3 Buried Leads

by Amanda M. Lee

  “Didn’t he think it was weird that she didn’t call and tell him that herself?” If I’m fifteen minutes late, Fish blows a gasket. I can’t imagine just blowing off a week of work.

  “Apparently, she had a great deal of autonomy at work – so it wasn’t an unusual thing,” Tony answered simply.

  “Are there any signs of a struggle in the house?”

  Tony frowned as he regarded me. “This is just a missing persons case right now, Avery.”

  “I was just asking.” That was a pretty snippy answer for a standard question.

  “Brian Frank is going to be coming out in a minute to make a statement to all of you,” Tony said. “I would hope you would treat him as a man who is terrified about his missing wife and not a suspect.” Tony’s gaze was fixed on me.

  “Of course,” Ariel Cook said. “We don’t want to add on to the pain he is obviously feeling. This must be terrible for him.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from rolling my eyes. I noticed the two female weekly reporters were being unusually silent. They probably had no idea what was going on, I figured. They were just happy to be here – and getting a paycheck. Weeklies are generally the learning ground for dailies and dabblers. The lifers are true journalists at heart – but they’re rare.

  The front door of the house opened and I saw a small man – 5’8” at best – exit. He was small in stature and, as he grew closer, I was surprised at just how nondescript he really was. He had mousy brown hair, which was cropped close to his head, and curled in weird places. His green eyes were bright and red-rimmed. He’d obviously been crying.

  “Hi,” he greeted everyone in a low voice. He seemed timid. He didn’t look like a murderer. Of course, very few murderers actually looked like they were capable of the deed.

  “Brian wants to make a statement,” Tony stressed pointedly. “He’ll answer a few questions, but let’s try not to overload him, shall we?” Tony was looking directly at me again.

  “My wife is a wonderful person,” Brian Frank started. “She’s a great wife and a great mother. I just want her back. . . “ He broke off as he fought off tears, choking on his own wrenching sob. He was either a really good actor, or he was really struggling with this.

  “Was it unusual for her not to call for a week?”

  Tony shot me a glare, but Brian didn’t seem to notice. “Yes. I thought she was still mad at me, though. I just thought we would talk about things when she got back. She never came back, though.”

  “What did you fight about?”

  “Just normal stuff,” Brian answered. “Married people argue. I didn’t think it was a big argument. I just wanted her to take fewer business trips and spend more time at home. I missed her.”

  Ariel Cook clucked sympathetically. “I’m sure she understood that.”

  “Has there ever been any domestic violence in the house?”

  Brian looked up at me in surprise. His eyes nearly bugged out of his head. Now that I mention it, his eyes always looked like they were straining in his sockets. It was kind of weird.

  “We’ve been married for seven years,” Brian answered. “I loved my wife. I love my wife. I would never hurt her. I would never lay a hand on her.”

  “I have to ask these questions,” I said honestly. “People are going to be wondering. We want people to be on the lookout for your wife. To do that, we have to convince them that you didn’t do anything to her and you’re not wasting our time.”

  Brian swallowed hard, wiping a stray tear from his face. “I know. You have a job to do. I also know that I can’t find my wife without help. What else do you want to know?”

  The press conference went on for another fifteen minutes. Most of it was just a rehash of how much Brian loved his wife. How much his children – Carrie and Mike – needed their mother. “I’m desperate for my wife to come home.”

  After everyone had exhausted their supply of questions, Brian handed out a card with his cell phone number on it. “Call me any time,” he said. “I need to keep my wife’s name in the news.”

  The Channel 2 woman maneuvered Brian over to an isolated part of the yard to do a private interview at this point and the two weekly reporters were heading towards their cars to leave.

  I looked down at the photograph of Sarah that had been handed out a few minutes before. A small woman, with curly brown hair and bright green eyes stared back at me. She had a warm smile, I thought.

  “What do you really think?” I asked Tony.

  He feigned surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t play coy,” I admonished him. “What do you think? Is she dead? Did he kill her?”

  “We have nothing that points to that,” Tony said stiffly.

  “It’s not normal to call a press conference at the victim’s home,” I pointed out the obvious.

  “We wanted Mr. Frank to be as comfortable as possible,” Tony replied. He was hiding something. I couldn’t figure out what, though. Did they actually suspect Brian Frank, or was this just a fishing expedition?

  “What’s Jake say about all of this?” I asked finally.

  Tony fixed his dark eyes on me. “You’ll have to ask him that.”

  That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. At least I hoped.

  Three

  After leaving the Frank house in Romeo, I took the same route back to Mount Clemens that I initially used to traverse to the boonies. I stopped at one of the roadside stands and bought fresh corn and Brussels sprouts – and chatted with the woman running the stand.

  When she found out where I worked, she seemed unusually excited. “That sounds like a cool job.”

  That’s what everyone says. Saying the job didn’t have its moments would be a misnomer. It can be exciting. Sitting through city council and water board meetings, though, is the actual definition of boring. Still, you don’t want to tell random people that. They think you’re just being snarky. Of course, I idle at snarky.

  “It’s okay,” I said noncommittally.

