He read the Wall Street Journal and played a game of Scrabble on his phone, all the while stewing in resentment over being ignored. An hour crawled by. When he couldn’t stand the inactivity any longer, he took to swearing under his breath, and, when he got truly fed up, he risked losing his seat by leaving it to go to the reception window and demanding that the deputy seated there summon Sergeant Detective Sam Knight immediately.
A few minutes later, Knight came through the connecting door, seeming to be in no apparent hurry, uselessly trying to tug his off-the-rack trousers up over his belly. “Must be mental telepathy, Jeff. I was just about to come get you. Come on back.”
He was Jeff now?
Knight held the door for him. The lady with the collapsed barn roof was no longer in the squad room. Personnel were talking to one another or on their phones. Some were at their computers. But no matter how they were engaged independently, they simultaneously paused to follow his progress over to Knight’s desk, where Grange was already waiting, looking as dour as an undertaker.
“Oh God,” Jeff moaned. “What’s happened?”
Grange answered by pointing him into a chair.
He remained standing. “Damn you, answer me.”
“Nothing’s shaking so far,” Knight replied as he lowered himself into his desk chair. “Sit down, Jeff, please.”
“That’s all you people seem capable of doing. Sitting. Why aren’t you doing something constructive to find my missing wife?”
“We’re doing everything we can.”
“You’re just sitting her
e!”
Realizing he had called even more attention to himself, he sat down—hard—and glared at the two detectives.
Knight said, “It wouldn’t do any good for us to go chasing around, burning up fuel, when we don’t know where she went after she left the motel.”
“What about her credit cards? Wasn’t Marybeth—”
“Maryjo.”
“Whatever. Wasn’t she supposed to be checking on charges and ATM withdrawals?”
Grange joined in. “It would have speeded things up if you’d had Emory’s credit card numbers.”
“I explained that,” Jeff said, practically having to unclench his teeth to get the words out. “Emory has her accounts. I have mine. She pays her bills—”
“Actually she doesn’t.”
Jeff looked from Grange to Knight. “What’s he talking about?”
“The accountant who keeps the medical clinic’s books also pays Emory’s personal bills. He charges her a small stipend each month. He gave us her personal account numbers.”
“Great. Fantastic. Did Maryjo follow up?”
Knight said, “Friday afternoon shortly after leaving Atlanta, your wife gassed up her car using a credit card at a service station. We’ve got that transaction on security camera video. By the way, she was dressed just like you described.”
“Why would you think she wouldn’t be?”
“Could be she’d stopped somewhere between your house and the service station and…you know…switched clothes.” Before Jeff could respond to that inanity, Knight went on. “Anyhow, she charged her motel room to the same card and used it again to pay for her dinner on Friday night. None of her cards has been used since.”
Jeff gnawed his lower lip. “Since Friday night?”
“Do you know how much cash she had on her?”
He shook his head, then cleared his throat and said, “But I doubt it was much. She isn’t in the habit of carrying a lot. It’s sort of a joke between us. She never seems to have any cash.”
After a lapse of several moments, Grange said, “We’ve also retrieved her cell phone records. Last call she made was Friday evening.” He smiled, but it wasn’t a friendly expression. “To you.”