Strangers (12 page)
Faye was hardly back from her trip to town when Daniel and Suzanne brought the leftovers from breakfast out to Faye’s work site and treated the archaeological team to lunch.
“We can’t serve this stuff again tomorrow. People will notice, and they expect fresh food at these prices. It’s still good, and it tastes wonderful, if I do say so myself. You people might as well eat it.”
Suzanne handed Faye a loaded plate and added, “Especially you, Faye. Here’s some protein and iron and vitamin C and calcium and a whole lot of other good stuff.”
She placed a sprig of parsley on the plate then, thoughtfully, she picked it up and moved it a half-inch closer to the plate’s rim. Faye didn’t think the placement of a bit of green stuff rated the intense concentration on Suzanne’s face, but she had to admit that the plate looked noticeably better after Suzanne moved the garnish.
Next to the parsley was a big chunk of egg casserole and a dollop of fruit salad with sour cream dressing. The baby would thank her, but her arteries might not.
The aroma of bacon and cheese rising from the eggs made Faye hungry for the first time in days. Hang the cholesterol. Today, she’d act like a pregnant woman, instead of a 40-year-old hoping to avoid a stroke. This food smelled
good
.
She took the fork Suzanne offered. “Thank you so much. I could sure use some protein and iron and all that jazz.”
“And some calories. You could sure use some calories, too.” Suzanne cast an evaluating eye on Faye’s body, head to toe. “That baby’s not much smaller than you are. Eat up. I promise it’ll taste better than those pregnancy vitamins. I remember that awful iron after-taste…”
Suzanne drifted away, dispensing already-loaded plates from a rolling cart. Faye stood, plate in hand, watching her. Daniel and Suzanne had no children. If Suzanne was intimately familiar with the flavor of prenatal vitamins, then that meant…
“We lost a child,” Daniel said, answering her unspoken question. Faye blushed, realizing that she’d been staring at Suzanne. “Annie had leukemia. She was ten. That’s when we sold everything up north and moved down here. I just couldn’t stand practicing law for another second. I was never the tough, driven trial attorney in the family, anyway. Suzanne was the brilliant litigator, not me. I’d rather play tennis. Suzanne left our practice to take care of Annie, and she was too fragile after we lost our little girl to even consider going back in the courtroom. There was an awful time when I thought I’d lose her, too. She’d inherited this place when her father died a few years back, and we both wanted to leave everything behind. Sometimes, you need to start over.”
A tall man flung open the back door of Dunkirk Manor, making just enough noise for everyone in the garden to notice and lingering just long enough in the open doorway for everyone to see him. Then he strode across the big yard, heading straight for Daniel and Suzanne. They rushed to meet him.
“Alan,” Suzanne said, “we’ve been so worried about you. Did you get my call? Has there been any word on Glynis?”
Alan Smithson shook his dark-haired head wordlessly in her direction, the action of a man who knew the rules of polite behavior but who had been pushed to the brink.
He spoke instead to her husband. “I waited for a ransom note for twenty-four hours.
Twenty-four hours.
It didn’t come. So now I know they weren’t after my money.” He shook his head again, as if he could hardly believe it. “They weren’t after my money. They were after my daughter.”
His mouth worked, but it refused to form any more words. Suzanne ran for the cart, poured a glass of ice water, and thrust it into his hand. Alan gulped the whole thing down.
“I think it’s your fault, both of you.”
Daniel took a step back in the face of Alan’s anger and put a hand on the small of Suzanne’s back.
Alan moved like a man trained in hand-to-hand combat. He stepped into the space vacated by his adversary, Daniel, and kept talking. “You put her in that ad. You let her be the face of something controversial.”
“Why should preserving the past be controversial?” There was a slight quaver to Suzanne’s voice, but it somehow made Faye want to congratulate her for speaking up in the face of Alan Smithson and his practiced intimidation techniques.
Alan looked at Suzanne as if she were a five-year-old. “Because preserving the past costs money. The preservationists who hid behind my daughter’s pretty face know how much money is at stake in the development business. They knew it then, and they know it now. The new preservation-friendly board that rode to election on my daughter’s elegant coattails will cost me something on the order of six figures, maybe seven, but I’ll survive. With the economy like it is, some of my competitors won’t be able to do that. They’ll be bankrupt in a year. You don’t think one of them might want to scare the new board into voting the right way…their way?”
