Criminal (Will Trent 6)

Amanda fanned her face. The heat was even more stifling inside the car. She tried not to think about her telephone ringing in her empty apartment yesterday.

“It’s legal now, sweetheart. You don’t have to be married to get birth control anymore.”

Amanda’s laugh was genuine this time. “I think you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions.”

“Maybe, but it’s fun, isn’t it?”

It was humiliating, actually, but Amanda tried to hide that fact by looking at her watch again. “Did this consume your entire Sunday, or did you manage to think at all about what we’ve been doing?”

Evelyn rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding? It’s all that’s been on my mind for the last week. I was so distracted this morning I put salt instead of sugar in Bill’s coffee. Poor man drank half the cup before he realized what I’d done.” She paused for a breath. “What about you?”

“I’ve been going over Butch’s notes.” Amanda pulled the homicide detective’s notebook out of her purse. “See this here?” She pointed to the page for Evelyn’s benefit. The letters CI were circled twice.

“Confidential informant,” Evelyn said. She flipped back through the notebook. “Does he say anything else about it? A name, maybe?”

“Nothing, but a lot of Butch’s cases rely on CIs.” Most of them did, actually. The man was very good at finding criminals and lowlifes who were willing to parlay information into a get-out-of-jail-free card. “He never names his sources.”

“Oh, that’s sneaky.” She scanned the pages, stopping on a crude drawing of the apartment where Jane Delray had lived. “He left out the bathroom. Did he even search the place?” She answered her own question. “Of course he didn’t. Why would he?”

Amanda checked the time again. She didn’t want to be late for roll call. “We should go over what we’re doing today. I can call my friend at the Housing Authority when I get to work. Maybe we can find out who rented that apartment.”

Evelyn paused for a moment as she switched gears. “I’ll call Cindy Murray at the Five and see if she has time to check the confiscated-license box for a Lucy Bennett. At least we’ll have a photograph of her.”

“I don’t know what good it’ll do. Pete will have to sign off on the ID. It came from her own brother.” Neither she nor Evelyn had the nerve to contradict Hank Bennett’s identification of his sister. “Bennett hasn’t laid eyes on her in five or six years. Do you think he knew it wasn’t Lucy?”

“I think all he cared about was not being late for his dinner date.”

They were both silent. Amanda felt a ping-pong sensation inside her head. Thoughts kept bouncing around, getting lost. It was just too much to keep up with.

Evelyn was obviously feeling the same. She said, “Bill and I started a puzzle last night—bridges of the Pacific Northwest. Zeke picked it out for Father’s Day last month—and I thought, ‘This is exactly how I’ve felt all week. Like there are all of these different little pieces to a puzzle floating around out there, and if I could only put them together, maybe I’d be able to see the full picture.’ ”

“I know what you mean. All I do is ask myself questions, and I can’t seem to get a satisfactory answer to any of them.”

“Hey, I’ve got a crazy idea.”

“You cannot imagine my surprise.”

Evelyn gave her a sarcastic grimace, then leaned into the back seat of the station wagon.

“What are you doing?”

She snaked her body around into the back seat. Her legs went up. Amanda swatted the woman’s feet out of her face. She scanned the parking lot, praying they were not being watched.

“Evelyn,” she said. “What on earth?”

“Got it.” Finally, she shimmied back into her seat. She had a pack of construction paper in her hands. “Zeke’s crayons melted into the carpet. Bring your pen.” She pushed open the door.

Amanda got out of the car and followed her around to the front of the wagon. Evelyn took a piece of paper off the top of the pack and, using Amanda’s pen, wrote, “HANK BENNETT” on the page. Next, she took another page and wrote, “LUCY BENNETT,” then on another put, “JANE DELRAY.” She added “MARY” and “KITTY TREADWELL” into the mix, then “HODGE,” “JUICE/DWAYNE MATHISON,” and finally, “ANDREW TREADWELL.”

“What are you doing?” Amanda asked.

“Puzzle pieces.” She spread the multicolored pages out on the Falcon’s hood. “Let’s put it together.”

Amanda took in the disparate words. The idea wasn’t so crazy after all. “We should do it chronologically.” She moved the names around as she spoke. “Hank Bennett came into the station, and then Sergeant Hodge sent us to Techwood. Make a new one for Tech.” Evelyn scribbled the word onto a new sheet. “We need to subcategorize these.” Amanda took the pen and started filling in details: dates, times, what they’d been told. The Fury’s engine clicked in the heat. The metal hood singed her skin.

Evelyn suggested, “I’ll make a timeline.”

Amanda handed her the pen. She pointed to the different pages as she called out the sequence. “Hank Bennett goes to Sergeant Hodge last Monday. Hodge immediately sends us out to Techwood to take a rape report.” She looked at Evelyn. “Hodge won’t tell us why he sent us in the first place. Obviously, there wasn’t a rape. Why did he send us there?”

“I’ll ask him again this morning, but he wouldn’t tell me the last four times.”

Amanda felt the need to tell her, “You were very brave to do that.”

“Fat lot of good it did.” Evelyn waved away the compliment. “Juice, the pimp, doesn’t belong in here.”

“Unless he’s the one who killed Jane.”

“That doesn’t seem likely. Juice was probably in jail when it happened. Or having the crap beaten out of him for resisting arrest.”

“Okay, let’s push him up here as a remote possibility.” Amanda moved Juice to the periphery. “Next: We’re at the apartment in Techwood. Jane tells us that there are three girls missing: Lucy Bennett, Kitty—who we later find out is Treadwell—and a girl named Mary, last name unknown.”

“Right.” Evelyn wrote down the information, shooting their names off Jane Delray’s.

“Then, a few days later, Jane is murdered.”

“But she was misidentified as Lucy,” Evelyn corrected. “I’ll put an asterisk beside her name, but we should keep it this way just for clarity’s sake.”

“Right. A person who is thought to be Lucy Bennett is murdered.”

“I wonder if the brother had a big life insurance policy on her?”

Amanda supposed being married to an insurance man put these ideas into Evelyn’s head. “Is there a way to check? A registry?”

“I’ll ask Bill, but just talking it out, I think given Lucy’s life, why murder her when she would eventually kill herself with drugs?” Evelyn looked down at the timeline. “It’s not much of a motive.”