Maggie and the Whiskered Witness

by Barbara Cool Lee

  Willow nodded, so Maggie told the boys to stay there and left.

  She walked down one block and over another, all the while hoping that Willow would at least say hello to any customers who wandered in. Customer service wasn't her strong suit. Or punctuality. Or explaining beadwork to others, though she was quite good at doing it herself.

  But Maggie had a soft spot for the girl, who had been through some rough times, so she was determined to give her every chance to learn how to be a good employee.

  She walked quickly, wanting to get this errand over and get back before the shop fell apart.

  She walked quickly for another reason, too.

  The Carita Police Department was housed in a modern building with lots of glass, concrete, and straight lines, a style drastically different than the typical Mission Revival of most of the shops in the downtown area. The new police building had been plopped down on a large flat lot just at the edge of the business district. There was a massive parking area beside it, far too big for the size of the town, unless they were expecting a big crime wave in the little village.

  She saw her reflection in the glass as she went up the steps to the front entrance. She noticed her hair was looking ragged again, and briefly considered what she'd look like if she shaved her head. She self-consciously patted her hair smooth, then kicked herself for letting that stupid paparazzo affect her so much.

  The entrance doors slid open with a whoosh and then shut behind her, and she was in the quiet of the lobby. She could hear voices and the clatter of keyboard typing ahead, but there was a counter topped by bulletproof glass between her and the main squad room.

  The officer at the reception counter saw her coming. He picked up the phone before she'd even had a chance to say hello.

  "Ms. McJasper's here to see you, Lieutenant," he said into the phone.

  He hung up and then nodded to a locked door. "I'll buzz you right in, Ma'am."

  Normally, he would have been right to assume she was here to visit her friend, Lieutenant Will Ibarra. But not this time. "I actually came to see if Lauren Douglas is working today," she told him. Lauren was a records clerk at the department, and Maggie had assumed, from the modest navy blue and white outfit she'd been wearing this morning, that she was on her way to her job.

  The officer frowned. "Um, let me check." He ran his finger down a clipboard, stopping at a line halfway down. "Yup," he said. "Do you want me to have her come out and talk to you?"

  "If you would."

  She sat on a hard metal bench and looked around the lobby while she waited.

  The place was pristine. The station was newly built in the last couple of years, and there hadn't been time for the building to get old and run-down. And Carita was a pretty nice town, with a reasonably low crime rate, so it wasn't like there were gun fights in the lobby every Saturday night. But still, it was exceptionally clean.

  There was a tidy row of big stainless steel planters along the wall, with tall palms sprouting out that Maggie assumed were fake, because they didn't have a single drooping or brown leaf. The floor was white marble, and the same material ran up the half-wall topped with the reception counter. The other walls were pale gray, and there was a giant Carita PD logo on one wall that appeared to be made of carved wood, more like a custom work of art than an official sign.

  The overall tone was like a combination of an upscale executive firm and an antiseptic hospital. Police Chief Randall was very big on first impressions, and wanted the wealthy Carita residents to feel the department was a nice enough place for them to stop by without feeling like they were slumming. At least that was what Maggie had always assumed.

  She wasn't a big fan of the chief.

  Someone cleared his throat. She looked up and saw the officer trying to get her attention.

  She went back to the counter. "Sorry," she said. "Just thinking." She didn't say what about. The young officer with his carefully pristine uniform wouldn't have appreciated her opinion on his boss.

  "Ms. Douglas isn't in today," he said. "Can I take a message?"

  "Did she call in sick?"

  "I… I wouldn't know, Ma'am."

  "Can you find out—no," she added, changing her mind. "Can you just buzz me in and I'll go talk to Lieutenant Ibarra?"

  He did.

  She made her way through the squad room, which was as tidy and camera-ready as the lobby had been, and then knocked on a thick door that appeared to lead to a broom closet.

  It did. Or at least, to a former broom closet.

  At the gruff "what now?" from behind the door, she opened it and went inside.

