“I don’t even know if she had one. I saw her with Lara a couple of times. And . . . oh, maybe Maddie, because, you know, if the guys were looking at Destiny, then Maddie wanted to make sure they saw her, too.”
“What about Lindsay Cronin?”
“I guess.” She frowned. “I heard she was missing. Her mom called earlier.”
“Have you seen her?”
“Not since the other night. At the Big Foot thing.”
“What about texting or talking to her?”
“Same as everyone else, I guess. She’s on group texts, but no, not since that meeting. We like hung out, yeah, but more in school, y’know. In summer we all kinda do our own thing unless there’s a party or we hang out at the river or whatever.”
She rang for the elevator and the doors opened. They all entered, and Simone said, “God, I hate this job.” As the doors whispered shut and they started upward, Simone folded her arms across her chest and slumped against a polished wall. “You think it’s really gonna help me get into Harvard or Yale or Stanford or UCLA? Stacking sheets and counting cotton balls? I don’t think the people who are recruiting for college really give a rat’s ass about how neatly I can organize pillowcases.” The elevator car arrived with a ding. An orderly pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair waited until they stepped outside, then rolled his charge inside.
As they headed toward reception, afternoon light was streaming in from wide windows near the front entrance. Simone yanked the lanyard over her head, stuffed it into a pocket of her scrubs and withdrew a set of keys, then said, “Look I really gotta go. I don’t know anything else.”
“If you think of something, call us.”
“Sure.” She didn’t say it with conviction, but she did add, “I think my mom just wants me to be busy this summer, that’s what I think. So that I stay out of trouble.” She headed for the exterior doors.
Alvarez checked her messages as she and Pescoli followed Simone outside. At the Subaru, she was still scrolling through them. “Guess what?” she finally said, looking up.
“I couldn’t begin to,” Pescoli muttered as she levered herself into the passenger seat.
“Zoller texted me. The night Destiny Montclaire disappeared, she called and texted Donny Justison. But he wasn’t the only one. In separate texts, she also contacted Kywin Bell and Lindsay Cronin.”
CHAPTER 20
They caught up with Kywin Bell just hopping out of a battered Dodge truck in the driveway of his father’s house. The truck had been jacked up, the wheels oversized, the tailgate missing.
He saw the two cops approach. A scowl curved across his unshaven jaw. “I talked to you already,” he said, retrieving a beat-up lunch pail from the truck’s interior, then slamming the door shut.
“We just have a few more questions,” Alvarez said.
“Well, I’m all outta answers. You already nearly cost me my job, so I’m done.” He started for the house, a single-story post-war bungalow that was in need of more than just paint. The porch sagged, the shingles of the roof were curling and cracked, the gutters rusting.
“You’re not quite done,” said Pescoli.
Swatting at a bee, he spun around just before reaching the listing porch, lips compressed, nostrils flaring. “What is it with you cops, huh? Never satisfied. Always nagging. Just cuz my old man did time doesn’t mean I had anything to do with . . . with anything!”
A scrawny gray cat that had been sunning itself on the porch got up quickly and slunk behind a couple of metal chairs. With a quick look over its shoulder and a swish of its tail, the feline slid off the porch to hide in a clump of dry weeds. Kywin reached for the dilapidated screen door as Alvarez said, “Destiny texted you on the last night she was seen alive.”
“What?” He dropped his hands and stared at them in shock. Shaking his head, he reached into his jean pocket for a crumpled pack of cigarettes. “I never got no text.” He found a lighter, lit up, then blew smoke out of the side of his mouth in a fast stream.
“We have records from the cell company,” Alvarez told him. “The text is there.”
“They’re wrong. I didn’t get a text from her.”
He was so sure of himself, Pescoli started to wonder a bit as he left his cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth and dug in another pocket, located his cell phone and checked the screen, pressing buttons deftly before finding what he was looking for. “There,” he said, holding the phone, face out, to the cops.
Shading the screen with one hand, Pescoli studied the phone. A tiny head shot of Destiny appeared beside a thread of texts, which included another picture, a selfie of her in a pin
k bikini at a swimming hole by the river. Her head was cocked to one side, her eyes dancing mischievously, her grin a little seductive. The attached message read: Swimming @Cougar Springs. Join me after work? She’d ended it with an emoticon of a smiley face wearing sunglasses. There were no more texts.
Pescoli pointed out, “You could have deleted any message you got from her.”
“I didn’t! For shit’s sake, I told you, that’s the last message I got from her.”