  “Why are you out here?” The woman looked around conspiratorially. “Are you busting a meth ring – like I read about that woman doing a month ago?”

  “No,” I shook my head vehemently, praying silently that she wouldn’t put two-and-two together. I had to head her off before she had the chance to think about it too much. “There’s a woman missing in Romeo.”

  The woman looked surprised. “Really? Who?”

  “Her name is Sarah Frank,” I said. “She lives out in Romeo.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?”

  I shrugged. “She’s just missing right now.”

  “I bet it’s human trafficking.”

  Human trafficking? People will believe anything that they see on television. It’s not like human trafficking isn’t a real thing – it’s just not an everyday practice in Macomb County.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “She might have just taken off, for all we know.”

  “Is she married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her husband probably killed her.” The woman was matter-of-fact. I couldn’t help but smile to myself at how quickly she had flipped her conjecture on what happened, though.

  “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” I admonished her. What? Just because I was thinking the same thing, that didn’t mean that I was going to put it in print.

  The woman pursed her lips at me. I could tell she didn’t like my advice.

  “I mean, I would have bet that Elizabeth Smart’s parents did something to her – and I would have been wrong,” I offered. “The same with Jon Benet-Ramsey’s family.”

  The woman actually nodded at my statement. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s just usually the husband, more often than not.”

  She had a point.

  I took my fresh corn and Brussels sprouts and went back to the office. I took the vegetables into the office with me. I doubted being left in a hot car would hurt them, but I wasn’t taking any chances. There’s nothing worse than
the smell of rotten fruit and vegetables, though.

  As I made my way to my desk, I saw my friend Marvin Potts holding court in the center aisle of cubicles. Marvin had only been back on the job two weeks. He had been injured when the house of the woman he had been seeing blew up about a month ago. He was still milking the injuries he had sustained in the incident for all they were worth. A consummate hypochondriac, I had worried about the day when Marvin would actually get a real ailment. I had been right to worry.

  “I still have a slight ringing in my ears,” he was telling the court reporter. “The doctor says it may never go away. Other people that have had this problem slowly go insane.”

  “You’re already insane,” I pointed out, dropping the bag of vegetables on my desk and regarding him seriously for a second. “That’s going to be a pretty short trip for you, isn’t it?”

  Potts smiled when he saw me. I was glad he wasn’t holding me responsible for the explosion. It really hadn’t been my fault – no, honestly – he just has bleeding tragic taste in women.

  “So, is that woman missing or dead?” The court reporter – Jim Tolliver -- asked the question. I figured he was doing it for professional reasons more than anything else. It’s not like we didn’t get along. In fact, he was one of the few people in the room that didn’t make me want to deafen myself with Q-tips on a regular basis, but we didn’t sit around and gossip like school girls every day either.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “If I had to guess, she’s probably dead. She doesn’t seem like the type of person who would just take off and abandon her kids. Of course, if I had kids, I’d probably want to abandon them, too.”

  “Did the husband do it?” Marvin was shuffling from one foot to the other. He was usually a fidgety individual, but his constant motion was a little distracting.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “He seems broken up about it. He could be acting, though. He did wait a week to report her missing.”

  Marvin was still shifting back and forth. “What’s the deal? Why are you so nervous?”

  “I’m not nervous,” he said.

  “Then why are you doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “That shuffling thing.”

  “I’m just in a good mood. Can’t I be in a good mood?”

  “Sure,” I said hesitantly. “I’ve known you long enough to know that something else is going on, though, and you’re dying to tell me. You might as well just get it out of the way.”

  Marvin scowled at me. “You think you know everything.”

  “I do.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “Fine.” I pulled my chair out and made a move to sit at my desk. Once I started writing, I wasn’t going to be in the mood to listen to whatever bit of gossip Marvin wanted to spill – and he knew that.”

  “I met someone,” he blurted out.

  Oh, great. Marvin’s love interests were getting progressively worse. If they weren’t married and trying to get him to do homosexual threesomes they were Oxy addicts that had their houses blown up in drug busts gone wrong. I was almost terrified to hear about this new woman. “Where did you meet her?”

  “She’s a bartender at the Roost.”

  The Roost was a dive bar in Warren that Marvin frequented on a regular basis. The waitresses were all young, and scantily clad. I had been there a few times with him. I hadn’t seen a waitress over the age of twenty-five. Since Marvin was fifty, the age discrepancy was starting to get noticeable. He kept getting older – and his love interests kept staying the same age. Pretty soon he was going to be Hugh Hefner – without the mansion, magazine and money.

  “Has she graduated from high school yet?”

  “Don’t be judgmental,” Marvin admonished me. He hated when I picked on the women he was dating – and yet he kept telling me about them. I think he got a perverse thrill out of me bad-mouthing them – I have no idea why.

  “So, have you had sex with her yet?”

  Marvin gave me a withering look. “She’s a lady,” he scoffed. “She doesn’t have sex on the first date.”

  “Have you had a date with her?” That surprised me. His dates usually ended up as drunken fondling sessions in the backseat of his Pontiac.

