought, yanking her keys from the ignition. “This shouldn’t take long.”

  The second Sarah cut the engine, Jade was already out of the car and walking through the front door. “I’ll be right back,” she said to Gracie, then followed after her oldest, leaving Gracie to pout and in plain sight through the plate-glass windows that lined the front of the building where the reception area was located.

  Hal, seventy-five if he was a day, was waiting for them, though she could see through another set of windows two men still working on a pickup in one of the bays. The hood was open, a light suspended over the engine, one man on a creeper that he slid underneath the truck, the other peering into the open engine cavity from above. Antique signs selling anything from Nehi Soda to Lucky Strike cigarettes adorned the walls.

  “There ya are; should be good as new!” Hal said as he took Sarah’s credit card, swiped it, then slid a receipt across the worn counter, where an antique cash register actually dinged as the drawer opened. Hal’s snow-white hair peeked from beneath an oil-stained baseball cap that was probably as old as the vintage cigarette machine standing against the back wall.

  “Thanks,” Sarah said as she tucked the receipt and the card into her purse. Jade snagged the keys that glinted under the fluorescent lights mounted high overhead, reminding Sarah of something . . . what was it, a niggling little thought that she couldn’t quite recall.

  “I’m going to stop at the store, get some things I need and a Coke,” her daughter sang on the way out.

  “Wait, Jade, I don’t think—”

  “Mom, please. It’s no big deal. It’ll take ten minutes. Then I’ll come straight home. I promise.”

  Sarah wanted to argue. To remind Jade that girls had gone missing, but they’d been over it a million times already. “Just be careful and really, ‘straight home’.”

  “Yeah, yeah! I know.”

  “Your car’s in the lot out back,” Hal called to Jade and hooked a thumb at an exit near the back “Through that door.”
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br />   Jade stopped and switched direction, the key swinging from her fingers as she headed out the door he’d pointed to. Sarah watched her go, her gaze trained on Jade’s key ring. What the hell was she trying to remember?

  “Good to have you back, Sarah,” Hal said, snapping Sarah to reality.

  “Good to be back.”

  “You gotta let ’em go, a little,” he said. “Kids. It’s hard. You worry yourself sick. But you gotta remember what you were like at her age.” His eyes glinted. “I do. You never wanted your wings clipped.”

  “I know, but, the missing girls . . .” She stared at the doorway.

  “And what? They don’t have crime in Vancouver?” He offered her an encouraging smile. “Raising kids isn’t for sissies, I know. See my hair? From my kids. All five of ’em. Trouble.” He chuckled at a memory, “But they survived, grew up to be fine people, gave me twelve grandkids, with another on the way.”

  “Congratulations,” she said, and wished she could take his advice.

  “Sorry about your mom.” Hal had serviced cars for everyone in the family, including Arlene. “Heard about her from Dee Linn.”

  Of course,

  “Give her my best.”

  “I will,” she promised before pushing her way out the front door.

  Gracie sat quietly in the backseat, absently petting Xena’s head and playing a game on her phone.

  Sarah opened the door and asked her daughter, “Gonna join me up here, or pretend I’m your chauffeur?”

  “Funny, Mom,” Gracie said, but switched seats to the front. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  “It’s okay, we all have bad days.”

  And they were piling up.

  Since arriving in Stewart’s Crossing, she couldn’t remember a good one.