Gone

by Karen Fenech

  She’d stopped taking the pain medication. The pills, she’d found, impaired her ability to think. The sedating properties made her want to stay prone and hampered her ability to focus. Given a choice between thinking or the headache, she opted to live with the headache.

  Her head was pounding now. She reached for the lemonade glass and pressed it to her forehead. Condensation had pooled in the coaster she’d placed on the dining room table. Clare dipped her fingers in the water and smoothed the lukewarm liquid across her brow. As she did so, she reached for the next statements in the file.

  She was looking for one that held interviews with Michelle Stephens. Adam Marsh, who’d dated Sara, was a friend of Michelle’s date. It was possible that Michelle’s date had fixated on Sara.

  Clare found Brownley’s interview with Michelle. For the most part, Brownley had asked the same questions of her that he’d asked Kelly Price. In fact, he’d been careful to include the same questions to each of the girls. Clare would have done the same as a way to confirm answers and to gain more information. No two people remembered incidents in exactly the same way. You could never tell what insights may be gleaned by asking two people the same question about something.

  Here, as well, Brownley and his partner had been thorough. Michelle’s date, Jeffrey Marcotte, roomed with Adam Marsh at NYU. They’d looked carefully at Marcotte. There’d been nothing to suggest his involvement in Sara’s disappearance either.

  Clare’s cell phone rang. She glanced at her watch. Two a.m. Not wanting to disturb Jake and Sammie, she retrieved it quickly. She glanced at the screen to identify her caller. Unknown. Whoever it was had blocked their number. Clare felt a rush of adrenaline. She’d scratched out her office number in New York on her business cards and replaced it with her cell number. She’d been spreading business cards around like seeds at planting time.

  Clare clicked on. “Agent Marshall.”

  The response was a long, heavy breath. Well, she had to know that making herself accessible could subject her to the interest and enthusiasm of the crazies who had nothing better to do with their time. She ended the call.

  It rang again. And again, the number was blocked. She had no time to waste on some moron who got off panting to a woman over the telephone. It could go to her voice mail, but even as she thought that she answered the call.

  “Clare Marshall,” she said.

  “Hello, Clare.”

  The voice was a whisper.

  “You have me at a disadvantage,” Clare said. “You know me, but I don’t know you.”

  “All in good time, Clare. For right now, I just wanted to let you know that I’m watching you.”

  Clare laughed. “Watching me? Like some low-life peeping Tom?” She panted loudly. “Does the sound of my voice turn you on?”

  The caller’s tone grew angry. “Looks like you’re healing well. In no time at all you won’t need to keep that crutch within easy reach. I hope you can reach it now, though. From this angle, I can’t see it. I can only see you.”

  The caller disconnected.

  Clare’s gaze had lowered to where the crutch lay beneath the table, out of plain view. A lucky guess or was the caller really close enough to see inside the house?

  She turned quickly to the windows. Sheer curtains covered the window in the living room. The door leading to the kitchen was open and she hadn’t drawn the vertical blind over the screen door when she’d come inside. Sitting at the table as she was, she was readily visible outside from both the front and back of the house.

  She flicked off the light. Jake and Sammie were upstairs.

  Clare called Jake’s cell phone. He picked up on the third ring, his voice husky from sleep.

  “I’m in the dining room,” Clare said. She quickly apprised Jake of the phone call. “If the caller was outside, it isn’t likely that he hung around, but we need to check.”

  “Stay put. I’ll look in on Sammie and I’m coming down. I’ll call Stan and the Sheriff’s Department.”

  Clare got to her feet. Damn her lame leg that prevented her from moving swiftly to help Jake secure the perimeter. She would be useless at that kind of stealth. But she could protect Sammie.

  “I’m coming upstairs, Jake,” Clare said. “I’ll meet you in Sammie’s room. I’ll stay with her while you and Stan look outside.”

  Clare retrieved her weapon from her purse on the table then made her way to Sammie’s room. Jake met her there. The little girl was asleep, oblivious to what was going on around her. Clare nodded and Jake left.

  With the air conditioning humming, and Sammie’s soft snores, Clare couldn’t hear Jake as he made his way down and outside. She didn’t expect to hear his movement anyway. Jake could move like a panther if need be.

  Time seemed to drag on, though, in reality, Clare knew that only a few moments had actually passed.

  “All clear, Clare,” Jake called up from the foot of the stairs a short while later.

  With a last glance at Sammie, Clare went to meet Jake. He was no longer at the bottom of the stairs, but stood in the hall, in the glow of the ceiling light, with a man she assumed was Special Agent Stan Doyle.

