“Mmm.” She didn’t seemed convinced. “Detective Williams has been advised to keep us in the loop, but he insists you’ve been important to the case; he wants you to work with him,” Chandler said, perusing a file.
“Good.”
“We’re all on the same side here,” Halden pointed out. Slouching just a bit in his uncomfortable chair, Craig Halden was the friendlier of the two, almost seemed like the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with. However, that could be all an act, a way to get O’Kee
fe to open up. Halden didn’t have that cold exterior that Agent Chandler worked so hard to exude. From her blue eyes to her platinum hair to the set of her jaw and unsmiling lips, everything about her was about as warm as New Year’s Eve in Alaska. Never displaying any emotion, Stephanie Chandler was as much an automaton as O’Keefe had ever seen in a woman, as much as he’d ever want to see. Halden said, “We’re all part of a team. You, us—” Flipping his hand back and forth to indicate both himself and Chandler, he added, “Grayson and his deputies, including Detective Alvarez, we’re all just trying to nail some bad dude’s ass to the wall.”
“I agree.” O’Keefe said, reassessing his opinion of the agents. So they weren’t idiots. Nor morons. But they were didactic, it seemed, in their quest to be thorough. And time was ticking by; O’Keefe felt each second as it passed. “So let’s work together. I need to find Gabriel Reeve.”
“And we need to find ourselves a killer,” Halden said, even offering his good-old-boy smile that seemed genuine enough, though it didn’t quite touch his eyes.
“Let me get this straight,” Pescoli said to the caller on the other end of the line. She had one arm through her jacket and had been on her way home when her cell phone had jangled and she’d caught it on the fly. “You got my number from Luke Pescoli?”
“Yeah, uh, he said you were his ex and that you were a detective with the sheriff ’s department.”
Terrific!
“And he gave you my personal cell phone number?” she clarified, ready to kill her ex-husband, not for the first time. Resting her hips against the edge of her desk, she shrugged out of her jacket and watched as it fell to the floor of her office.
“Yeah. Look, I’m worried. Because of my girlfriend, Johnna, uh, Johnna Phillips, she didn’t come home last night. And, you know, with everything that’s happening around here, I got worried, so I called up Lucky and he said I should call you.”
Pescoli sighed and grabbed a piece of paper she kept near her computer monitor.
“What’s your name again?”
“Carl. Anderson. I worked with your husband when I drove a truck.”
“I got that and he’s my ex-husband.”
“Oh, yeah. He said that.”
Amen for small blessings.
“Your girlfriend’s name is Johnna Phillips?”
“Yeah, but, oh, technically, she’s kinda my ex, too.”
“How kinda?”
“We broke up the night before last.”
That explained a lot. “And now she won’t take your calls?” This was beginning to sound like a wild goose chase. She caught the neckline of her jacket with the edge of her boot, kicked it upward and caught it in her free hand.
“It’s not like that. And I went to the house and she hasn’t been back since last night when she went to that bank party. She works for First Union. In the loan department. And her car isn’t at the apartment and she hasn’t been back. I still have a key and I went in, you know, to try and work things out, and she wasn’t there.”
“Maybe she went home with ... a friend?” Pescoli suggested, thinking the guy on the other end of the connection was dumb as a stone. The girlfriend had probably just moved on, hopefully to someone with a higher IQ and a better set of acquaintances than a group that included Lucky Pescoli.
You married him. You chose him to be the father of your daughter. People in glass houses ...
“I don’t think so. She hadn’t been feeling all that sharp and she was just going to the party because it was kind of, you know, expected. What did she call it? A royal something or other?”
“Command performance?”
“Yeah, that was it!” he said, amazed.
“Have you called all her friends?”
“Oh, yeah. And her sister and ... and that Stephanie chick from the bank. No one’s seen her and Stephanie said they had plans to meet up today and walk in the park. Johnna didn’t show; but she thought maybe she just slept in. But she didn’t.”