by Marion Myles
She knew well the tidal wave of emotions he’d been riding ever since her arrival with the bracelet. After the initial shock, he’d kept himself in tightly controlled check, but no matter how flat and detached he came off, his eyes showed the toll of a decade’s worth of rage and grief. Mia had to remind herself it wasn’t her fault. She’d only done what she had to do both for herself and for Anita Mancini.
* * *
Roman stood by the yellow police tape, overseeing the technicians sweeping the area in the woods where Mia Reeves had brought them two days ago. He didn’t expect they’d find anything. Mostly because every cop instinct he had told him Ms. Reeves was full of shit.
What he couldn’t figure was why she was doing it. What could she possibly have to gain by coming in with this cockamamie story about finding Anita’s bracelet? The only thing that made sense was she was somehow involved in whatever had happened to his sister.
In his experience, guilt was the wild card. The random factor. Lord knew it didn’t seem to affect the hardened criminals, but for the average Joe who’d done something stupid, made a single, fatal mistake, it could nibble away at them until they broke.
If this Mia woman was trying to atone for her sins, it was admirable all right, but he’d still nail her ass to the wall and make her pay to the full extent of the law, for whatever part she’d had in ripping his family and his world to pieces.
He sighed heavily when he saw his mother stepping through the woods toward him. She was bound to find out sooner or later, but he’d been fervently hoping for later, like next month later, after he’d closed the file on this stupid woman and her false claims.
“You know you can’t go in there,” he said in a resigned sort of voice.
Molly Mancini, all four feet, eleven and three-quarter inches of her, stopped long enough to pin her son with a withering stare. “I’m a cop’s mama, and I’m not stupid. Of course, I can’t go tromping around contaminating a potential crime scene. But I can stand here and watch, can’t I?” She continued the final few steps and stood beside him. “You should have told me,” she said, poking him in the ribs.
“Why? So you and Dad could get upset over nothing. This is gonna turn out to be another false lead. And there’s been too many of them over the years. We can’t keep getting our hopes up because it kills us a little more each time.”
“I don’t care if we have a hundred more false leads. I want you to promise you won’t keep anything from your papa and me. Anita was our baby girl. Our last child. We love you and Lina with all our hearts. Having only the two of you would have been enough, but there was once a third. I’ll never have any peace until we find our missing girl. Now tell me why the police are looking here.”
It wasn’t strictly protocol, but Roman explained about Mia and the bracelet and how she supposedly came to find it.
“I know that bracelet,” she said, eyes lighting with memory. “Your sister never took it off, not even to shower. Luke gave it to her not a month before…well, before. She was so happy when she showed me. He’d bought it at Tiffany’s in the city. It came in one of those special turquoise boxes.” When Roman looked blank, she tsk-tsked. “Every girl knows a Tiffany box. And you should, too, my boy. Between you and Lina, I’m never going to have any grandchildren to spoil.”
“Mama, Anita could have lost it at the fair that year. Maybe some kid found it and kept it and, then, years later, lost it again. You need to be prepared. This is probably all there is to the story.” He gestured with his arm to the two men and three women combing the small area. “Anyway, they’re going to be here at least until end of day tomorrow. Then we’ll see.”
“And who is this Mia Reeves? I don’t know her.”
“She’s the lady who bought old man Jasper’s log house outside of town. Haven’t seen much of her since she moved in last fall. She’s quiet. Keeps to herself. Does something with crystals and sells them online. I’m working on tracing her. Seems to have moved around a lot. I’ve got feelers out, but so far she’s coming up clean.” He paused, rubbing his hand along his jaw. “I don’t like her. There’s something there. Something strange. Something she’s not telling us.”
“Hmm,” was all his mother said, but he knew that expression.
“Don’t you dare. You stay away from her. This is police business. And besides, you don’t know any of this anyway, remember?”
