Cry Mercy (8 page)

“Let's go back to the weekend your niece went missing. You were out of town?”

He nodded. “I was in Los Angeles at a car show, had been there since Tuesday of that week. When I got home on Monday night, there was a call from her roommate on my answering machine, asking if Belinda had come home for the weekend. Said she'd left their sorority house on Saturday morning, that they had tickets for a concert on Sunday night, but Belinda
never showed up. I called the police in Eastwind and when they tried to ignore me, I drove there and made them take a report. I'm sure you've seen the police reports. I sent in everything I had with my application.”

“Why did they ignore you?”

“They said she'd probably gone off for the weekend and forgot to tell anyone.”

“And you didn't think that was likely?”

“No. If she was going away for an entire weekend, she'd have told someone. Deb, maybe, or me, if she was going to be away for more than a day or two. She wouldn't just go and stay away and not let me or Deb know.”

“So you told the police this and they made a report. Then what?” She gestured for him to continue.

“Then they interviewed the girls in the house, and they looked around her room hoping to find something that might give them a clue, where she might have gone. But there wasn't anything.” He looked at the ground. “I looked too, when they were finished, in case they missed something.”

Emme tapped her pen on the top of her notebook. “I know it's been asked before, but can you think of any reason why Belinda would want to walk away from her life?”

“That's a nice way of saying run away,” he observed dryly. “No, no reason I know of. Her roommate told me she wasn't dating anyone in particular, that she hadn't mentioned anyone stalking her or paying undue attention to her, or following her. Deb—that's her roommate, Debra Newhouse—said Belinda was just enjoying her sophomore year. She was into all the activities at her sorority house, but
she was also focusing a lot on her grades. She spent a lot of time in the library, Deb said. Beyond that, I don't know what else I can tell you.”

Emme pulled a folder from her bag and opened it. She removed a sheet of paper and slid it across the desk to him. “This is from the police file you sent us. It's a copy of the page from Belinda's datebook for Saturday, January twenty-fourth.”

“The day she disappeared,” he noted as he reached for the copy.

“She has initials circled there.” Emme pointed.

“D.S., yes. The police asked me if I knew whose initials they are.” He shook his head from side to side. “Like I told them, I have no idea. I'm afraid I really don't know any of her friends, except for Deb.”

“Maybe by now, she or one of the other girls in the sorority house has thought of someone.” Emme reached across the desk and dragged the sheet of paper back toward her with one finger. She slid it back into the folder.

“I'm guessing you'll be contacting her?”

“I'll be meeting with her this afternoon.”

“You'll let me know if there's anything new?” he asked.

“Of course. Is there anything you can add … maybe something that's occurred to you since you sent in the application?”

“No. I wish there were, but no. There's nothing. She's just … gone.”

“By the way, what happened to your niece's things from her room at school?”

“The housemother boxed everything up and sent it to me. It didn't occur to me to clean out her room
when I was there, but when the semester ended and she wasn't there, they thought it was best to send it home.”

“Have you gone through her things? Maybe there's something there—a note, a letter, something that the police might have missed.”

“I didn't really go through the boxes. Like I said, I looked through her desk and all when I was there.” He paused. “Do you think there might be something there?”

Emme shrugged. “It's possible. Maybe you could take a little time over the weekend to find out.”

“I'll drive out to the house later and take a look. Would you want to come along?”

“I really would, but tonight's out. I'm pretty much tied up until Monday.” She and Chloe had some house hunting to do tomorrow and she wanted to get an early start.

Emme tucked the file back into her bag and stood. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

“You're kidding, right?” He stood as well. “This is my niece we're talking about here. I appreciate your organization taking on her case, more than I can say. I had hired a private investigation firm, but didn't feel overly confident in them. Plus, let's not talk about the expense. They told me up front it could take months. I'd have had to mortgage my business to have kept them on. After six weeks they had nothing for me except a whopping bill.”

