“Good for them.” Lance rose to walk Stella to the front door. He could see Sharp in his office, talking on his phone. An unusual stiffness to his posture caught Lance’s attention.
Sharp turned, his eyes grim.
Something’s wrong.
Chapter Five
“Take a deep breath.” Sharp tried to calm Mrs. Cruz, but the fear in her voice gripped his gut like a fist.
“Olivia gave me your number in case of an emergency,” Mrs. Cruz said. “I hope it is all right to call. I don’t know who else to contact.”
Emergency?
The pit of Sharp’s belly chilled. “What’s wrong?”
“Olivia was supposed to be here hours ago to take me to the doctor, but she never came.” Mrs. Cruz spoke faster, urgency speeding up her words. “I thought maybe she had car trouble. My husband drove me to my appointment. But I’m back home now, and Olivia isn’t answering her cell phone or her house phone.” Mrs. Cruz wheezed. “She would never forget me.”
“No, ma’am. She wouldn’t.” Sharp ran a hand over his fresh buzz cut. Possibilities spun in his mind. After twenty-five years on the SFPD, he immediately thought of worst-case scenarios. But scaring Mrs. Cruz would be pointless and cruel.
“What time was your appointment this morning?” Sharp asked.
“Nine thirty,” Mrs. Cruz said, the pitch of her voice rising.
Sharp checked the time. Eleven thirty. “Maybe she had a flat or her car broke down.”
“She would have called.” Mrs. Cruz blew away his suggestion.
“There are spots with poor cell reception between here and Albany. I’ll go looking for her right now.”
“You’ll call me if you find her?” She sniffed.
“Of course. Try not to panic. I’ll call you soon.” Sharp disconnected. He dialed Olivia’s cell. The call went to voice mail. He left a message. Then he sent her a text just in case she was in an area with poor reception. Sometimes a text would go through when a call would not. Even though she rarely answered her home phone—only her mother and telemarketers used that line—he tried that number too. After three rings, her digital answering machine picked up. He left her a message there as well.
He shoved the phone back into his pocket and returned to the kitchen. Stella was gone. “That was Olivia’s mother.” He explained her news to Morgan and Lance. “I’m going to her house. Olivia told me about that appointment last night on the phone. She’d intended to be there.”
“I’ll come with you.” Lance fell into step beside him. They walked to the door.
The medical examiner’s van blocked the driveway to Sharp Investigations. Two morgue assistants were wheeling a gurney to the back of their vehicle. The body had been zipped into the black bag.
“You two go.” Morgan’s brows lowered. “I’ll stay here in case Carl needs anything. Let me know if you find Olivia.”
“Will do. Thanks.” Sharp took his keys from his pocket.
“I’ll drive.” Lance headed for his Jeep, parked at the curb. “Your car is blocked in.”
Reluctantly, Sharp followed him, putting his keys away.
“Morgan is inside if you need anything, Carl,” Lance said on their way past.
“Thanks,” Carl called. “I’m waiting on the tow truck.”
With a wave at the cop, they climbed into Lance’s Jeep. Lance steered around the ME’s van and drove the short distance to Olivia’s house.
Lance parked in front of her bungalow, and Sharp looked for signs that something was amiss. But her house looked normal. They got out of the Jeep. Sharp went to the garage door, shielded his eyes with both hands, and peered in the window. The spot in the garage where she normally parked her car was empty. Had she gone out and forgotten about her mother?
That wasn’t like Olivia. She’d remembered the appointment the previous night. As the only unmarried sibling, Olivia was the first person her mother called on for help. She doted on her parents.
Lance appeared beside him.
“She’s not here.” Worry tugged at Sharp.
Lance nodded. “Let’s drive the route between here and her parents’ house.”
Alarm rose in Sharp’s chest.
“You talked to her last night?” Lance asked.
Sharp hurried back to the Jeep. “Yes. She was going to bed. She wasn’t feeling well.” A warning itched Sharp’s spine.
“She was sick?” Lance asked.