  Lieutenant Will Ibarra was seated behind his desk. He was the head of the major crimes unit for the Carita PD. He was smart, and a good detective, and actually quite cute, in a burly cop sort of way, with plenty of muscles and the confidence of someone who could knock a man flat with one punch if the situation called for it.

  But unlike those in the main squad room, his desk was piled with case files at least a foot high. And unlike his fellow officers out there, his clothes were a bit rumpled. And there were flyers and maps tacked up at random on his office walls with no regard for the condition of the perfect pale gray paint. And he drank his coffee out of a chipped mug that was rebelliously bright orange instead of institutional white.

  Maggie liked him. A lot.

  But he didn't fit in with the professional style of the Carita PD, and Maggie suspected that was why he was relegated to this cluttered little office.

  He didn't seem to care, though.

  "What's up?" he asked her. "Please tell me you didn't find another body."

  He said it jokingly, but she couldn't muster up much of a smile in response, and he didn't look pleased about that.

  "You didn't, did you?" he asked with a frown.

  She sat in the chair in front of his desk and felt the broken spring hit her in the behind. "No," she said carefully. "But I am worried about something."

  He relaxed at the news that she hadn't discovered anybody murdered, and leaned back against his chair. It protested with a squeak.

  "You should get some WD-40 for that," she pointed out.

  "Yeah, I'll get to that after I finish these cases. So what's worrying you, Maggie?"

  "Lauren's missing."

  "Lauren who?"

  "Lauren. Lauren Douglas. Your Lauren."

  "She's hardly my Lauren," he said sardonically. "And what makes you think she's missing?"

  "She dropped off her dog with me this morning and never came back. And I've been calling and calling, and she isn't answering. And she didn't come to work today, even though her name was on that nice young officer's clipboard out in the lobby, and so I want to file a missing person's report."

  He took a drink from his mug while she recited all this, wincing like it was bitter. She wasn't sure if it was her news or the drink that tasted off to him.

  "I think it's a little early for a missing person's report," he observed. He set down his mug on top of a manila folder that had several coffee rings on it already. "She's a grown woman and can choose not to come to work if she feels like it."

  "But she left Hendrix with me and didn't come back for him."

  "I can see that could be annoying, but is it really enough to make you worried?"

  "Yes," she said firmly.

  He narrowed his eyes at her. "What else?"

  "What do you mean?"

  His eyes were dark brown, so dark they appeared almost black in the shadow cast by the overhead fluorescents. And he had bushy eyebrows that gave him a forbidding expression when he chose to narrow his eyes at someone and act like they were holding back from him. Like now. "I know you, Maggie. You're not telling me everything. What else is there?"

  Maggie took a big breath. "Nothing concrete."

  "Concrete?"

  "No evidence. No facts. Nothing I can point to and say, here's your proof that something's not right."

  "But there is something," he said.

&n
bsp; "You'll think I'm stupid."

  He rested his elbows on the stack of files in front of him and laced his fingers together. "No, Maggie. I never think you're stupid. I sometimes think you're annoying. Cute, but annoying. You drive me crazy. You can be a pain in the—"

  "—I get it," she said quickly.

  "But never stupid." He smiled faintly. "So tell me the rest, so I can say you're wrong, and then you can insist you're right, and we can do the dance we do."

  Maggie smiled back at him. "Okay. Fair enough."

  She thought back to the morning, revisiting the scene in her mind, and feeling the chill wash over her, just like it had hours ago. "First of all, she was wearing her mourning beads necklace."

  He sat there, fingers interlaced, waiting. He knew her well enough not to scoff.

  "She doesn't wear big pieces of jewelry to work," she explained.

  He nodded. "It's against the dress code."

  She looked him over from his rumpled khakis to his open-collared shirt that had been through at least a hundred washing machine cycles. "Right. Dress code."

  He smirked. "She's not a senior detective. I've been here thirteen years, and she's been around less than one. She's a civilian staff member, and a junior one at that. She has to follow the dress code."

