Sharp Absence (Sharp Investigations Book 1)

by Kate Anders

  “Is that really important?” I ask, feeling myself start to deflate now that this guy has made himself comfortable in his chair.

  “It is if you want this conversation to continue.”

  “I’ve known him for years.”

  The silence that follows is deafening. He looks like he is frozen, like someone just pushed pause, as he stares me down, waiting for me to elaborate. I can’t help but squirm under the pressure.

  “I used to date his son,” I finally tell him.

  “Ah.” He takes another sip of his liquor. He’s quiet for a while after that, like he’s working through what he wants to do next. The adrenaline from our banter starts to wind down and suddenly I’m feeling every bit of the exhaustion of the last few days all at once. I take a chance that this is going to move forward and I sit down in the leather chair in front of his desk. “Alright then,” he says.

  “Alright?” I ask with closely guarded hope laced in my voice.

  “Alright, tell me why you are here, but maybe start with who you are first,” he says.

  “Right, okay, I’m MacKenzie Sharpe, but everyone calls me Kenzie,” I tell him as I lean forward with my hand extending toward him.

  This time, he doesn’t hesitate. He reaches out and takes my hand in his. I can feel the calluses on his fingers and his hand is a lot warmer than mine, but it’s a gentle handshake, something I wasn’t expecting. I expected it to be like everything else about him: abrasive and quick.

  “Will Anderson,” he tells me, even though I have already figured that much out. “So what brings you here to my office after hours? Nothing good, I take it.”

  “No. Not exactly. I need your help finding my best friend.”

  He leans back in his chair again.

  “She went missing a few days ago, I’ve talked to everyone I can think of, I’ve been to the police on campus and the police in town and I’m out of options.”

  “Nothing like being a last resort,” he jokes, breaking a little bit of the tension between us. “Alright, start from the beginning,” he says as he once again props his feet up on his desk.

  So I take him through the entire story, how everything was normal, and then poof she vanished like she was never there at all. I tell him all about the locket, how this mysterious uncle showed up out of nowhere to withdraw her from school and why the whole thing rings false. I leave nothing out. And even though he is sipping on liquor and leaning back with his feet up, he is fully engaged in listening to my story. Asking questions when he wants more details, confirming key facts; basically he’s doing everything I wanted him to do since the moment I walked through the door.

  When I finally finish my story, I feel like I just went five rounds in a prizefight. I’ve told this story what feels like a million times by now, but no matter how many times I tell it, it never seems like I get anywhere with it.

  Time feels like it slows down, and I can hear the sounds of the heater kicking on in the office while I wait for Will to say anything about what he just heard. The fear of being told once more that there is nothing anyone can do for me is suffocating. He just sits there looking at me while he swirls the remaining half an inch of liquid in his glass.

  I break when I can’t stand waiting any longer and ask, “So what do you think, can you help?”

  “I don’t really do these kinds of cases anymore.”

  “But you did before?” I ask.

  He looks away before answering, “Yeah.”

  “Okay… look, I’ll do whatever I need to do to get you to sign on for this. I know this probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but this case, Clara, she means everything to me. I would never be able to live with myself if I didn’t see this through. I know everyone just thinks that she just left, but I know her, I know her better than I know myself some days, and there is no way she would just leave.”

  Will raises his eyebrow at my declaration.

  “And even if she did leave on her own, and everyone is right, I have to at least know that wherever she is, she is okay. She would do it for me.”

  “Well, I can see where the police had their issues, and frankly, I’m surprised Joe went as far as he did, flagging everything the way he did. There really just isn’t enough manpower these days to really work missing persons cases when there are so many other immediate crimes that need to be dealt with. You’re lucky that he got involved enough to go that far,” he tells me. I know what he’s saying is right.

  “But you’re not the police.”

  “Not anymore.” He sighs, long and hard. “Look, I agree, something smells fishy. And assuming everything you told me is correct and your friends and her teacher back up everything you told me tonight, then yeah, I can understand why you are coming to me. Can’t say I would do anything different in your place.”

  “But…” I say, waiting for the other shoe to drop, this is where everyone else has said no in the past.

  “But nothing, but you need to be prepared. These kinds of cases often don’t come with anything but disappointment. Best-case scenario your best friend ghosted you and doesn’t want you in her life and you’re out cash, time, and heartache. Worst case, well, worst case can look pretty bad. You need to start preparing yourself for a scenario that is going to be painful, time consuming, and depending on how long this takes could end up costing you a whole lot of money.”

  “How much money are we talking about?” I ask.

  “Simple searches like running background only cost a couple hundred, but what you are talking about borders on a police investigation. For this kind of thing, I charge a three-thousand-dollar retainer fee before I even get started working the case, and from there it’s an hourly rate.”

  “Three grand? Three grand and you’ll be on the case?”