“Just some indigestion.” She would have called him if she felt worse, right? Was their relationship at that point? They hadn’t talked about any sort of commitment. They were both independent and wary of being too clingy. Both had been burned in the past and without romantic entanglements for some time. She seemed as content as he was to take things slowly.
But suddenly Sharp felt very alone.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Lance said, steering the Jeep toward the main road that led out of town. “Don’t you always say, if it looks like a horse and smells like a horse, don’t go looking for a zebra?”
“Yes.” Sharp scanned the shoulder of the road. He suppressed the disaster scenarios popping into his mind. “Her car doesn’t have a spare. If she got a flat and the tire repair kit couldn’t fix it, she’d have to call for roadside assistance. If she couldn’t get a cell signal, she’d have to walk.”
But wouldn’t she have found a phone in three hours?
“Why don’t you call Morgan?” Lance turned right at the stop sign and accelerated. “Get her to make the usual calls to police departments and hospitals between here and Albany. It’s premature, but you’ll feel better.”
It didn’t feel premature to Sharp. “Good idea.”
“Do you want me to call my mother and see if she can locate Olivia’s cell?” Lance’s mother suffered from depression and anxiety and rarely left her home. She was also a computer genius who often assisted with their investigations. Finding Olivia’s cell without a warrant would require some illegal hacking, but Sharp doubted Olivia would complain.
“Yes,” he said.
Lance talked to his mother, then Morgan, on speakerphone as he drove. By the time the calls were made, he was merging onto the interstate. Sharp sat up straighter and focused on scanning the sides of the road. Olivia could have driven off the shoulder. There were ditches, ravines, and lakes. Her car could be buried in underbrush—
Or submerged underwater.
The empty chill in the pit of Sharp’s gut deepened as the miles passed with no sign of Olivia.
Just short of her parents’ house in Albany, Lance slowed the Jeep. “Do you want to stop at her parents’ house?”
“Not yet.” Sharp didn’t want to waste time.
Lance turned the Jeep around. Sharp closely watched the opposite side of the interstate all the way back to Scarlet Falls.
Sharp saw no cars abandoned on the side of the road and no breaks in the foliage to indicate a car had gone off the road. The ditches were empty.
Where is she? He rubbed the center of his chest. In his mind’s eye, he saw Olivia, her dark eyes shining with mischief, wearing the feminine trench coat and the pointy-heeled shoes she loved.
Lance exited the interstate onto the ramp that led to Scarlet Falls. “Where do you want to go now?”
“Back to Olivia’s house.” Sharp dreaded calling her mother and telling her he hadn’t found any sign of her.
Lance’s phone buzzed on the console. “It’s my mom.” He put the call on speaker. “Hi, Mom. You’re on speaker in the car. Sharp is here too.”
“Hello, Sharp.” Jenny Kruger’s voice came through the car’s speaker. “I tried to track the GPS on Olivia’s phone, but there’s no signal.”
“Nothing?” Sharp’s apprehension grew.
“No,” Jenny said. “No signal at all. I’m sorry. The last activity recorded on her number was a phone call to you at eleven p.m. last night. That call was made from her home.”
No signal meant Olivia’s phone battery had been re
moved or destroyed or the phone was out of cell range.
Lance parked in front of Olivia’s house. Sharp jumped out of the vehicle and rushed up the walk.
Lance hurried to catch up with him. Almost at the front door, he caught Sharp’s arm. “Take it slow.”
“Something is wrong.” Sharp paused and inhaled. The hollow pressure in his chest intensified.
“Then take precautions.” Lance dug into the pocket of his cargos and offered Sharp a pair of gloves. “We don’t want to destroy evidence.”
Reluctantly, Sharp took them and tugged them onto his hands. He didn’t want to think about a crime having been committed in Olivia’s house.
Lance was more than his partner; he was the closest thing Sharp had to a son. When Lance was ten, his father had vanished. Sharp had been the Scarlet Falls detective assigned to the case. He hadn’t found Lance’s dad back then, and when he’d discovered Lance’s mother suffered from crippling anxiety and was incapable of handling her husband’s disappearance or raising her son, Sharp had stepped in to help.