  "Exactly. And she was dressed in her usual navy blue conservative clothes like she was headed to work soon."

  "But she wore some necklace that stood out to you."

  "Not just any necklace," Maggie said. "A necklace that had great personal significance to her."

  He shrugged, but the fingers stayed laced together, and she knew he was paying very close attention to what she said. "And—?"

  He knew there was more. Knew her well enough to know she wouldn't have walked down here and interrupted his work because of Lauren's fashion choices.

  Maggie felt the sting of tears and blinked a couple of times to make them go away.

  Ibarra saw it. He saw a lot. Noticed details.

  Maggie did, too. And Ibarra knew that. And over time they'd grown to know each other. To trust each other's judgment. To realize that they were kindred spirits, in a way. Both observing things that were invisible to others. Both able to spot the patterns in what others dismissed as random noise.

  And so he sat, waiting, and watching her intently, and knowing there was more.

  "She said goodbye," Maggie said softly, putting into words the unsettled feeling that had been hanging over her all day. "Six hours ago, out of the blue, she left her dog Hendrix with me for the very first time ever, claiming she would only be gone for an hour. And she looked at Hendrix, and then she looked at me. And then she said goodbye." Maggie swallowed, hard, to keep the tears back. "She said goodbye. Like she meant it."

  Ibarra unlaced his fingers. He nodded, slowly. Then he stood up. "Then we'd better find out why."

  Chapter Six

  They went out into the main squad room. "Ramirez?" he said, and a young woman came over. She wasn't much older than Lauren, late twenties probably, and she was dressed in the same serious and subdued way. But she had a ready smile and an open, trusting expression quite different from Lauren's.

  "This is Enid Ramirez," he explained to Maggie. "Lauren Douglas is in the records department, and Ms. Ramirez is the property clerk, so they work together a lot."

  "She's not here today," Ramirez quickly offered.

  "So I've heard," Ibarra said. "Did she tell you why she didn't come to work today?"

  Ramirez shook her head. "I haven't seen her. I texted her when the day watch supervisor said she didn't show up and didn't call in sick or anything."

  "But she didn't reply to your text?" Maggie asked, and the woman nodded. "I'm Maggie McJasper, by the way," she added.

  "Oh. Her dog friend."

  "Yes." Maggie smiled. "Her dog friend. I own the Carita Bead Shop downtown."

  "I want to take one of your classes," Enid said. "Lauren's talked about how much she enjoys them."

  "Has she? So you talk to her a lot?"

  "Not that much. We're pretty busy here. And she's very private. But she mentioned how much she loves pearls, and I asked if she had a rich boyfriend to pay for them, because we don't make that much money here, and then she told me about the fake pearls she gets at your shop."

  "They're not so much fake, as crystal," Maggie started to explain. "Made by Swarovski in a rainbow of colors and—"

  Ibarra interrupted this by asking the woman, "do you have any idea where she is?"

  The woman shook her head. "No. And it's not like her. She's never absent. I don't think she's missed a day since she started working here."

  "And she didn't call in sick, you said?" Maggie said. "She just didn't show up."

  Ramirez nodded. "That's what the day watch told me when I asked."

  "That'll be all, thanks," Ibarra said, and the woman went back to work.

  He went over to a desk where an older officer was typing away. "Drake?" he asked, and the man nodded without looking up from his keyboard. He was pecking on the keys with two fingers, but making pretty good progress just the same.

  "I want you to check all local hospitals and clinics for any injury reports of a young African American woman about five-foot-six, one-eighteen, twenty-five years old—"

  "—Huh?" Drake stopped typing and finally looked at Ibarra.

  "See if they admitted or treated anyone matching Lauren Douglas's description," Ibarra clarified.

  "Lauren?" Drake said loudly, his response echoing through the squad room, and Ibarra quickly hushed him.

  "Let's not shout it from the rooftops, Drake," he said quietly. "It's unlikely, and I don't want to get the whole department obsessing over this. I just want to make sure."

