The Woman Who Wasn't There

by Marie Ferrarella

  She looked around once more. The motel room looked no better in the late-afternoon light than it had in the predawn hours. An oppressive feeling of hopelessness seemed woven in with the stains and the grime. That and an almost disabling loneliness.

  “I thought maybe he had her address here or a phone number.” It was her intention to exhaust the regular avenues of search before resorting to the Internet.

  Tying up those loose ends wasn’t exactly within the probation department’s jurisdiction, but he liked the way the woman thought. “Do you know what her mother’s name is?” he asked.

  Delene shook her head. “Clyde never married her so it’s not on our records. I wouldn’t have known about the girl at all except during one of the department’s impromptu visits, I found Clyde sitting by the window, holding her picture. There were tears in his eyes. He told me she was four, maybe five. He wasn’t too good with dates.”

  Troy had his own thoughts about the origin of those tears. Probably Clyde realized that he didn’t have enough money to score, he thought. “Well, I guess he wasn’t ready to take on the dad from The Brady Bunch for the title of Father of the Year.”

  She moved her shoulders in a half-dismissive shrug. “I suppose Clyde did the best he could, given how weak he was.” This time she did look down at the chalk outline. “At least he tried.”

  What was she really doing here? Troy wondered. He caught himself wondering other things about her, as well. Things if he asked, he was confident he’d only get a flippant response to. He decided that once he was off-duty, he was going to do a little homework. See just what he could find out about Agent Delene D’Angelo. If all else failed, he was pretty sure he could always ask Brenda, his brother Dax’s new wife. The woman could make a computer do anything but sit up and beg—and maybe even that, too.

  “Want me to help you look around?” he offered.

  The first response that occurred to Delene was she didn’t want to be indebted to anyone. Favors required favors in return.

  “It’s not that big a place,” she told him, then reconsidered. This was his crime scene, not hers. Technically he could order her off. “Sure, why not? Two sets of eyes are usually better than one.” Approaching the largest pile of fast-food wrappers, discarded soda cups and stained carryout bags, she paused to take out her gloves. “What is it that you’re looking for? Just in case I stumble across it first.”

  He gave her a grin that she found much too engaging. “I don’t know.”

  Their eyes met. Hers were incredulous. “You don’t know?”

  Admitting it didn’t seem to phase him, and she found that unusual. Most men liked to look as if they knew what they were doing.

  “Nope. Just that I’ll know it when I see it,” he said.

  Her mouth quirked and he felt something skip a beat inside his chest. Probably had to do with the burrito he’d had for breakfast. Ordinarily, three days out of five, breakfast time would find him at his uncle’s house, seated at a table that never seemed to run out of leaves or chairs in its ever-expanding mode.

  His father’s older brother, Uncle Andrew, had put himself through the academy as a short-order cook in a diner. When he retired to raise what was, at the time, his motherless family, Uncle Andrew indulged himself in his only passion outside of law enforcement and his family. Cooking.

  And when, one by one, the members of his family began to spread their wings and fly away from home, he’d insisted on having everyone return each morning for breakfast. To entice them, Andrew went all-out, preparing not just a meal but what could pass as a gourmet feast. Troy hadn’t been able to make it to Uncle Andrew’s house this morning, because of the homicide call. So breakfast had turned out to be the first semiedible thing he could get his hands on.

  Troy knew exactly what expression would descend over his uncle’s face if the older man heard that he’d grabbed a breakfast burrito at a fast-food restaurant.

  “You’ve obviously been watching too many cop shows,” Delene was saying to him.

  Actually, he found himself addicted to the slew of crime dramas that were on the air, taping the ones he didn’t get a chance to watch. He flashed her another grin. “Doesn’t make it any less true.”

  He thought he heard her say something about the level of intelligence of the new wave of detective these days, but he couldn’t be sure. The next moment, she was riffling through the drawers in the battered and scarred bureau that dominated the wall beside the tiny bathroom.

  He let the comment go.

  Between them, they went over the entire length and breadth of the motel room, coming up empty when they finished.

  It bothered Delene that she couldn’t even find Rachel’s photograph. She found it telling.

  “Why is this significant?” Troy asked.

  She closed the closet. The hangers had been empty. Whatever clothing Clyde had possessed was in the heaps on the floor.

  “Because someone must have taken the photo,” she told him. “I know I saw it.”

  “Why would someone want to take a picture of a drug dealer’s daughter? It’s not as if they could kidnap her and hold her for ransom. It certainly doesn’t look as if Clyde had any money.”

  “Not just any someone,” she corrected him. “Her mother.” Maybe the woman, whoever she was, didn’t want him having anything to do with the little girl.

  “Or,” Troy theorized, “Petrie could have easily lost it.”

  Delene didn’t believe that. She shook her head. “It meant too much to him.”

  “When he was sober,” Troy pointed out. “All bets are off when he was high.”

  But Delene remained unmoved. “Some things remain constant, even for addicts.”

  He wondered if the woman even realized that she had become passionate about her subject. “Is that firsthand knowledge?” he asked.

  Her chin rose defensively. “That’s firsthand information. The people the county has on probation are not exactly all the crème de la crème.”