He had also hit rock bottom at the time, with a divorce and the death of his partner in the line of duty. In the end, Lance and his mom had become Sharp’s family. He’d dated over the next two decades, but he hadn’t let anyone else get close—until Olivia.
Who would have thought a reporter would sneak into his heart?
But she had.
He swallowed his fear and unlocked Olivia’s front door using the key she’d given him a few weeks before. He opened the door and stepped inside. Lance followed Sharp down the hall to the kitchen. The alarm system beeped. Sharp punched the deactivation code into the panel.
“Can you see the system history?” Lance looked over Sharp’s shoulder.
Sharp pushed buttons and read the screen. “At two thirteen this morning, the alarm was deactivated and rearmed as Away.” He moved to the center of the kitchen, his critical gaze scanning the room. “Where could she have gone in the middle of the night?” His ignorance of her current work felt acute.
“Has she ever slipped out that late at night before?”
“Not that I know of.” But then, Sharp wasn’t with her every night. They spent a couple of nights a week together. Then each retreated to their own private spaces.
“Would she call you if she was going to meet someone that late?”
“Apparently not.” Sharp brushed off his irritation. Olivia didn’t owe him a call before she went out. He wouldn’t have notified her if he had to work in the middle of the night.
Sharp walked around the kitchen. “She was researching new topics for another book. That’s all I know.”
He had to face facts. He’d been sleeping with Olivia for months, and yet he knew very little about her.
Last night’s phone call was the first sign she was willing to share her research with him. They slept together but kept their work to themselves.
“Where does she keep her phone, keys, and purse when she’s home?” Lance circled the kitchen, scanning surfaces.
“On the island.” Sharp pointed. The square of recycled glass was empty. “She carries her phone from room to room with her most of the time. In the middle of the night, it would be on her nightstand.”
He headed for the hallway. Lance stayed close. They walked into Olivia’s bedroom. The covers were on the floor.
“Olivia always makes the bed as soon as she gets up.” Sharp felt his voice crack, and he took care not to touch any of the surfaces. In case Olivia’s house was a crime scene, he needed to preserve evidence.
The words crime scene pooled fear in his gut.
“Maybe she was in a hurry,” Lance said. Morgan and Lance lived with three children, two dogs, a nanny, Morgan’s grandfather, and a seemingly endless string of renovation projects. For them, chaos was more normal than order. But Olivia thrived on organization.
“Olivia likes to keep things neat and organized.” Sharp walked out of the bedroom. On the surface, the house looked as expected. He went into the second bedroom, which she’d converted into an office. Her laptop sat in the center of the desk. He lifted the lid. It was password protected. “I have a key to her house and the code to her security system, but she hasn’t shared her laptop password.”
Their professions required them to maintain a level of confidentiality. Sharp certainly hadn’t shared any client information with Olivia. She had essentially morphed from a journalist into a true crime writer over the past five years. But in the back of his mind, she was still a reporter—a label that made him wary.
Lance went back through the kitchen to the doorway that led into the laundry room. “Sharp! Over here.”
Sharp hurried to join him in the narrow hallway. Lance pointed to a door. “Is that the garage?”
Sharp nodded. His gaze followed Lance’s pointer finger to a dark-red smear on the white molding around the door.
“Could be blood,” Lance said.
“There’s only one way to find out. Do you have an RSID kit in your car?” Sharp asked, his face drawing tight.
A Rapid Stain Identification Kit would detect the presence of human blood.
“No,” Lance said. “Because we are not cops anymore. We don’t swab and possibly contaminate evidence. I’ll call Stella. She’ll handle it. I’ll call Morgan too. She might notice things we haven’t.”
Lance stepped back to make the calls.
Sharp crouched and took a long look at the molding around the door. Small scratches marred the wood. His gaze traveled down the length of the door. Something was stuck in the soft caulk around the frame. It was bright pink. A broken fingernail was embedded in the bright-white sealant.