  The man just sat there staring until Ibarra said, "I'd like the answer today, Drake," and he picked up the phone and started dialing.

  He and Maggie stood to one side and let Drake make his calls.

  "Do you think she's in the hospital?"

  He shook his head. "We should have been informed if that happened. I'm just covering the bases. Let's give it a little time before we get worried."

  "But what if she is…?" Maggie asked.

  "In danger?" Ibarra replied, putting into words what she had been trying not to think for all this time. "I think it's too soon to jump to that conclusion. After all, she chose to leave the dog with you. She chose to drive away. She wasn't kidnapped, or in an accident, or anything like that, Maggie—Ms. McJasper."

  "Ms. McJasper?" she said. "A little formal, aren't you, Lieutenant Ibarra? But what if she was going to meet someone, and then something happened? We have no idea who that person may be," Maggie insisted. "We may not have much time to find her."

  Drake was watching her warily out of the corner of his eye, though he kept making his calls.

  Ibarra was ignoring her, focused on something behind her, and finally Maggie turned around to see Chief Randall standing there, obviously listening to the conversation.

  "What's this about Lauren Douglas?" Chief Randall asked Ibarra.

  "She didn't come to work today, and there are… concerns she might have gotten in an accident or something," Ibarra said carefully.

  "What makes you think she was going to meet someone?" Chief Randall asked Maggie.

  She shrugged, not wanting to try to explain her hunches to an unsympathetic person. "I don't know that. I was just saying it's possible."

  Randall turned to Ibarra. "Why wasn't I informed of this? Is there some reason to believe Lauren Douglas is in trouble?"

  "Not really, Chief," Ibarra said. "I'm just double-checking. There's no evidence of foul play. It's probably nothing."

  Maggie bristled at that, but a quick glance from Ibarra kept her from speaking up.

  "Should we be taking this seriously?" Randall asked. "If one of our own is in some kind of danger, we should act quickly."

  "I'm investigating," Ibarra said. "With your approval, of course, Sir," he added in that just o
n the verge of sarcastic way he tended to be around Randall.

  Randall waved his hand. "Of course. How would it look if we didn't take this seriously?"

  Exactly, Maggie thought. How would it look? That was always Randall's bottom line. But in this case, it worked in Lauren's favor, so she wasn't going to call him out for it this time.

  "We have no reason to believe there's anything wrong," Ibarra was explaining. "But it's unlike her to miss work without calling in. So I just figured it wouldn't hurt to do a bit of checking."

  "I see. What's her personal life like? Who's she dating?" Randall asked.

  "I would have no idea," Ibarra said coldly, and when Randall turned to Maggie, she shrugged. She didn't know, either.

  "I don't want to be blindsided by this," he said to Ibarra. "If she had any personal problems it could be bad publicity. Who do you think she was meeting?" Chief Randall asked, turning back to Maggie.

  She shook her head, unsure what to say. "I honestly don't know."

  "I have a fundraiser for the department at the ambassador's house this weekend," he said, sounding worried. "If there's any possibility this is some kind of lovers' quarrel, we need to get ahead of the press on it or it could hurt the department."

  Ibarra bristled at that. "I hardly think that's the case, Chief," he said coldly.

  "I hope not," Randall said. "Her personal life could reflect badly on the department."

  Some look passed between them, but Ibarra said, after another glance at Maggie, "right now her absence is just a bit odd. There's been no hint of anything criminal. It's simply a person not showing up for work."

  His boss nodded. "Well, let's keep this quiet. There's no reason for a black mark on her record at this point. She works under you, so you can choose to write her up for the unexplained absence, or not."

  "Thank you, Chief," Ibarra said.

  Randall walked away then.

  "It's always about the department's image," Maggie muttered.

  "You wanted this looked into, Maggie," Ibarra said. "Does it matter what his motivation is, as long as you get what you want?"

  Maggie shrugged. What she wanted was for Lauren to walk through the door.