“You’ll hear her out.”
Lexie hesitated, seeing a look of determined defiance on Walter’s face.
“How many?” He slammed his hand down on the desk. Though he kept his voice low, in acknowledgment of the in-house spy, it shook as he added, “For God’s sake, how many young women can go missing without somebody other than you and me starting to wonder whether there’s a darker reason for it than our police chief would like us to believe?”
Lexie’s mouth dropped open. For weeks, she’d been tiptoeing around the building, remorseful, regretful, certain she’d let her boss down and had deserved the scorn that had been heaped on her head. Equally certain Walter felt the same way, or at least wished he’d kept her on a shorter leash. Now the realization that he hadn’t simply shocked her into silence.
“Lex, they wanted to shut you up. And I let them.” He leaned over the desk, twisting his thick fingers together tightly until the knuckles grew white. “I let them.”
“What haven’t you told me?” she asked softly. “Something else happened. What is it?”
He stared at her for a long moment, then cast a quick glance toward the door. Whatever it was he wanted to say, he wouldn’t do it here, no matter how low the whisper.
“Why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow night?” he asked, his voice at a normal level. “Ann-Marie and the girls would love to see you.”
Nodding, she was just as normal in her reply. “Sounds great! I’d love to see them, too.”
She had been a frequent guest of the Kirbys before Ann-Marie’s illness. But she didn’t doubt why she was receiving this invitation. In the privacy of his house, Walter would tell her whatever it was that he was afraid to reveal here.
“Why not tonight?” she mouthed.
He leaned over his desk to whisper, “I need more time to confirm what I’m hearing.” Then, loud again, “Of course, I can’t promise the kids will actually be around for long on a Friday night. Biggest game of the season, you know. Two hometown teams going head-to-head.”
Meaning Taylor and Jenny would both be donning their cheerleading uniforms. Hundreds of kids and their parents, who wanted to relive their own glory days, would crowd the stadium of Granville High to roar for their football heroes.
Her smile was slightly cynical as she thought of how nice and quaint the old-fashioned Friday-night ritual was. Because nice and quaint didn’t describe the Granville Lexie had come to know recently. No, they weren’t the words one would associate with missing teenagers or with the shut-down of the local press.
Given the usual tensions between the residents of the Boro and those in the north side of town, she could only imagine rumors of another disappearance would make things even more tense when Granville went up against Hoover High. “I suppose the missing girl went to Hoover. That’s where I’ll start . . .”
Walter shook his head. “Not Hoover. She was from GHS. My daughters know her, Lex.” His throat worked as he swallowed, hard. “Jenny was one of the last people to see her. She’s the one who told me the girl was missing.”
Wow. No wonder he was in a state about this. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “But it’s really interesting that she’s from the other school.”
All of the other missing teens had gone to the “poor” high school, or they’d been dropouts. This was the first from the snooty side of town. No wonder the chief was panicking. North Granville was the only part of the area he seemed to give a damn about.
“Here.” Walter reached into his desk and drew out a sheet of paper.
“What’s this?” She took the paper, opened it, and read the name and address. Genuinely surprised, she asked, “You really want me to contact
him
?”
Walter nodded once. “I have my reasons. I don’t know that he’ll talk to you, but I think he might be able to help with this.”
Huh. She had her doubts. But she wasn’t about to argue with her boss now that he’d given Lexie her journalistic legs back. “I guess it makes sense. I considered interviewing him before we broke the story, after I heard he used to specialize in missing persons cases.”
“I wish we had reached out to the man.”
A few days ago—hell, an hour ago—she would have responded with a pessimistic,
Why? Because he could have saved us the trouble and told us we were chasing people who weren’t really missing?
Now, though, she didn’t. All the scorn and the accusations that she’d been creating news, or seeing boogeymen, the spiteful laughter at her expense of the past month—they had suddenly evaporated, become completely irrelevant. Things had changed. Yet another girl had disappeared. And Walter had stumbled across something important. She knew it.
