Enemies Closer (5 page)

Carlisle awkwardly pulled a handful of toilet paper off the roll and handed it to Clara. “We’re going to do everything we know how to find Maddy. I promise you that, Miss Gardner.”

And Clara believed her. But even as her tears subsided she knew that it might not be enough and she wouldn’t stop her own search. Friend or foe, she was determined to get to Ben Radcliffe before the cops scared him off.

Chapter Five

B
efore Carlisle and Kincaid left Maddy’s apartment, the redheaded detective asked if they could take Maddy’s laptop. Refusing, Clara told him she wanted to keep looking through it. The detective hadn’t argued, but she could tell he didn’t approve and after impatiently watching the elevator door close, she went straight to the computer to check Maddy’s email. But a ping from her phone got her attention first.

Hey! Got your message on FB. What’s with the East Coast number? I’m tied up with work stuff until noon. I’ll call then unless you have time for a quick coffee downtown?

Hell yeah, she had time for coffee. Would Maddy have time for coffee at noon on a Friday? Probably. This guy was either a gambler or he had no idea that Madeline had vanished. Maybe she should just tell him who she was.

Nah,
she thought.
Not yet.
The last time she was in town, there had been a little bar half a block from Dovetail that had local beer and good coffee. Manny’s? She looked it up on her phone to make sure it was still there before she asked Ben to meet her there. Lying would require some fact-checking. Hopefully she could give up the subterfuge when they met. She wrote back.

Sure. Noon at Manny’s?

His response didn’t come right away so Clara distracted herself by scanning her sister’s email. Nothing popped out at her. None of the subject lines said,
Send five million dollars by five o’clock tonight or else.
She closed the computer and fed Bea, changing her water dish while she was at it. Strange, satisfied snarls and snorts emanated from the cat as she started eating almost before the kibbles hit the dish. “Were you starving, Bea? I’m sorry I didn’t feed you right away. I was busy dealing with the fuzz.”

A few minutes later Bea followed Clara onto the balcony. It was another stunning day in Seattle. The sky was solid blue and sunshine glittered on Elliott Bay like it was made of diamond dust. Clara leaned on the steel and glass railing and looked down at the steady streams of pedestrians moving around Second Avenue, the smell of baking bread catching her attention and making her stomach growl. With a heavy feeling in her heart, she pulled her phone from the back pocket of her jeans. Time to check in with her parents.

Clara dialed their landline and hoped her dad would pick up. She knew that no matter how scared he was, he would tone it down for her sake. No such luck. Her mom was in full panic mode when she answered.

“Why hasn’t anyone found her?” she demanded after Clara had delivered a synopsis of the police investigation. “You have to talk to all of Maddy’s friends. Everyone. Because
someone
knows where my daughter is. I don’t understand what the police want in her apartment when it’s one place you know for certain that she is
not
!” And later, when they were getting off the phone because Clara couldn’t tell her anything else, “Keep on those detectives, Clara. I don’t care if you have to ride their asses to hell and back, Maddy has got to be their priority!”

You had to give it to her: Clara’s mom meant business. At least she had promised not to call the detectives and hound them herself. Not yet.

Ending the call, she checked her messages again. Nothing from Ben. Feeling discouraged, she dragged her feet to the sofa, sat down and closed her eyes.

And then her cell phone chirped.

Clara grabbed it and looked at the screen.

12 at Manny’s. See you then.

She smiled for the first time that day. Before she had let Kincaid look through her sister’s computer, she had deliberately logged out of Maddy’s Facebook and Twitter accounts so that he couldn’t poke around without a password. Now that he had agreed to meet her, there was still a chance she’d get to Ben Radcliffe before the police.

On their way to meet Michelle, Kincaid called the DMV from the passenger seat, requesting the driver’s license information for Michelle Perkins and Benjamin Radcliffe in Seattle.