Faye was struck by Alan’s certainty that Glynis’ disappearance was linked to money. In his world, either someone kidnapped her because they wanted some of his money, or else they did it because they blamed her for the loss of their own money. He could think of no other possible motive.
What about Glynis herself? A woman that beautiful would always be sexually vulnerable. Had her father not thought of that? Or maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to think of that.
The first suspect in any crime against a woman is generally the man in her life. In this case, the man in Glynis’ life was missing, too. Detective Overstreet hadn’t said he was focusing his investigation on Lex, but he’d be a fool if he didn’t.
Faye couldn’t help herself. “Why are you blaming Daniel and Suzanne when your daughter’s boyfriend is missing, too? Don’t you think Lex might have taken her?”
“Impossible,” Alan stated with the blustering certainty of a rich man. “I know the man. He…” The bluster faded. “Well, frankly, I’m concerned that he’s been harmed by the people going after my daughter. I can’t believe…”
He cleared his throat and tried again. “Lex has been part of my daughter’s life…my life…for two years now. His parents are my friends. I just can’t believe he would have hurt Glennie. If he did…”
Suzanne stepped forward, as if to touch his arm, but she didn’t follow through. Her hand hung in mid-air, touching nothing.
Alan found his voice. “I’ve spoken with Lex’s family and they’re outraged that the media is treating his disappearance like a footnote to my daughter’s. So am I.”
Faye wasn’t at all convinced that Alan’s concern extended beyond his daughter’s safety to Lex’s.
And what about the possibility of random violence? Was Alan really ignoring the possibility that Glynis and Lex had been caught up in a purse snatching gone bad? Or the possibility that they had crossed paths with a serial killer who murdered for no reason at all?
Faye suspected that Alan Smithson couldn’t comprehend the notion of killing for no reason at all, because it didn’t fit with his world view. And that world view was simple: Alan Smithson and his money sat squarely at the center of the universe.
***
Detective Overstreet reached for a cigarette, but pulled his hand away from the pack without touching it. He was a nicotine addict, for sure, but he wasn’t so much of a junkie that he’d let a pregnant woman sit cooped up in his car beside him, breathing his second-hand smoke. He was having second thoughts about the wisdom of hiring a pregnant woman to help him in the first place.
The woman was interesting, he’d give her that. “The crucifix is probably very old,” she was saying, “maybe as old as St. Augustine itself. There’s a decent chance that all the artifacts you found are that old—musket balls, crucifix, beads, celt, blade, bone. The age of the crucifix alone ramps up the significance of Glynis’ note. If someone was tampering with an unreported archaeological site of that age…”
Detective Overstreet had grown up in St. Augustine, and that upbringing generally put you in one of two camps. You either had a certain reverence, even awe, for the cool old stuff you saw every day. Or you were thoroughly bored with the constant carping over how old the bricks were in the pothole-strewn street in front of your house, which did nothing but make you wish for some nice smooth asphalt. And you wholeheartedly wished the flippin’ tourists would go home and stay there.
Overstreet liked the old stuff, himself, and if there were people out there abusing it, then he wanted Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth to help him find them.
“Betsy says that this visit to the county growth management people will tell us where construction is going on in the county.” She patted one slender, short-nailed hand on her armrest. Its skin was the color of dark honey. “Nothing we see today will tell us much of anything, though. Nobody’s going to put a piece of paper in their file that says, ‘Dug up a real old crucifix today. Tossed it in the landfill to keep the damn preservationists off my back.’ Today, we’ll find out where the currently active construction projects are, and that’s all. We’re going to have to go out and look at the construction sites themselves. Even that won’t tell us much, unless somebody’s raping history at the very moment we arrive.”
“Then why did you suggest that we do this?”
The honey-colored hand rubbed a cheek made puffy and blotchy by hormones. Overstreet remembered when his wife had been this pregnant. Three times, she’d looked this tired and this uncomfortable.