  Jake made introductions. Special Agent Doyle was lean, like a marathon runner, and was battling a nicotine addiction. A smoker’s patch showed beneath the cuff of a Yankees T-shirt. In his haste to arrive at Jake’s, he’d worn two different shoes.

  “If whoever called you was outside, he left,” Stan said.

  She’d expected that, but of course had to take every precaution, particularly for Jake and Sammie’s sakes.

  “There’s nothing that looks like he was even at the house,” Jake said. “I’ll take a good look when it’s light, but it doesn’t appear that the grass below any of the main floor windows has been trampled.” Jake scowled, looking into the darkness. “It’s not a surprise that you’d get that kind of call, Clare. You’ve been all over with the TV thing. That’s bound to bring out some of the nut jobs.”

  “I’m thinking the same,” Clare said.

  “Doesn’t make sense that our unsub would call you,” Jake said. “He’s been anonymous until now. I can’t see him breaking pattern and showing himself.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to be anonymous any longer.” She made the comment without any conviction. “But I agree, it doesn’t feel right. The unsub responsible for Sara’s disappearance isn’t into headlines and fame. If so, he’d have shown himself in the last four years.” Clare shook her head as she thought it through. “If this guy decides I’m a threat, he won’t warn me, he’ll just strike.”

  Jake gave her a hard look at the comment. “Could also be someone you put away. Someone who saw you in that interview or read about you and your past, and is taking the opportunity for payback.” Jake’s tone was as hard as his expression. His anger was palpable.

  “Could be,” Clare conceded.

  Jake addressed Stan. “Thanks for coming out, Stan.”

  “Hey, anytime.”

  Stan left and a deputy from the sheriff’s office arrived. Jake met him on the driveway. They spoke briefly, then took another turn around the house.

  Clare stood at the door, peering out at the houses across the street. Lights were on in a few of them, the neighbors awakened by the arrival of a sheriff’s deputy. The other houses she could see farther down the street were dark.

  Clare watched as Jake and the deputy returned to the driveway. When the deputy drove away, Jake was greeted by a few of the men from the neighborhood.

  The house phone rang. Clare tensed and turned toward the answering machine on an end table. Jake’s voice came on, inviting the caller to leave a message. Clare stilled, holding her breath.

  “. . . yeah, Jake, it’s Barry. Saw the cruiser out your way. Just checking to make sure everything’s okay.”

  She relaxed her shoulders. A call from a concerned neighbor. Nothing that pertained to Beth or Sara McCowan.

  Clare rubbed her brow. Her headache had increased. She needed
to shut down for a few hours.

  The home phone rang again. Another call expressing concern, or just plain interest, her cynical side thought. But no, the caller on the line was Mike North. He and Laura were good people. Clare wondered if she’d had so little contact with the good people that she automatically tossed everyone in the same mix? Or, had she simply stopped seeing the good? Had she become that jaded?

  She must be more tired than she realized to be self-analyzing.

  Jake was still talking with his neighbors. She left him to it, and went to bed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The information on Clare’s late-night caller came through the next day. Clare had made a pot of coffee, then took a cup to go and retreated to the dining room, to the case files. It was getting to the lunch hour when her cell phone rang. Not Jake. It was Jonathan.

  “Jake’s tied up right now and asked me to give you a call,” Jonathan said. “He’s at a meeting with the town council and Sheriff Petty. The council is pretty stirred up about the possibility that Sara McCowan went missing from this town.”

  “They should be stirred up. I hope that means they’ll do whatever they can to help. What did Jake want you to call me about?”

  “The call you got last night came from a land line in Idaho,” Jonathan said. “I’m guessing the guy hadn’t known the call could be traced. Local agents are being dispatched to the caller, an Evan Hollis. Our office in Idaho will be in touch after the interview with him.”

  The name Evan Hollis didn’t ring a bell. Clare couldn’t recall crossing paths, though it was possible he was someone she’d apprehended. She didn’t hold out any hope that Hollis knew anything about Beth’s disappearance, though, all the way out in Idaho. Sounded like he’d caught her recent press and gotten a sick thrill from messing with her. The Bureau agents in Idaho would put Hollis through the paces and they would know for sure.

  “We didn’t expect this guy to be our unsub,” Clare said to Jonathan now. “He didn’t feel right. Still, we’ll need to find out if he has ties to anyone in Farley.”

  “Got it,” Jonathan said. “I’ll pass that along to the Idaho office. I also have a message for you from Supervisory Special Agent Cohen. He called here a short while ago and asked me to ask you to get in touch with him. He’s made a couple of attempts to reach you on your cell phone without success. He’s concerned that your phone may not be working.”

  Sure, that’s exactly what he’s concerned about, Clare thought grimly.