“Well, the foundation was set up to take on cases like this. Ones the police haven't been able to move off dead center. We'll give it our best, Mr. Perone.”

“Nick,” he told her. “Call me Nick.”

She removed a card from her bag. “I don't have any cards of my own yet, but this one has the numbers of the foundation on it, and I added my new cell number as well.” She glanced at the card as she passed it to him, then said, “Oh, give it back and I'll add my name to it.”

“No need.” He tucked the card into his back pocket and smiled for the first time since she'd arrived. “I'll remember your name. Emme Caldwell, right?”

“Right.” She nodded, wondering how long it would take for the name to stop sounding strange to her ear, how long before she'd stop feeling like a total fraud. “Emme Caldwell.”

The drive from Khoury's Ford to Eastwind on the opposite side of the Chesapeake took just over an hour. Emme found the police station housed in the newly constructed municipal building right past a sign that read
WELCOME TO EASTWIND, MARYLAND, HOME OF THE EASTWIND HURRICANES
. Chief of Police Edward Dietrich was standing in the lobby talking to the receptionist when Emme entered through the automatic glass doors.

“I just came out here to tell Kate I was expecting you,” he told Emme as he extended a beefy hand in her direction. “Come on back to my office.”

He led the way to the first office off the hall.

“Have a seat there next to the desk, Ms. Caldwell.” He sat on one end of his desk and stared down at her. “So you're here about the girl that went missing from the college back a few months.”

“Yes. Belinda Hudson.”

“You been on the job?” He narrowed his eyes to study her. “You have that look about you.”

“Seven years,” she told him. “In California.”

“Well, then you'll understand what I mean when I say that I'm happy to turn it over to you. That case has been a pain in my ass since day one.” He paused before adding, “We charge ten cents a page for copying, by the way. I explained that to the lady who called.”

“I'm sure that's not a problem.”

“Yeah, this was just one of those cases that started out bad, right out of the gate, you ever have one of them?”

Emme nodded. “I don't know a cop who hasn't.”

He shook his head, and a strand of white hair flipped onto his forehead. “I've been a cop for almost forty years, and I never had a case where there were no clues. Nothing. That girl just walked out of that house on College Avenue and disappeared into the mist, just like you see on TV. You know those shows about missing people, how they just sort of evaporate? That's what this girl did. She just evaporated.”

“Well, there's the datebook with the initials—” Emme pointed out.

He kept on going as if he'd not heard. “No one saw her leave the house that day, no one saw her on campus, no one saw her—period. We interviewed damn near everyone who was on campus that weekend, and spent two days making the rounds of the shops on Main Street. Nothing. A lot of folks knew her, but no one had seen her on Saturday morning. Now, that could be due to the early hour she left the house.”

“She left a little before seven, I think the report said.”

“That's what the roommate told us. Said she was half asleep but she knows that the Hudson girl was there because she borrowed some money from her. The roommate figured she was going to grab a coffee somewhere there on campus, then go on to the library, the way she usually did.”

“Chief, do you have her datebook?”

He nodded. “I do. Did you want to look at it?”

“I would, thank you.”

“Just a second, and I'll have that brought out for you. We have several boxes of interviews—you're welcome to go through them, too, if you like.”

Emme turned her wrist to look at her watch. She had a few hours before she had to meet with Belinda's roommate. “I'd like that, yes.”

“We can set you up in the office next door—we're waiting for the town council to approve a new hire for us. Built us this nice new space but didn't give us the money to put any more officers on board. Though with the college complaining to the mayor every week that the girl is still missing, you'd think someone would think it would be a good idea to put a few more uniforms on the street.”

He shoved himself off the desk and disappeared into the hall, then returned a few minutes later, telling her, “They're going to bring the files down for you in a few, along with the evidence box.”

“Chief, I appreciate you being so cooperative,” she said. As a cop, she'd found most departments to be highly territorial, but Chief Dietrich didn't appear to be holding anything back.

