“The morning of April twenty-second. I had classes. When I came home, she was gone. I never even got a text goodbye. All her stuff is still here. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Are you afraid she’s gone back to the life?”
He shook his head. “She said she was done and I believed her. She got rid of her old phone, even. We were good together.” He sighed. “I wanted to save her from the past.”
Tim Lewis looked like a weak reed of a white knight, but his sincerity was obvious. I had gone through my white-knight phase. Now I was covered with tarnish. I made him go through the day she disappeared in detail. He had gone to classes at eight-thirty that morning. Grace was with the baby at home. When he returned around three that afternoon, she was gone. All she took was her purse and cell phone. She always carried pepper spray and a knife in that purse. Nothing had seemed unusual in their apartment.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?”
“I filed a missing person’s report the next day. The cops made me wait twenty-four hours and even then they didn’t take me very seriously. I could tell. They thought she’d left me. They said she was an adult and there wasn’t much they could do unless I had evidence of foul play. Of course, I couldn’t tell them she used to be a call girl.” He shook his head. “Anyway, AFP pays the cops off. Grace warned me. I was sure I’d eventually hear from her. I called hospitals for a week. Nothing.”
Grace would have been dead by the time he went to the police. But things fell through the cracks in every police department.
“Where’s her family?”
“They lived in Arizona.”
I asked him to get me their address and he did.
“What about a brother? Big guy? My size with close-cropped hair and a prosthesis on his lower leg?”
“She was an only child.”
I looked at the skinny kid with the cat crawling up his leg: I thought, dear old dad. I said, “Who is this Edward that the pimp was talking about?”
“I have no idea. I swear!”
So I told him she was dead and waited as he cried. It was a long wait. He said over and over that Grace would never kill herself, especially after the baby came.
Finally, I asked if he had any place he could go.
“My parents live up in Riverside. It’s a boring hellhole.”
“My advice is to go there. Right now. And stay awhile.”
He nodded, but it was obvious he was descending into a fog of grief, in addition to being beaten up. I made him repeat what he would do.
Go.
Now.
I handed him my business card.
“Private investigator,” he said quietly. “Are you trying to find out who killed Grace?”
“Yes.”
“I want to hire you.”
“We already have a client.”
He repeated his request. “I’ve got to know what happened to Grace. And I want the bastard who killed her to burn.” Misery shone in his watery, pale eyes.
“Okay.”
He reached under the cushions of the sofa and I tensed.
“Here’s five hundred.” He handed me a wad of cash. “Is that enough for a start?”