  “Yeah.” He leans forward in his chair, puts his feet on the ground, and looks me dead in the eye. “I need you to really understand. I said I don’t do these kinds of cases anymore for a reason. You seem like a nice girl, and I understand why you are doing this, but you really need to start preparing yourself. In my experience, there is not going to be a happy ending, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

  In all this time, no one has really put it like this before. No one has been this blunt. And if I am being honest with myself, I haven’t really thought this through. Every time I walk back into the apartment, I expect to see her in the kitchen cooking or sitting at her desk working on some math problem I would never understand. I’ve been on this mission for the past couple days, and I never even considered what it would look like when it was over. Did I really just think everything was going to be hearts and flowers? That she was going to pop up and tell me everything was a misunderstanding but she was home now? The whole uncle thing had hit me as sinister from the second I heard about him. It left a pit of dread in my stomach. But I never let myself think about what sinister meant. Where she is now. If she is even alive. What she is going through or went through.

  Reality hits me like a ton of bricks. My vision starts to lose focus, and it’s not until I feel the stinging in my eyes that I realize my eyes are starting to build up with unshed tears. As I blink rapidly to try and clear my vision, I see Will just looking at me. Patiently waiting for my reply, letting me process without any judgment or rush.

  I’m afraid. The truth I am so desperate to find is scary. But I have to know, and I think I really need someone like Will who will tell me how it really is without trying to spare my feelings. He’s the first one to make me truly confront what everyone was probably thinking but not saying.

  “I have to know. Whatever it ends up being, I have to know. If there is a chance she needs me, then I want to be there, and right now I’m the only one who even cares, so yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Alright then. I take cash or check, but won’t start work until the check clears. Either one works for me.”

  “I won’t be able to do anything until tomorrow, but I can get it to you as soon as possible. It may take some time,”
I admit to him.

  He reaches across his desk and grabs a piece of paper and a pen before jotting down some information for me.

  “Here’s my cell phone number, text or call first, I’m not always in the office. Tomorrow morning I’ll touch base with Detective Fitzpatrick and see if he can send over whatever information he has, that way I don’t need to waste time repeating any steps they have already done for us.”

  “Okay.” I nod almost absentmindedly, feeling like I am in some kind of daze with the realizations of this night.

  “Until then, keep your eyes peeled. Keep talking to people, you never know what you are going to stumble on. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that your instincts aren’t wrong, so keep following them, they have gotten you this far. Sometimes following your gut is all you have,” he tells me, bringing me an odd sense of reassurance.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “LULLABY” BY SHAWN MULLINS

  The morning brings a new goal. Cash. Cold hard cash. Last night when he said it was going to cost three grand to start the process of looking for Clara, I didn’t bat an eyelash. No amount of money would be too much to get Clara back. Or at least that’s what my heart was telling me.

  My wallet, on the other hand, was singing a different tune. The song of a scholarship student without a part-time job. I have enough money in my bank account from this semester’s disbursement to cover my rent and a couple of meals beyond what I was getting for free off my meal plan, but disposable income was really as mythical as a unicorn. Where did I really think I was going to be able to come up with that kind of cash?

  If I took the rest of the rent money for this semester, I would have almost two thousand. Granted, that could mean I end up homeless next month, but that’s tomorrow’s problem. How does a person just come up with a thousand bucks? I don’t exactly have family I can turn to for money, my mom is too busy numbing her pain with pills and my dad is following right behind with alcohol. There is no way they have disposable income for me to borrow.

  It’s Friday morning and instead of getting ready to go to my last classes of the week, I am sitting here, coming to the realization that it’s been an entire school week since I saw Clara. It’s about to be my first weekend without her. I start thinking about all the ways people get money. Getting a job and waiting for a paycheck is going to take way too long. Selling plasma is only going to get me a fraction of what I need to get Will to take the case. I need something bigger, something that is actually going to bring me a decent amount of cash in a short amount of time, preferably in just a few hours. I’m pretty sure, barring committing some kind of felony, there is no way I am going to make a thousand dollars appear as if from nowhere.

  My exhaustion finally caught up to me last night, and I finally got a few hours of sleep. It’s probably the only reason why I am even mildly thinking clearly enough to realize I have no way of getting cash. Even still, my mind is running through not just the money problem but also the events of the past week. With a clearer head, maybe I will notice something I didn’t before.

  “Fuck it,” I say out loud. I jump out of bed and head into the living room, finally having a plan. My feet eat up the distance between my room and the printer we keep in the living room. I grab a stack of computer paper out of the printer and head to the wall with the least amount of decorations on it. It takes only moments for me to empty the wall of photographs before I start tacking up the paper to the wall.

  “That’s right, Kenz, you’re going full crazy, like every deranged character in a crime movie,” I tell myself.

  And with that, I start building my timeline. I start it on Sunday, our last meal out of the apartment. I write out the time, location, and all the bullet points of the conversation. I include notes on what our moods were like and our encounter with Chanel, I don’t want to leave anything out. I repeat this process for Monday, which has a lot more information and a lot more questions. I put up the email with a note to get a hold of it. What time was it sent? Did it sound like Clara? I’m sure I would recognize her speech patterns in an email, so maybe it’s a forgery. I put notes up about the voice mail and everything else I remember about that day, including the time I found the locket in my room.