“You’re a good boy, Roman,” she said, standing on tiptoes and kissing his cheek. “You come over for dinner tonight after you’re done here. I’ll make meatloaf and mashed potatoes.”
“Maybe…I’ll see what time we finish up and let you know.”
“I’m going to stand here for a while longer. I won’t be in the way,” she said softly. “I need to be nearby…in case. You understand, right?”
“Sure, Mama. No problem. I’m here for a bit more myself before heading back to the station. I’ll let you know about tonight.”
He ducked under the tape and walked over to check in with Donna, one of the techs. Slowly, Roman perused the area, watching as they screened dirt and leaves and took pictures. When he next looked back, his mother was gone, and he let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.
Oh, yeah. Mia Reeves was going to answer for this.
Chapter Four
Just as Roman had predicted, he spent two and a half days standing in the woods and found exactly nothing. Nada. Zippo. Zilch.
He hadn’t wanted to admit it, especially to himself, but the whole time a flutter of hope had been swirling in his belly. When he finally walked away from the scene, there was a viscous throbbing behind his eyes. The hope in his stomach had given away to a grinding burn, and his mood was darker than the bottom of the ocean.
Upon arriving at the station, he immediately stomped down to the evidence room and signed out the bracelet. He wanted to look at it again. Back in his office, he unsealed the evidence bag and pulled the piece of jewelry free. The crime scene techs had already pulled prints, only Mia Reeves’s, of course, so it was cleared to be handled. He traced the edges of the connecting hearts and opened and closed the clasp. Like his mother, he remembered how thrilled Anita had been when showing off the bracelet as though it was some rare and precious treasure, all the while telling them Luke was The One.
At the time, and through his jaded twenty-two-year-old eyes, he’d thought her unbearably juvenile. Just wait till she went to college, saw all the guys, experienced life a little. He’d doubted she’d still be so ready to settle down with her small town high school sweetheart.
His mind roamed to Luke McNally, now a doctor practicing right here in Dalton, shoulder to shoulder with his father. Maybe in the end, he and Anita would have married exactly as she’d planned. Maybe it would have been her walking two little boys to school every morning instead of Mandy Simmons, another local girl who’d wasted little time swooping in and providing comfort to a shocked and grieving Luke only months after Anita’s disappearance.
Roman shook his head violently. Who the hell knew? Not him. Not anyone.
Picking up the bracelet again, he draped it over his palm, flipping it back and forth. The gesture made the little dangling heart dance. Tiffany’s, huh? It probably cost a pretty penny for a kid barely out of high school even if he was a doctor’s son.
Setting aside the jewelry, he swiveled to his computer and started a search. Yep, even ten years ago it would’ve set him back a chunk of change and then some. Roman didn’t get it. The bracelet looked like any other out there. It could have come from one of those stalls at the local fair for all he knew. It was the same thing with all that high-end shit. Slap a Gucci or a Chanel label on it and people would hand over their first-born without so much as a whimper.
He glanced at the bracelet again. With eyes narrowed, he picked it up and held it to the light. Where was the maker’s mark? He scanned each link and found nothing. Turning back to the computer, he did another search and discovered it was from a collection all branded with
the words Tiffany and Co. Even using his magnifying glass, he found nothing other than the engraving of Anita’s initials.
Interesting.
When the receptionist answered, he asked to be put through to Luke McNally.
“I’m sorry, Dr. McNally is with a patient. Is this a medical emergency?”
“No, not medical,” Roman said. “Have him call me when he’s free. It’s Detective Mancini. Tell him it’s important.”
He waited, tapping his fingers on the desk and turning over the possibilities in his mind. When the phone rang, he all but sprang at it. “Mancini,” he barked.
“Hey, Roman. It’s Luke. Martha on the desk said it was urgent.”
“Yeah. Thanks for getting back to me. I have a question about the bracelet you bought Anita the summer she disappeared. She told us it was from Tiffany’s. Is that right?” Luke’s intake of breath was audible, and then the silence hung heavy for several seconds. “Look, it doesn’t matter if it was a fake. I couldn’t care less, but something’s come up, and I need to know.”