  “Thank you, Jonathan,” she said.

  They said their goodbyes and Clare disconnected.

  Cohen had left another message for her. That made two. She had no doubt he’d seen or heard of the interview with Lauren Duval and was calling to rake her over the coals. She winced. She had to call him back, but in truth she didn’t know what she would say to him. If he wanted her to pull back from the investigation, or worse step out of it altogether, she couldn’t do that. He could order her off. Agents weren’t usually involved in investigations that were personal to them. But, even if ordered, she would not let this go. She was going to force him to either suspend her or get rid of her. Either way, that conversation wasn’t going to end well. Her career would be damaged at the end of it. She decided to delay calling him back.

  She left the table and went in search of more coffee. As she was refilling her cup, she glimpsed Sammie and Heather in the Norths’ yard. The girls were seated beneath a Palmetto tree, surrounded by a pageant of dolls. One of them wore a costume that glittered like stars.

  Stars. Stars.

  Clare hobbled quickly to the table in the dining room. Coffee sloshed over the rim of the mug, dousing her knuckles. “Damn!”

  She plopped the mug onto the table then, with her fingers still dripping and smarting from the hot liquid, grabbed the file on the Sara McCowan disappearance and began rifling through the pages. She skimmed them quickly, the papers snapping beneath her fingertips.

  Something. She’d read something in one of the statements the other night. It seemed familiar. She hadn’t known why then. An instant later the statement she’d been seeking was in her hand. It was Kelly Price’s interview with Detective Brownley. Clare scanned the pages.

  She grabbed her cell phone from the table and called Jake. Belatedly, she remembered Jake’s meeting with the town council. She was about to disconnect and proceed alone, when he picked up.

  She wasted no time getting to the point. “The other night I read something in one of the statements that seemed familiar. I didn’t know why then. I do now.”

  “Which statement?” Jake asked.

  “Kelly Price’s interview with Brownley. Something about the clubs she mentioned seemed familiar. My second day in town I met Richard Dannon.”

  “Connie Dannon’s husband. You mentioned he hit on you.” Jake’s tone went cold as he said that.

  “Part of his pitch was that he’d show me around Columbia. He knew all the hot spots. Blah, blah, blah. But he mentioned one in particular: The Starlight. Could be nothing more than a coincidence. The Starlight is a public place, no reason Rich Dannon and every other man in Farley couldn’t go there. But, the fact is we don’t know about every other man; we do know about Dannon. I want to ask him about Sara McCowan.”

  “I’ll pick you up in ten minutes,” Jake said.

  * * * * *

  Rich Dannon had agreed to speak with Jake and Clare at the Bureau office. It seemed to Clare that Dannon preferred to speak there, rather than where they’d found him thirty minutes earlier, at his regular haunt, Charley’s Bar. In this instance, he’d opted to be out of the prying eyes of the other patrons.

  Outside an interview room at the Bureau office, Clare turned to Jake. “I want to take the lead with Dannon.”

  Jake nodded.

  Clare entered the interview room. She set her crutch on the floor and took a chair at the table, across from Dannon, who was dressed as Clare usually saw him, in casual businesswear. A sport coat in beige over a crisp white shirt made the most of his tanned good looks. Jake took up a position against a wall, leaning a shoulder against the faded gray paint.

  “What can you tell us about Sara McCowan?” Clare asked.

  “Sara McCowan?” Dannon’s voice cracked. Sweat broke out on his brow. “That the case you talked about on the TV show? The girl that went missing a few years back?”

  “That’s the one.” Clare kept her eyes on his. “How did you meet Sara, Rich?”

  Dannon gave a nervous laugh. “Hey, do I need a lawyer here?”

  He was sweating profusely now, perspiration dripping down the side of his face and into the collar of his shirt.

  “It’s certainly your right to have an attorney,” Clare said. “We can call your wife if you’d like, and she can make arrangements for one to join us here.”

  Her mention of his wife had the desired effect; Rich Dannon blanched.

  “No.” Dannon bobbed up, coming halfway out of the chair. “We can just clear this up here and now and be done with it. No need to get formal. Lawyers just muddy up the waters anyway.”

  “Once again, then, how did you meet Sara, Rich?” Clare said.

  “It’s been four years. I only saw Sara a couple of times.”

  “What happened to her, Rich?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Tell me about the night you met Sara.”

  Dannon stretched his neck, as if the collar of his shirt was too tight. “We were in The Starlight. She was pretty and looking for a good time. I’m always ready for a good time. I went over to her. Bought her a couple drinks. We partied some more and then we got a room at one of the motels on the street.” He shrugged. “After, I went home.”