“We’re going out there because people have consciences,” she said. “Somebody dug up those artifacts. What did they do with them? Throw them away someplace where Glynis found them? Give them to Glynis because they knew she cared? Somebody knows where those artifacts—museum-quality artifacts, from the looks of some of them—came from. That somebody probably knows that Glynis had them. Now that her disappearance has hit the media, that person’s conscience is going to be screaming, right about now. Anyone in that position who isn’t feeling some blame for her predicament is a sociopath.”
“So you think that if we go out to the site and just…hang around…someone might come to us privately and spill the beans?”
“It would probably be smarter if I went without you. People get very quiet when the police come around. Maybe you’ve noticed that?” She crossed her arms and grinned like a woman who knew what he was about to say.
And she did. Overstreet wasn’t about to be distracted by her smart-ass tendencies.
“That’s what Miss Smithson was trying to do, and look what happened to her.”
Damn. He was right back where he’d started. Despite the fact that they had no plans for this day beyond paperwork, there was still a danger that he might be putting his civilian consultant in harm’s way, and he didn’t want to do that.
There was no way in hell he would ever show her the photos stored in his phone’s memory. The wide shot of Glynis’ sleek expensive car sitting empty with the driver door hanging open. The close-ups of blood smeared across the pristine leather seat. The mid-range shots depicting the positions of the broken celt and the broken blade and the blood-sodden envelope. And the very graphic shot showing just how much blood had soaked into the ground in Dunkirk Manor’s employee parking lot.
“Has the lab come up with anything, based on the samples they took from the parking lot?”
Overstreet could see that she was going to keep poking into the most gruesome parts of this crime until he told her to shut up, or until he broke down and told her the whole bloody truth.
“Footprint analysis from the parking lot hasn’t been all that useful. The forensic technicians were dealing with pea gravel and patches of weedy grass and soil packed hard as iron. They did find three partial footprints—”
“Wait. Let me guess. Glynis, the gardener, and…Lex?”
“Close. Glynis and the gardener were gimmes, although the conditions were so bad that the technicians could even have missed those. But no Lex. Just Sara the housekeeper.”
“She walks through that lot twice a day, at least.”
“Exactly.” If he closed his eyes and forgot Faye was an archaeologist toting a Ph.D. and a nearly done bun in the oven, Overstreet could believe he was talking shop with another detective, a partner. “Sara was seen arriving at work at six-thirty, about the time Glynis was on film at the convenience store. So her footprints were
supposed
to be there. There was also plenty of scuffing that proved what we already knew—the entire staff of Dunkirk Manor comes through there every day. Beyond the expected amount of scuffing from foot traffic, I’d say there was enough evidence to suggest a struggle near Glynis’ car, but we’ve basically got nothing useable, footprint-wise.”
“Tire prints?”
“The only interesting tire print data that we have is negative. The whole parking lot is covered in a web of tire tracks, and not many of them are readable. Those that are readable seem to belong to cars that had every right to be there, the cars of Dunkirk Manor employees. Lex Tilton, however, drives a vintage Corvette with extremely expensive specialty tires. We see no sign that his car has ever been in that lot.”
Faye hadn’t even thought about Lex’s car. “Do they know where that Corvette is?”
“In the driveway of the very nice historic home where he lived with Glynis, not three blocks from Dunkirk Manor. Apparently, she hardly ever drove to work.”
“Does it mean anything that she drove yesterday?”
“Maybe she had a fight with her boyfriend and left in the car just so she could get him out of her sight. That would explain why she was out and about so early. Or maybe her car was running on empty and she just needed to get some gas. Or maybe she’s addicted to convenience store coffee. We just don’t know.”
“So we know that she got gas on her way to work, although we can’t be sure where she was coming to work
from
. Probably from her house, but we don’t have proof of that. Her car got as far as Dunkirk Manor, and its seats are smeared with blood that’s Glynis’ type. We don’t really know where Lex slept or where he’s been since…”
“You are the witness who saw him last,” Overstreet pointed out.
“Then we don’t know where he’s been since night before last. But we know he’s missing and that he’s not in his own car or in his girlfriend’s. Do we know his blood type?”