“It was Tiffany’s all right,” Luke finally said. “I saved like a madman to buy it. My sister came with me to help pick it out.”
“Okay. Good to know. Thanks, man.”
“Wait. Why are you asking? Have you found something?” When Roman said nothing, Luke’s voice hardened. “I have a right to know. She was my whole life back then. All I cared about was her and getting into med school. You’d better tell me what’s going on.”
Roman sighed. “Nothing’s going on. Next to nothing, in fact. I swear to you.”
Replacing the receiver, Roman leaned back in his chair and rubbed a hand along his jaw. So, little Ms. Reeves wasn’t as smart as she thought. That Tiffany’s slip was a big one. And now he had the perfect excuse to bring her back to the station and turn up the heat.
* * *
Mia was sweating which was completely stupid. For once in her life, she hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Thin trickles of moisture rolled down from under her arms, and she fought an incredible urge to dab at her damp hairline. She was back in the interrogation room, and Detectives Latterly and Mancini had been hammering away at her for close to an hour.
“We know it’s not Anita’s bracelet,” Detective Mancini said, as he’d been saying over and over again throughout the questioning. “We know you know more than you’re telling us. We’re giving you this chance to come clean. Right now. It’s a one-time offer. If you don’t tell and we find out later you purposely mislead us or held anything back, we’ll charge you with PC Section one four eight point five. What is that you ask? Well, that, my lovely lying witness, is a misdemeanor for making a false statement to a police officer. We’re talking a thousand dollar fine and up to six months in jail. Could be, depending on the judge, we’ll get the green light on an obstruction charge as well. That’ll be more fines. More time in a cage.”
Mia swallowed and looked away. She wasn’t going to tell them what they wanted no matter what they said. Besides, there was absolutely no way to prove otherwise.
“You can threaten me all you want,” she said. “All I know is I found the bracelet and I thought it might be something to do with Anita Mancini’s disappearance. I can’t tell you anything else.”
“I’ve been looking into you, Mia Reeves. It all seems kosher on the surface,” Detective Mancini said.
“Yeah,” Detective Latterly added. “No trouble. No police record. Parents died in a car crash when you were twenty-three. Good grades in college. Yada Yada Yada.”
“But seeing as we both have suspicious minds,” Detective Mancini continued,” we couldn’t help noticing there was a pretty big space of time where nothing much happened. No address. No phone records. No employment record. No credit card purchases. It was like you dropped off the face of the earth. Poof. Then five years ago, it’s whammo, and you’re back. Getting yourself a VISA card. Taking driver’s tests. Buying a cell phone and a car. Now this house in Dalton. All with cash. It’s…curious…you might say.”
“I was traveling. Backpacking around Europe. I took jobs under the table here and there to make ends meet. And then I got into making jewelry, and it took off from there. It’s not a crime to see the world,” she said, forcing herself to meet their accusing eyes.
Detective Mancini smiled wide causing her stomach to bottom out. “Right, jewelry. I’m so glad you brought that up because I almost forgot. See, me and my partner here, we were batting around some ideas about this bracelet when it occurred to us…wait, I should really let him tell this part. Go ahead, Detective Latterly. Tell Ms. Reeves what we were thinking this morning.”
Detective Latterly chuckled. “He’s right. I do love telling this part. So, it occurred to us what with your business and all, you’d have the materials and equipment right on hand to make this bracelet yourself, wouldn’t you?”
Detective Mancini leaned forward in his chair and placed both palms on the top of the metal table until he was eye to eye with Mia. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you come in with this fake story? What the hell do you know about my sister’s disappearance?”
The walls were closing in. If they kept poking around in her past, there was a remote chance they might find something. She’d just gone and handed Detective Mancini all the motivation in the world to do exactly that.