“Hey, the sooner it becomes your problem, the sooner it's no longer mine,” he told her bluntly. “I got enough problems in other areas without having the mayor, the council members, the college, parents of kids at the college, all on my back. If you can find this girl, that'll be great. But in the meantime, people call me, I tell them to call you, far as I'm concerned.”

“That will be fine, Chief,” she said evenly.

“You think you'll do a better job than we did?”

“This is my only case right now, Chief. If your guys had the luxury of devoting all their time to one case, I imagine by now we'd have some idea of what happened to Belinda Hudson,” she answered, as diplomatically as she could. “I know how hard it is to work a complex case like this, to watch it grow cold, and meanwhile the new cases are stacking up on the desk. So no, to answer your question, I don't think I'll do a better job than your people did. I just think I'll have more time to do it.”

He nodded, satisfied with her response.

“Hey, just think of me as that extra set of hands you always wish you had around here.” She tried to sound chipper.

A uniformed cop stuck his bald head through the door. “Chief, the files are on the desk, like you asked.”

“Thanks, Feldman. Take Ms. Caldwell next door and see that she gets what she needs.” The chief turned to Emme. “There's a copier at the end of the hall there, if you need it. Just keep track of how many you run. Council's been driving us crazy down here, keeping track of every damned thing.”

“I'll be sure to do that, thanks. And thanks for everything. We appreciate it.”

“Good luck with the case. You'll keep us in the loop?”

“Of course. It's still your case.”

“Right. You're just ‘the extra set of hands,’” he said as she walked past. “But if you settle the case, I guess the press is going to be real good for your organization.”

“Mine and yours.” She smiled. “Like I said, it's still your case. If there's an arrest to be made in Eastwind, it's going to be your collar.”

He stared at her. “You crack it here, you're turning it back over to us?”

“That's right. You're the law here.” She'd already figured out that everything the foundation did was going to be scrutinized, that word in the law enforcement community traveled fast, and that she had to make nice with the cops into whose cases she'd be interjecting herself. She might as well start now, with the first case. Besides, other than making a citizen's arrest, what jurisdiction did she really have here?

The smile still plastered on her face, she followed the officer to the next room and dropped her bag next to the desk. There were seven boxes piled on top, in no particular order. She only had a few hours to go through them.

“Oh, Chief?” she called back to him. When he appeared in her doorway, she asked, “What about Belinda's computer? Has it been found?”

He shook his head, “No. She must have taken it with her. Sorry. No computer, no phone.”

“The records from the phone company?”

“Should be in one of those boxes. We didn't get a whole lot of information from them, though. As often as kids use those things, you'd have thought we'd come up with more than some calls home and a couple of wrong numbers…”

T
he Theta Phi Sigma sorority house at Chestertown College was set on a slight rise directly across College Avenue from the library, and bore its name on a banner that stretched across the front porch from one end to the other. The house itself was light gray, well-maintained stucco with a narrow drive that ran along one side and ended in a tiny parking lot out back. Emme hadn't realized just how tiny until she attempted to park there. Exasperated after several attempts to fit her car into any available space, she backed out of the lot onto the busy street, cursing under her breath all the way, just as classes were changing. She drove around the corner and parked in a metered spot. Finding that she lacked the proper change did nothing to improve her mood. She decided to leave the car next to the expired meter and take her chances with the meter maids.

A young woman seated in a rocking chair on the far end of the porch called to her as she walked toward the sorority house.

“Ms. Caldwell?”

“Yes. Are you Debra Newhouse?”

The girl nodded.

Emme joined her on the porch and took a seat in the rocker next to hers.

“Has anyone found out anything about Belle?” Debra asked.

“Belle … you mean Belinda?”

“Everyone called her Belle.” Debra's voice was thin, her eyes red rimmed as if she'd been crying. “When you called, I was hoping that you'd have some good news to tell us. We've all been so upset about her. But you go along and after a while, you don't think about it all day every day like you do at first. I felt so guilty after you called, because I hadn't thought about her yesterday.” Deb's eyes filled with tears.