  Which led him to the question that had been echoing in his head since he first laid eyes on her this morning. He couldn’t see her going down into the trenches, getting dirty in their filth. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a business like this?”

  Now there was a line, Delene thought. “Earning a living.”

  “Got to be other ways to do it.”

  She looked at the piles of wrappers. It was hard not to just scoop them up and throw them away. She hated chaos, always had. “I like the hours,” she quipped.

  “You mean round-the-clock?” Troy scoffed. “What are you, a bat?”

  “Get your facts straight, Detective. Bats don’t operate during the day.”

  “Guess their union’s stronger than yours.” He finished going through the last pile and found that it was exactly what it appeared. Garbage. “Nothing,” he announced, rising to his feet.

  An exercise in futility. Delene bit back an oath. “Did you check out Mendoza yet?”

  He’d placed a call to his sister to check out D’Angelo’s story. When it rang true, he and Kara had gone to see the self-appointed drug lord at his opulent house, only to be told by one of Mendoza’s underlings that the man was on vacation in Florida, visiting his sister. Troy didn’t believe the excuse for a moment, but the location had a true ring to it.

  “Mendoza’s out of town.”

  She gave him a pointed look. “He wouldn’t have to pull the trigger himself.”

  It was Troy’s turn again to grin. “Trying to tell me how to do my job, D’Angelo?”

  “Just making a helpful observation.”

  Before he could comment on the helpful nature of her observations, a commotion outside the motel room had them both becoming alert. Troy had his weapon out in under a heartbeat.

  “Stay here,” he told her.

  She had her own weapon and the department had spent its fair share of money training her on its use. She unholstered it.

  “The hell I will,” she declared, following
him out.

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  Troy bit off a curse. Why couldn’t the woman stay in the room the way he told her to?

  The next moment, the surge of adrenaline that began to sweep over him receded. There was no danger. At least, not the kind that left bullets in its wake. But something equally lethal had just made its appearance.

  The local media.

  Troy lowered his weapon and holstered it. A TV network news truck was parked over on the side and a perky strawberry-blonde with a microphone stood in the middle of the courtyard. The woman seemed undecided as to whether she wanted to flirt with the camera or come on as a seasoned professional, despite her very obvious pretty-doll appearance.

  “Looks like a slow newsday at Channel Eight,” he muttered more to himself than to the woman at his side.

  The words were no sooner out than the reporter swung around and saw them. Recognizing authority, her expression lit up instantly.

  There was no way he was going to hang around and be questioned, Troy thought. At least he’d had a chance to go through the dead man’s room to his own satisfaction before the vultures descended.

  “Time for me to go.” He tossed the words toward Delene even as he headed for his rental car. Delene didn’t answer, not that it surprised him. But she had fallen into step with him, keeping to his left side so that the motel was at her back. For all intents and purposes, his body hid her almost completely. If he didn’t know any better, he would have said she was using him as a shield to block her from the reporter’s view.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Keep walking,” she ordered, her voice low, intense.

  Delene had pulled her cap down to partially obscure her face, like a celebrity in hiding. It was obvious that she definitely didn’t want the eye of the camera to find her.

  What gives? he wondered.

  He didn’t have time to speculate or wait for an answer. The reporter with her cameraman had descended on them. He never slowed his pace but kept walking toward his vehicle as if the woman wasn’t pushing a microphone toward his face.

  Undaunted, the woman pressed on. “Detective, what can you tell us about what happened here?”

  Never breaking stride, Troy gave the woman his most charming smile, gambling that it would deflect any attention the reporter might have been inclined to give Delene. “You know that we can’t talk about an ongoing investigation, even if we wanted to.”

  For a second, the woman seemed physically touched by his smile. She beamed at him in response, attempting a little charm of her own.

  “Oh, c’mon, Detective. It’ll be in all the papers by morning. Why not give me a break?” Tossing her hair over her shoulder as she nodded toward the motel room with its harsh yellow tape that proclaimed it a crime scene. “Wasn’t the victim supposed to testify against Miguel Mendoza in next month’s trial?”

  He traded his charming expression for one of pure innocence. “Looks like you know more than me, ma’am,” he told her just as he reached his car.

  Unlocking the driver’s side, he glanced up to see that instead of continuing on to her car, Delene had thrown herself into the passenger seat of his. She tugged her cap down even lower until the brim was touching her nose.

  Not exactly the last word in subtle, he thought, getting in himself.

  “Agent D’Angelo, this is so sudden,” he cracked. “Your place or mine?”

  After inserting his key in the ignition, Troy turned on the engine. The vehicle made a few strange noises, testifying that as a rental it hadn’t received the best of treatment. He hoped it would last until he got his own car back.

  “Drive.” The order emerged from beneath the khaki cap.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Once he backed up, Troy turned the car around and pulled out of the lot. Glancing back, he saw that the cameraman was still filming. A really slow news day. He looked over at the passenger seat where Delene was slouched down. “You can come up for air now.”

  She sat up, pulling the cap off her head. Delene dragged her fingers through her hair, taking away its flatness before leaning forward to stuff her cap into her back pocket.