  I step back and look at my progress. Should I put the information I found out from the police on the timeline when I found it out or when it happened? Should I put information about the “uncle” under the conversation with campus police, or when campus police reported that he was actually on campus? Ultimately, I decide to do a combination of both. All information gets listed under when it actually happened, as well as when the information was provided to me and by who. Or at least that’s the plan I make in my head.

  By the time I lay everything out on my walls and stand back to observe my work, I can’t help but realize I was right earlier. I’ve lost my fucking mind. If someone were to walk into the apartment right now, they would think I was batshit crazy. This is movie-level insanity. But it’s not like I have any other options right now. As of right now, my brain is completely fried. I have nothing left. As much as I want to keep going, as much as I want to keep pushing myself, I know the only way I am going to be able to do that is to start taking care of myself.

  It’s time to start looking at this like a marathon and not a sprint. I need food and a shower, I need to feel like a human being again and not a zombie. I let my head drop in front of me, letting the feelings of defeat wash over me for just a few minutes before I get to work at taking care of myself.

  My wet hair is still dripping on my shoulders, leaving wet spots on my T-shirt as I sit on the couch munching on my sandwich and bag of chips. Not exactly the most nutritious meal I’ve ever eaten in my life, but at this point, food is food.

  I threw caution to the wind and moved our couch to face the wall of clues as I’ve started to call it in my head. So now I’m sitting here eating my sandwich and staring at this insane wall, trying to figure out what I am going to do next. The words up on the wall are all starting to blend together I have been staring at it so long.

  A lot of the questions I have are going to need the help of other people. I could talk to the person at the registrar’s office. I could try and get my hands on the camera footage, but Will’s got a better chance at that than I do. I could listen to my voice mail for the hundredth time, but I can’t imagine what that is going to give me that I don’t already have up on the Wall of Crazy.

  “There has to be something,” I murmur to myself as I shovel more chips in my mouth. My eyes finally find purchase on the email. Maybe there is something I can do with it. Obviously according to the school, Clara sent a message announcing her departure, not just sending some random guy to turn in her forms. I really want to see what it says. I can’t even begin to count the number of emails I have received from Clara over the last four years. There is no way someone would be able to fake one from her without me knowing.

  I hope.

  Who knows when I am going to get the money to pay Will, so right now the only person moving things along is me. I can only rely on myself. So if I want Clara’s email, I’m going to have to get it myself. I wipe the Cheeto dust off my fingers and then grab my laptop and start to get to work.

  I’ve heard a million girls talk about how they “hacked” into their boyfriends’ social media, when really they just guessed the passwords. I’m beyond confident that I can do the same thing with Clara’s passwords. I pull up the university mail site and log out of my account, type in Clara’s information, and think long and hard about what she would make her password.

  It’s probably complex.

  She’s a computer science major, for crying out loud, she probably follows all the rules. There are probably special characters and numbers, and chances are she changes the password every couple of weeks just to be on the safe side. So maybe guessing it isn’t going to be the right track to go on.

  I slide my finger over the trackpad, moving the cursor to the button labeled “forgot your password.�
� This is where I hit pay dirt. It’s challenge questions.

  I was made for this. I feel like Ken Jennings going into a round of Jeopardy. Confident.

  Question One: What is your paternal grandmother’s first name?

  “Yes, I know this one!” I shout. I type out Alice into the box and click the submit button. The half a second for the screen to reload feels like it goes on forever.

  The second question appears on the screen in front of me.

  “Yes!” I pump my fist in the air.

  Question Two: Name of the street you lived on in fourth grade?

  “Easy peasy lemon squeezy,” I mutter under my breath as I type out Cloverfield Dr. I hesitate for just a second. I know I have the street name right, but would she have used the abbreviation or would she have written the whole thing out. I use the abbreviation, but I’m lazy, Clara has always been super precise. She would probably write the whole thing out. So I use my delete key and change the answer to Cloverfield Drive.

  I hold my breath as I hover the little arrow over the submit button before clicking it.

  Once more, the next question pops up.

  “Yes! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I chant while I wiggle around on the couch in a makeshift victory dance.

  “One more time for question three,” I tell myself, this is the last thing I need to do.

  Question Three: What is the name of your childhood stuffed animal?

  As soon as I finish reading the last question, my feet start stomping on the floor. I have it. No chance of failure now, I’m going to have access in a matter of seconds.

  “Miss Piggy,” I say out loud as I type it out. I’m completely confident about this because I have a stuffed animal that I brought with me to college and showed Clara and she told me all about hers that she lost in the house fire, and how much she wished she had been able to bring Miss Piggy with her to college. I told her that day that I would share mine with her whenever she needed it.