Then he made another call and asked for a criminal history of Benjamin Radcliffe and Michelle Perkins. “Can you get some information on her family too? Husband, kids. And find out who owns a restaurant called Dovetail and any public info about the place.” He hadn’t forgotten that Clara had told him who owned the restaurant, but he wouldn’t be much of a detective if he took her word for it. “Email it all to me. Thanks.” He hung up and turned to his partner. “Someone somewhere in the mix has a record. That’s as good a place as any to start if nothing else pans out.”

“What do you think about the sister?”

Kincaid thought for a second. “She’s scared, but she’s got her own agenda. There’s no way to keep her away from this investigation. I just hope she doesn’t get in the way.” Then he added, “If you’re asking whether I think she could have anything to do with her sister’s disappearance, eventually we’ll have to look into it if we don’t get any leads, but I don’t see it.”

Two blocks from Dovetail, Carlisle found a place to park the unmarked. “Me neither, but she’s gonna end up pissing me off somewhere along the way.”

Kincaid didn’t disagree. For one thing, it was unusual for a person to actually log out of their Facebook and Twitter accounts on a personal computer locked up in a private residence. He would have expected to get into those accounts when Clara gave him permission to look through Madeline’s computer, but he hadn’t been able to. Plus, when he’d checked Instagram, it opened immediately, making him certain that Clara had manually logged out of the other two social networks. A lot of people forgot about Instagram and apparently Clara was one of them. Unfortunately when he’d looked through Maddy’s photos there were a lot of pictures of delicious-looking plates of food, but not many with friends or colleagues. He explained all of this to his partner as they walked.

“We should pressure Clara to let us take the computer into the lab,” replied Carlisle. “Tell her we may be able to get into Madeline’s accounts.”

“To crack the passwords? She doesn’t need us for that, Judy. She has the passwords. She wouldn’t have chanced logging off if she didn’t.”

“Then why didn’t you ask her for them? She was forthcoming about the name of Madeline’s date on Monday.”

“I would have if she had let me take the laptop. Nah, she doesn’t want us in there. Not yet anyway. She looked that Ben guy up and then closed out of those accounts so that we wouldn’t have it so easy. She wants to talk to him first.”

“We’re cops. It’s not going to be very hard to find him.”

“Wait to press her until we need to. Right now she’s being friendly. Letting us look around the apartment, letting me dig around the computer. I still had access to Madeline’s email, calendar, files.”

Carlisle shrugged, “All right. Anything on the calendar?”

“We have plenty of time to find out. I emailed it to myself.” Kincaid gave his partner a self-satisfied smile.

With a guffaw, she replied, “I knew you were good for something, Kincaid.”

The front door of Dovetail was locked at nine-thirty in the morning. Carlisle knocked while Kincaid sent a text message to Michelle Perkins’s cell phone. One of those things worked because a few seconds later they saw her come around the corner of the bar and wave.

Carlisle waved back with her badge and Michelle let them in and introduced herself. “Would either of you like coffee?”

“We’re fine, thank you. Let’s take a seat, Mrs. Perkins.” Carlisle made it a statement, not a question, subtly positioning herself as the bad cop, and the detectives followed her to a large table by a window.

“Have you found any sign of Maddy?” She directed the question toward Kincaid because he wasn’t frowning at her, but Carlisle answered.

“We’re making progress in the investigation, Mrs. Perkins. Do you have any idea where Madeline Gardner might be?”

Without bothering to hide her irritation, she said, “Where she might be? No. That’s why I contacted the police. If I had any idea where she might be then I would have checked that place before I filed a missing persons report.”

Kincaid put a hand up to stop her before she went on. “Do you have any idea what could have happened to her? Has anyone threatened her, or maybe the restaurant?”

“No. What could this have to do with the restaurant?”

Carlisle thought,
Well, by all accounts Madeline Gardner spends ninety percent of her waking life here,
but she said, “Just covering all the possibilities, Mrs. Perkins. What about threats to Miss Gardner?”

“If I’d known she was being threatened, I would have said something right away. Look, I don’t have any idea where she is or why, I just want you to find her and bring her home.”

“What about the restaurant?” Carlisle asked again.