“I don’t know how much of that supernatural stuff I believe, but there’s no doubt this guy is smart. Even if it’s just intuition, this McConnell guy comes up with some amazing insights.”
She lifted a surprised brow. “You know him?”
“Know of.”
“Yeah, quite a rep he’s got.”
“You should know better than anyone not to believe everything you read in the papers.”
“Touché.”
Lexie rose from her chair, tucking the piece of paper into her pocket. Not leaving yet, she offered her boss a genuine smile. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your trust and your faith in me. And thanks for believing me to begin with.”
The big man waved off the humble thanks. “See what you can find and we’ll talk more tomorrow at dinner. Come around six thirty.”
Suddenly thinking of his wife, who was recovering, but certainly not yet healthy, she felt a stab of embarrassment. She’d been so interested in whatever information Walter had to share, she hadn’t considered the imposition on his wife. “I don’t want to put Ann-Marie to any trouble. How about I bring some pizzas?”
He chuckled. “You really think my wife does the cooking? Puh-lease. Her meatloaf could be used in place of a cement block to hold a Mafia hit man’s victim underwater. The girls threatened starvation protests if she ever went near the kitchen again. I’m still chief cook and bottle washer these days. Ann- Marie’s strictly the supervisor.”
His bluster didn’t fool her one bit. The tenderness in his voice and on his face when he talked about his family was something to behold. Whatever Ann- Marie’s skills in the kitchen, her husband wasn’t about to let her take on too much.
What a good man. The nicest, most decent one she knew. Again, Lexie had to acknowledge how blessed she’d been the day he’d hired her.
“And listen to that mother if she calls,” he added softly.
She nodded. Oh yeah, she’d take the call and listen very carefully.
If that call didn’t come, she’d go one step further. She would do what she did best: dig around to find out which girl had missed school all week and go find the mother herself.
As she left the office, she wanted to skip with relief. For the first time in a month, she allowed herself to fully believe she hadn’t been wrong, hadn’t been the sleazy reporter making up juicy scandal, finding salacious stories where there were none.
Deep down, she’d always known it. She just hadn’t allowed herself to think too much about it, knowing those thoughts would lead her to bitterness and even more worry about things she knew were happening but was powerless to change.
Now, the man she respected more than anybody else had given her his blessing to remember who she really was and what she did best.
Lexie sought the truth. She almost always found it. And this time, she would not rest until every ugly secret in this town was brought out into the light.
Including the fates of all those missing girls.
Chapter 2
Thursday, 3:55 p.m.
Aidan should have been bored.
The change in his lifestyle from Savannah to here had meant removing himself from the day-to-day regularity of work. He didn’t need the money, having made a lot over the years, with book royalties still coming in and several recession-proof investment choices.
That meant he didn’t live on a schedule, didn’t pencil in meetings or go into the private office he’d kept near Wright Square. There were no more visits to crime scenes with the SPD, no trips out of state to help a family in need, no interviews with witnesses, lawyers, or the media. No explorations of the lives of missing people, no careful touches of their hairbrushes, their pillows, their clothing, all in an effort to find out where they were—and if they were still alive.
None of that.
The house, which he’d bought for next to nothing, was old, but not in need of significant repair. He certainly wasn’t involved in the local community, and he sure as hell wasn’t the type to have a cold one over the back fence with the neighbors. So after almost a year of solitude, he probably should have gone crazy out of sheer boredom.
Fortunately, though, he’d found a way to keep himself busy, challenged, and almost entertained. He’d also occasionally managed to make the cops look like idiots. That was a plus.
Which was why he was now calling a complete stranger, a rich widow in Atlanta who lived with her equally rich, equally widowed sister. The women might be about to help him solve an armed robbery that had taken place in her neighborhood. They just didn’t know it yet.
“Hi, is this Millicent Weinberg?” he asked, tucking the phone into the crook of his neck.
“Yes? Who is this?” asked a demanding voice.
“This is Charlie. I work for Tony’s Pizzeria and deliver pizza to your house.”