Sharp’s heart squeezed as he remembered the color of Olivia’s nails when she had stroked his bare chest two nights before.
Bright pink.
His chest tightened, and he pressed a hand to it.
“Sharp!” Lance grabbed him by the arm.
“I’m OK.” He gestured to the fingernail.
Lance examined the caulk, then straightened, his face grim. “Morgan will be here soon. Stella didn’t answer her phone. I left a message. Do you want to call the SFPD?”
“And tell them what?” Sharp asked. “That Olivia missed one appointment, didn’t make her bed, and broke a nail on her way out of the house? We both know that’s not enough to launch a missing persons case.”
He ran out to Lance’s Jeep for a flashlight. He would touch as little as possible, but no one could stop him from searching for clues.
When he returned to the laundry room, Lance had marked the locations of the blood and the broken fingernail with yellow sticky notes.
He tested the garage door. “The dead bolt is locked, which means it was either locked from the inside or the key was used.” He turned the dead bolt and went into the garage. It was as tidy as the rest of Olivia’s house. Her bicycle stood in a rack near the wall. Opposite the empty space where she parked her car, some basic tools were organized on a pegboard over a small worktable. The concrete was swept clean. Sharp shone the flashlight on the floor. No footprints.
“I thought she liked to garden.” Lance scanned the space. “There isn’t even any dirt in here.”
“There’s a potting shed out back where she keeps the messy stuff.” Something shiny caught Sharp’s attention. He bent down.
“What is it?” Lance asked.
Sharp recognized the small diamond stud as one of Olivia’s staple pieces of jewelry. “An earring.”
Lance stuck a note to the concrete near the earring.
Checking the floor before setting each foot down, Sharp searched in a spiral pattern. He spotted a glint of metal near the base of the overhead door, where the hatchback of Olivia’s Prius would have been located. “Here’s the second earring.”
“Maybe she was getting something big out of the back of her car and knocked her earrings loose,” Lance suggested.
“I don’t know.” Sharp didn’t like it. “I could buy her losing on
e earring, but two? And breaking a nail on the doorjamb?”
They went back into the house. Sharp rubbed his solar plexus. Behind it, fear coiled itself into a tight ball.
Where is she?
Chapter Six
Morgan watched the tow truck drive away with Mrs. Olander’s vehicle secured on the flatbed. The Scarlet Falls patrol car pulled away from the curb and followed.
She stared at the empty space where the minivan had been parked. The wind blew, and a few dead leaves tumbled along the gutter. The street showed no sign that a woman had taken her life there just a few hours before.
I am not responsible.
She knew it wouldn’t be easy to shelve Mrs. Olander’s desperation and despondency. But finding Olivia took priority, and Morgan was relieved to lock up the office and leave. She arrived at Olivia’s bungalow a few minutes later. When Sharp opened the front door, she followed him back to Olivia’s kitchen.
Lance crossed the room to give her a quick kiss. “Any luck with the hospitals?” He didn’t ask about morgues, even though he knew she’d have called those as well.
“None,” she said. “I checked with all the hospitals within a hundred miles of here. No sign of Olivia or any Jane Does that fit her description.”
“I’m going to check the outside of the house.” Lance went out the front door.
Sharp paced the kitchen like a trapped animal. Morgan’s heart bled for him. Sharp kept his world small, but he’d fallen hard for Olivia, even if he hadn’t wanted to admit it.
Stella arrived. Morgan let her sister in and led her to the kitchen.
“You have a key?” Stella asked Sharp.
“Yes,” Sharp answered. “And the codes for her alarm system. Thanks for coming. I know a detective wouldn’t normally be the first responder.”
A uniform on patrol would have taken the initial report. A detective would have been summoned only if the uniform found evidence of foul play.
He walked Stella back to the laundry room, pointed out the broken fingernail, and explained the call from Olivia’s mother. He showed Stella the earrings in the garage. Normally athletic, his movements were jerky and agitated as he identified the small bits of seemingly random evidence.
Save Your Breath Page 4