“No. No. No!”

Michelle was beginning to sound hysterical and Kincaid responded in a mollifying tone, “Please don’t get upset, Mrs. Perkins. In order to find Madeline, we have to ask questions, lots of them, and I understand that some of those questions may seem obvious to you, but until we have the answers, we can’t stop asking the questions. We need your help to focus our investigation on the things that are relevant and rule out the things that aren’t.”

Kincaid finished the mini-lecture with a self-deprecating shrug and a head bob. A curl of coarse red hair came loose from his pompadour and bounced off of his forehead, making him look boyish and a little uncertain. Her partner could be slick as a fox when questioning a witness and Judy would have bet money that he shook that curl loose on purpose.

Michelle had managed to take a few deep breaths while Kincaid was talking to her and her shoulders relaxed a little. “I’m sorry, detectives, I’m just so scared and so exhausted and so stressed out.”

“Perfectly understandable,” said Kincaid, pushing his hair out of his face. “You must be under a lot of pressure, running this place by yourself.”

“It’s been really hard, I’ll be honest. Running this restaurant with two people is a ton of work. Alone, it’s been totally overwhelming. Add to that, I’m afraid that something terrible happened to Maddy.”

“I can’t even imagine.” He pulled out a leather-bound notebook as if to indicate that now the questions were serious. “Let’s get through these questions so that you can get back to it. Is Madeline currently dating anyone?”

“No.”

“Even casually?”

“No. She would have told me.”

Carlisle jumped in. “We found indications in her apartment that she is sexually active. Is it possible that she is seeing someone and didn’t tell you?”

“Well, if she didn’t tell me, how would I know? Anyway, don’t all single women have condoms around just in case they have sex?”

It was almost the same thing the sister had said to her earlier, and it was probably true, but her job during this interview was to push a little. Kincaid’s job was to placate. He said, “We really have to be sure about a boyfriend or lover, Mrs. Perkins, because in cases like this, if something bad happened, ninety percent of the time, that’s who did it.”

Michelle sighed. “I
really
don’t know of anyone, and I
really
think I would. We’re so busy here that it’s even hard to find time for friends, let alone start a new relationship. I hardly have time to be married and Eddie’s part of the business.”

Carlisle raised her eyebrows and Kincaid made a note. He asked, “Eddie is your husband?”

“Yes, and partner.” After a pause she said, “The last guy Maddy dated ended in the fall. Right around Halloween. And I think it ended because he wanted to spend more time with her and she couldn’t. Something like that – it didn’t seem like a big deal to her, and like I said, we don’t have much personal time. Our restaurant has done really well but Seattle is a competitive place for restaurateurs and we’re still a relatively new place. We have to work our asses off to keep the menu fresh and lively and maintain a good staff and a nice ambience, all on a tight budget.”

Kincaid nodded sympathetically. “Do you remember the name of the man Maddy was dating?”

She thought for a moment. “Jack something. I don’t remember his last name, but maybe it’ll come to me. He seemed pretty normal though, and she never mentioned that he was bugging her after they broke up. In fact, he might have broken up with her because of the time thing. I just don’t remember.”

“Where did she meet him?” asked Carlisle.

“Probably online. That’s where everyone meets these days.”

Carlisle thought they might find a record of him on Madeline’s computer.

“No one since then,” she went on. “Although she flirts with everybody.” Michelle smiled ironically. “She’s a heartbreaker.”

“Anyone in particular?” asked Kincaid.

“No. She really flirts with
everybody
. Not sexually, I don’t mean that. She’s just very friendly with people. Men, women, children, gay, straight, old, young. She just turns on her high-beam smile and bats her eyelashes and charms everyone. If she weren’t such an incredible chef, she would be perfect in the front of the house. Or on Broadway.” She smiled again, this time with real mirth. “Maddy’s appealing to everyone.”

Carlisle didn’t smile. “Is she appealing to anyone strange? Someone who comes to the restaurant and asks for her too often, or who has made a pass at her that was inappropriate?”