Her plan had seemed foolproof when she’d come up with the idea last weekend. Now, though, she was well and truly screwed. Closing her eyes, she exhaled long and slow, like a diver preparing to go under.
“I had a vision. I saw Anita being dragged into those woods where she was raped and strangled.” She blinked once before looking straight back into Detective Mancini’s bitter chocolate eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said after a pause.
Chapter Five
Her situation went downhill from there. Mia sensed that neither detective believed her story for even a single second. They pounded and pounded at her, determined to get at whatever truth they thought she knew.
It was no use. Her visions were unpredictable at best. She couldn’t always see everything in the scene; unfortunately for her, she couldn’t give them so much as a basic outline of the attacker other than the fact he was taller than Anita. Based on the skin tone of his hands and arms, the man was probably white.
“She knew him,” Mia told Detective Mancini. “I could feel that much. And he called her Anita at one point when he was on top of her during the…well, during the attack.”
“How can you be so sure she was dead?” he pressed.
“Because…It’s hard to explain, but I felt her leave. One minute she was there, next the energy was gone, wrenched away like a leaf in a hurricane.”
“She could’ve been unconscious,” Detective Latterly said, his eyes flicking to his partner in sympathy.
Mia shook her head. “I wish I could say yes, but I know what I know. She was dead. I’m sorry. So sorry,” she said again to Detective Mancini.
He scowled at her. “You actually want me to buy into the fact you know without a shadow of a doubt that my sister died, but you can’t tell me what happened to her? Did the guy run away and leave her in the woods? Bury her? What the hell happened?” His voice rose to a shout and Mia shrank back when he slammed his fist down on the table in front of her. “This is bullshit like everything else about you. You’d better start packing your bags, lady because you’re done in this town. I don’t care if I lose my badge. I’m going to hound you day and night until your life is a living hell.”
“Roman, chill, man,” Detective Latterly said in an undertone while glancing meaningfully at the digital device recording the interview.
Mia was kept in a holding cell for the three hours it took to procure the loan of a sketch artist and have him travel in from a neighboring police station. Then back to the interrogation room she went for another tortuous hour of questions on face shape, bone structure, skin tone, and a million other details she couldn’t answer because she’d never seen the face of the man i
n her vision.
“It might as well be a fucking cartoon character.” Roman swore and threw the sketch down on the desk. He paced his office. Kevin wisely held his tongue. “We’re going to have to let her go, aren’t we?” he finally said, sinking into his chair and pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.
“Yeah, we are,” Kevin said. “But that doesn’t mean this is the end of it. We’ll keep pushing on her and see what we can dig up. She has to have some connection to either Anita or the killer. We’re going to figure this out one way or another.” He got to his feet and clapped a hand on Roman’s shoulder. “It’s time to call it a day. You go home. Hit the crap out of your punching bag and have a beer. Tomorrow we’ll make a plan.”
“Yeah. Maybe I will. Thanks, man.”
But Roman didn’t go home. He got in his car and drove out to old man Jasper’s house. Weird that Mia would buy a place this remote and isolated. Hardly ideal for her fortune telling and incense and crystal crap. Didn’t her kind of people usually set up shop on the main drag of the town and put out one of those signs on the sidewalk to snag any potentially weak-minded passerby into coming in and plunking down their cash?
As soon as he turned onto her driveway, he jammed the car into park and let it idle. He wanted to hurt her so badly the blood pounded in his ears like a drum beat, urging him to give life to his fantasy. But he was a cop, dammit. And more, he liked to think he was a decent human being. Decent people didn’t show up at people’s houses and mess them up.
He drummed fingers on the steering wheel. It didn’t hurt to talk to her again, did it? A follow-up conversation to see if she’d thought of anything else. Cops did that all the time. It was part of the job. Besides, it wasn’t likely she’d report him. Not with the threat of misdemeanor charges hanging over her head.
