“If she had one, we couldn’t find it.” Taj stared up at her. “And we looked.”
“Okay. So maybe she just took off.”
“Probably.”
“Can you forward what you’ve got on her to me?”
Taj was nodding. “You got it.”
“Thanks.”
Alvarez left the Missing Persons department with a bad feeling she just couldn’t shake.
No bodies.
No crime scenes.
But now three missing women.
Where the hell were they?
Calvin Mullins had never liked the police. No matter what shape or size, cops made him nervous, even Cort Brewster, one of the deacons in the church and an undersheriff with the county sheriff ’s department. A pious man, stalwart in his faith, devoted husband and loving father of breathtakingly beautiful daughters, Brewster was, nonetheless, a cop and that bothered the preacher.
Today in the church office, he was faced with another member of the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department. This one, Detective Regan Pescoli, was causing him to sweat beneath his crisp shirt and sharkskin jacket. He was seated at his desk, his sermon printed out as
he just went over it in highlighter, hoping to beef up some of the more salient points, when Pescoli, a brash, arrogant woman if he’d ever seen one, had knocked and stepped inside.
“Your wife said you’d be here,” she’d said before introducing herself and taking a chair without him inviting her inside. Just then Lorraine had texted, and his cell phone, on vibrate, had nearly skittered across his desk, as the warning, “Police detective on her way to see you,” appeared a little too late on the screen. That was the trouble: Lorraine had never learned to text properly and quickly.
High-tech, Lorraine was not, but she was a faithful and forgiving wife, mother of his three daughters.
Pescoli was beautiful, in that hard-edged, woman-in-control way that he found a little bit of a turn-on. A few inches shy of six feet, she stood tall, and what he could see of her hair reddish brown-blond, and a little unkempt. Intelligent eyes assessed him.
He pasted a smile onto his face and hoped it appeared beatific. “What can I do for you?” he said, standing as he shook her hand.
His office was small but neat, decorated with hardbound books on philosophy and religions of the world, given just the right amount of color with pictures on the wall of the Lord and beautiful spots on earth, as well as his framed degrees and awards. Though he believed that pride was a sin, accomplishments were certainly proof of piety, struggle and self-improvement: all good qualities.
A small basket of poinsettias sat on one corner of his desk. Lorraine always made certain that flowers in season, “God’s handiwork,” graced his office.
“I’d like to talk to you about Brenda Sutherland.”
“Has she been found?” he asked hopefully. He truly admired Brenda and her faith, her difficulty in raising two stubborn boys alone.
“Not yet.”
“Oh, dear. I pray she comes home safely,” he said and meant it.
“You saw her recently?”
“Yes. Of course. I pop my head into the study groups when I can, and Brenda was with my wife’s group the other night. They were discussing our giving tree.” He folded his hands over his sermon, left over right, showing off his wedding ring.
But, as the cop asked a few more questions, he felt his tie tightening and beads of sweat dotting his back. He gave a short history of his ministry, neglecting to mention that he was originally from Bad Luck, Texas, though, from the degrees on the wall, it was obvious that he’d graduated from Southern Methodist University. That’s where he met and married Lorraine.
“So how did you end up here, in Grizzly Falls?”
He spread his hands. “I go where the church needs me,” he said, and it really wasn’t a lie. After spending a decade basking in the warm Arizona sun at a parish in Tucson, there had been a problem, a minor indiscretion with an eighteen-year-old daughter of Cecil Whitcomb, one of the church deacons. Peri had come to him for guidance and he hadn’t been able to ignore her lips, always glossy and full, her tongue, how it flicked against her teeth so seductively, or the pull of her T-shirts across breasts that could fill a man’s hands and then some.
Peri had needed comforting during the time of her parents’ separation.