“I know how that is,” I said, my voice low.
I almost reached for her hand, but I stopped myself. Seeing someone you cared about suffering and knowing that you’re helpless is a special kind of hell. There was a terrible intimacy to the moment. It clawed deep in my chest so that it took all my self-control to hold eye contact with her. The urge to look away was as fierce as it was cowardly, and I wouldn’t give in to it. Her green eyes were clouded with sadness and something like compassion for me. The only thing tougher than meeting her gaze was keeping myself from gathering her in my arms right then.
She cleared her throat, “It’s been four days since Becky Simms disappeared. Even my contact in Charleston that helped with the phone mentioned that there probably wasn’t anything there that would lead to a happy ending at this point.” Her voice was grim.
“I don’t believe that. If I thought we needed to switch the focus to recovering a body, I’d make that call. Just like I don’t believe she’s a runaway, I don’t believe this is a lost cause, not just yet.”
“If somebody told me twenty years ago that Brody Peters would not only be my boss but would be sitting here trying to restore my faith in humanity, I’d have told them they were bonkers and kicked them in the shins.”
“That sounds about like you when you were ten years old,” I said wryly.
“It sounds like me now, too,” she shrugged.
Then she jolted and pulled out her cell phone. “That’s Max, the guy who figured out the phone. I’m gonna go talk to him.”
When she left the office in a flurry of activity and shut the door behind her, the whole place seemed big—which it wasn’t—and empty and too quiet. That’s what she did. She filled up a room.
11
Laura
I chewed the end of the pen cap and listened to Max go over the likelihood of being able to trace the source of the unknown number that Becky Simms called before it was too late to be anything more than a talking point. Max was my techie friend from the Charleston PD, and he’d seen enough bad outcomes to expect them every time.
“Have you noticed in the five years I’ve known you that every time I ask you to do something, you say, ‘they’re probably already dead, it’s not gonna matter’?” I asked.
“It’s gallows humor, kid,” he said. “It helps to brace me for impact. You go around trying to get me to hurry up with accessing the data in her phone, sending me a picture of her at some fuckin’ science fair and now I gotta carry that image around in my head while I do this. Now I gotta think of her as a real person and not a case number. Why’d you go and do that to me?” he said.
“Because she is a real person, dude,” I said. “If you think of it that way, it lights a fire under you to get all the info you can to save her in time.”
“Bright side—maybe somebody just kidnapped her so they can traffic her. Florida’s got a big market for that, but most cities do.”
“Human trafficking is not a bright side, Max. You’re a strange man.”
“But one with skills,” he said. “And the point is, if they wanna traffic her, they’re not gonna kill her. They might drug her up, but she’s gonna be alive when you find her.”
“That was almost optimistic of you.”
“You’ll find her all right. What remains to be seen is if it’s dead or alive,” he said.
“Okay, fine, so hurry up,” I said.
“The number was a burner phone.”
“Can you find out who bought it and where?”
“That’s why they’re burner phones, so they’re harder to trace them and people ditch them pretty quick. It’s not like some guy gave out his Social Security number when he bought it and then registered for an extended warranty. Most people that buy burner phones aren’t figuring on keeping them long. They’re either financially insecure and know they can only afford it for a month or else they’re using it for a shady purpose. Best case scenario, extramarital affairs or blackmail.”
“Again, your bright side is not the same as my bright side.”
“Neither of those things involve dismemberment, so it’s a bright side.”
“You got some low standards, dude,” I said, but he wasn’t wrong. At this point, I wanted the girl safe and sound, but I’d settle for not dead and not critically injured. We were running out of good potential outcomes four days into the search.
“You’ll get back to me?” I said.
“Well, if I don’t decide to chuck it all and move to Maui, yeah.”
I hung up and pushed my notebook and pen away. I stretched my legs out on the desk in front of me and looked around. The place was pretty much deserted. Mrs. Rook was gathering her things.