“You must be mistaken,” the old woman said. He could almost hear her frowning; snobby old ladies from Buckhead didn’t order pizza. Especially not extralarge pizzas with half a pig sitting on top. Mushrooms, onions, double sausage, double pepperoni—either the woman had a cast-iron stomach or she hadn’t been the one who’d ordered the artery-hardening pie that had been delivered to her door one night eight weeks ago.
“I don’t think so, ma’am. I got the record right here that says at seven thirty on the second Friday of September, an eighteen-inch pizza with the works was brought to your back door.”
“Ridiculous . . .”
“Your purchase means you’ve won a coupon to try our new triple-bacon, sausage pizza.”
The woman’s gasp made him fall silent to wait for the payoff.
“First of all, young man, if it was a Friday evening, I was at temple. Which, unless you’re as uneducated as you are uncouth, means I am not a customer who would be interested in bacon or sausage pizza. I did not order anything from your establishment. I never have.”
“But—”
The woman harrumphed. “Wait. The second Friday of September, you say? I wasn’t even in town! We didn’t even come back from our summer place in the mountains until a week later.”
Score
. “Maybe somebody else at your house placed the order?”
“Impossible! My sister and I took our live-in housekeeper with us.”
Interesting. Aidan had to wonder whether that housekeeper had happened to lose her key to the Weinberg house one day before she’d left, or whether she’d merely misplaced it for a few hours—long enough for her sleazy, drug-addicted half brother to have a copy made.
Said sleazy thief had been looked at by the local cops for the violent break-in near the Weinberg house, but they hadn’t connected him to the housekeeper who worked right up the street from the vic. Dumb mistake; Aidan had put them together with a one-hour records search.
The guy had an alibi for that night. A false one, Aidan had felt sure. Now he thought he could prove it—with some help from the real pizza delivery boy, with whom he’d already spoken.
The local PD could have done that, too. Instead, they’d ignored one of the witness statements about a pizza delivery vehicle being spotted in the neighborhood two hours before the robbery, dismissing it as irrelevant. In Aidan’s opinion, when working violent crimes, nothing was irrelevant. Every lead deserved to be followed.
He might have to remind the detectives of that when he dropped the info he’d gathered into their ears. Maybe it would teach them a lesson. It should certainly cause a little embarrassment for the investigators whose work had been so shoddy. Win-win.
“Well, ma’am, thanks for your—”
He was interrupted by a loud knock on the front door. Startled, as he was so unused to visitors, Aidan almost dropped the phone.
“Mr. McConnell? I need to speak with you!” called a muffled voice from the front porch. The person didn’t wait for a response, knocking again and adding a sharp jab of the doorbell.
He flung his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, but apparently not in time.
“Wait a minute. Where did you say you’re calling from?” Mrs. Weinberg asked, her tone sharp. She’d obviously heard the doorbell, not exactly standard background noise at a pizza joint.
“Uh, I better go. Got some deliveries to make. Thanks a lot!”
“Young man . . .”
He hung up, swinging around to look out the arched doorway between his office and the foyer, frying the front door with his heated stare. Not even putting the cordless phone down, he stalked to it and swept the door open.
“Aidan McConnell?” the woman asked, flinching, as if surprised at how suddenly, and forcefully, he’d answered.
He didn’t reply, taking a moment to assess his unexpected visitor.
She was pretty. Very pretty. Looked to be in her late twenties. Her fine blond hair was swept into a ponytail that brushed her shoulders, her cheeks a little pinkened by the strong autumn breeze that had turned his deep, covered porch into a wind tunnel. Of average height, she had to tilt her head back to meet his angry stare.
Her dark green eyes had quickly narrowed with determination when she’d seen him. The woman’s small jaw was thrust out a tiny bit, as if she’d been steeling herself for something, and the way she held her slim form—squared shoulders, stiff back, frown—indicated she knew he wasn’t going to want to speak to her.
The car parked at the curb looked fairly new, the hood wasn’t up nor were any of the tires visibly flat, so she wasn’t a stranded motorist in search of a phone. Of course, he’d already known that, since she’d called him by name.