  “No, but I’ve asked her out and she’s agreed.”

  Well, that was actually progress. “Where are you taking her?”

  “We’re going dancing at the Boat Basin in the Shores,” Marvin said proudly.

  I grimaced. I had seen Marvin dance. He had the rhythm of a deaf octogenarian. A deaf white octogenarian at that. “Well, that will be fun.” I didn’t want to rain on his parade. Once she saw him dance, I figured it would be all over anyway.

  “I think she could be the one,” Marvin said dreamily.

  “The one what?”

  “The one I’ll marry and settle down and have kids with.”

  I blew out a sigh. Marvin met “the one” every couple of months. Usually those relationships ended up with some sort of police involvement. Still, I wasn’t in the mood to get in a full blown fight with him. “Well, I hope it works out for you.”

  “Me, too,” Marvin said happily.

  I was happy to see that the perpetual whiner down the aisle had heard Marvin’s pronouncement and was now grilling him on his upcoming happily ever after. Kim Hawk was one of those people that had a life-changing drama every day – whether it was legitimate (like a family member getting in a horrific accident) or not (her son dropping the F-bomb on his teacher).

  I took advantage of Marvin’s preoccupation with Kim and started to write my story. It really wasn’t all that difficult. There wasn’t a lot of extemporaneous information – so it was a straight-forward mystery at this point. I took the extra time to look up how many people had gone missing in the county last year, padding the story so it was more in-depth than it probably had to be. I was still trying to get off Fish’s shit list.

  When I was done, I shipped the story to the news queue and got back up from my desk. Marvin had just finished extolling the virtues of his new lady love and was walking back down the aisle.

  He stopped at my desk long enough to pick up the press release and peruse the photos of the missing woman. “She’s pretty,” he said.

  “Yeah, she looks nice,” I said.

  Marvin read through the press release in its entirety. He’s a newshound. He actually sleeps with a police scanner next to his bed. He loves crime and crime stories. I could tell he was hoping this would turn into something big. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to be disappointed. Unfortunately, a white mother of means disappearing from a ritzy suburb had Nancy Grace written all over it.

  “Her husband’s name is Brian Frank?”

  “Yeah.” I had no idea where he was going with this.

  “He did it,” Marvin said firmly.

  “How do you know that?” I totally agree, by the way.

  “He has two first names.”

  Even for Marvin, that was some circular thinking. “What do you mean?”

  “His name is Brian Frank. Never trust anyone with two first names. They’re always crazy. That’s a proven fact. Everyone knows it.”

  Well, you couldn’t argue with that.

  Four

  After I finished my story, I stopped by Fish’s desk to let him know that it had been filed. My desperation to ease his dislike of me was starting to get a little pathetic. I recognized it – and yet that just made me more determined to get off his list. I was much happier when he was mad at my co-workers. I’m selfish like that; I can admit it.

  Fish read the story and said it was “fine.” I knew it wasn’t exactly going to win any awards, but a little gushing wouldn’t have hurt.

  Instead, I decided it was time to call it a day. I didn’t want to say anything that would come back to haunt me. That’s a usual occurrence for me. I know when to shut my mouth, but I don’t have the ability in a lot of situations. I decided to just remove myself from temptation.
I had to be downtown anyway. I had a bridal fitting.

  I’m not the one getting married, mind you. My best friend Carly had been involved in the marriage preparations of the century for the past six months. That meant less time for me – and more time for general bitching. I missed just being able to laze around on the couch and badmouth people with her – but I had more time for video games and movies without her petulant pouting about “wasting my time.” It was a trade off. Of course, my mom was making up the slack on Facebook. I had a feeling it was a conspiracy.

  Anyway, as her maid of honor, I was due for my second fitting on my bridesmaid dress. Usually, this is something I would essentially lie, cheat and steal to get out of. Carly and I had been best friends since college, though, and I knew there was no getting out of this. She knew all my tricks, anyway. Plus, I was genuinely happy for her. I loved her fiancé, Kyle, like he was my own brother. He was a good guy – and she’d made a good choice.

  The dress, though, was another story. It was a lilac sheath that had very little give. I don’t like heels – unless they’re on a pair of really cute boots – but I didn’t think Carly would allow me to wear my new cowboy boots to her wedding. When Carly tried to sell me on the dress, she kept saying it was something I could wear for years. Brides always say that – and it’s never true. The only place I could see wearing this dress again was in my nightmares.

  Carly told me the only reason I didn’t like the dress was because it wasn’t fitted properly yet. “It’s just a sample sheath,” she admonished me. “You’ll like it when they take it in.”

  I doubted that, but I knew that letting her know how much I hated the dress would only hurt her. And, despite all evidence to the contrary at times, I don’t go out of my way to hurt people.

  I drove to downtown Mount Clemens, casting a wary glance at the pawnshop on the corner. I hadn’t seen the owner, Eliot Kane, in weeks – not since he’d been injured in an attempt to save Lexie and me from a crazed stripper with a gun. The ensuing explosion had put him in the hospital. Before the incident, we had been steadily dancing around one another and flirting. Since then? Nothing. I found that I actually missed him.