  Troy waited to be enlightened, but in vain. “Mind telling me what that was all about?”

  Delene kept her face forward, staring straight ahead as dusk softly embraced the city streets. She let out the breath she’d been holding. That could have been disastrous, she thought.

  “I don’t like reporters.”

  No one in his family had a soft spot in their hearts for the people who made their livelihood on tragedy and disaster. “Neither do I, but I don’t fold up like a piece of origami paper when one of them approaches me with a microphone.”

  She shrugged. Her bangs fell into her eyes and she combed them back with her fingers. He caught a whiff of something soft and herbal. Clean. Probably her shampoo.

  “We all do things our own way.” Delene didn’t follow up the flippant answer by saying that she had a fear of having her picture taken or being captured on film. That she was afraid that maybe, just maybe, Russell would see the end result and realize where she was. That he’d come looking for her.

  His seeing the film clip was, of course, only a remote possibility, but she’d gone through too much to get careless now. The consequences were too huge. If she had a choice between being supercautious or supersorry, she’d pick cautious every time.

  They drove down another street. Delene hadn’t ventured a single extra word. “Any particular place you’d like me to drive to?”

  She shrugged again, as if he should already know the answer. Her agitation level had definitely gone up, he noted. What had he missed? Did she know that reporter? Or the cameraman? And why had she hidden her face like that? He didn’t know her, but she didn’t strike him as the type to hide from anyone.

  “Just around until that news truck leaves and I can go back to my car.”

  “Right.”

  On the following block, they passed several restaurants, all in a fashionable row. Italian cuisine, a steakhouse and a quaint restaurant that could have doubled as the cottage where the Seven Dwarfs lived. There was smoke coming from the chimney. He glanced toward Delene. Since she obviously wanted to kill some time, they might as well make it pleasant.

  “Buy you a cup of coffee, Agent D’Angelo?”

  “Hmm?” She looked at him as if that would help her replay his question in her head. It obviously did because she said, “No, thanks.”

  Coffee was the main ingredient that kept him and his family going, but he supposed there were those who didn’t care for the brew. “Tea?”

  She shook her head, her face averted as she glanced out the front windshield. “No.”

  Undaunted, he tried again. “Soda? A drink? A cup of air?” he finally asked when she didn’t respond to the first two choices.

  Her was expression impassive. “I don’t drink.”

  “But you do breathe.”

  A hint of a smile flirted with one of the corners of her mouth. “On occasion.”

  What did it take to make her smile? he wondered. Really smile? He felt a challenge coming on. One that he was up to.

  The light up ahead turned red. He eased down on the brake, his headlights casting beams on the back of the black SUV he was behind.

  “What about the drinking?” he asked. “Is that a religious thing or just a personal preference?”

  This had been a mistake. She should have sprinted toward her own car instead of getting into his, Delene upbraided herself—even if that would have left her exposed for a few moments. At least she would have already been on her way home by now instead of being subjected to this cross-examination.

  She could feel his eyes on her, even though he had started driving again. “Not that it’s any business of yours, but it’s personal.”

  Troy waited a beat. “How personal?”

  Eyes that could have frozen a fire in midflash turned toward him. “Very personal.”

  Her m
anner only served to intrigue him. “Someone in your family drink too much?”

  The man was more intuitive than she’d first thought. And this made her uneasy.

  To her further surprise, she heard herself giving a tentative answer. “Maybe.”

  “Your mother?”

  Her uneasiness grew. How could he know that? Heartbroken, not wanting to burden her daughter with her worries and insecurities, her mother had sought the kind of comfort that poured out two fingers’ worth at a time. And thus only succeeded in worrying her more.

  Doing her best to keep her thoughts from her face, Delene asked, “Why would you guess my mother instead of my father?” To her, that would have been the logical assumption.

  They drove by a mall that boasted fifteen different theaters. The marquee was just lighting up. “Because he left you.”

  “I never said that,” she pointed out quickly. She didn’t want this man poking around in her life. “You just assumed it.”

  “But I was right, wasn’t I?”

  Delene fell silent. She supposed that it did no harm to admit this tiny part. After all, it didn’t illuminate who she was, wouldn’t send him off on any trails toward the truth. It was just an isolated fact.

  One that saddened her whenever she let herself think about it.

  “Yes.”

  He glanced at her, trying to gauge her tone. “On both counts?”

  Delene blew out a breath. “You just don’t stop, do you?”

  Actually, Troy thought of his relentlessness as an asset, considering his line of work. His cousin Callie said he was like a bloodhound on the trail of a scent that was fifteen days old. He just didn’t give up until he got what he was after.

  He flashed Delene a grin. “There were eleven of us when I was growing up. You stopped, you got run over. Or missed out.” Shy and retiring just didn’t work in his family.

  Delene’s eyes widened in disbelief. She’d thought that Jorge and Adrian had been exaggerating earlier. They were prone to that.

  “Eleven children?” she echoed. He had to be pulling her leg. Nobody had big families anymore. Three was considered large by today’s standards. “Your mother had eleven children?” she repeated, waiting for him to own up to the exaggeration.