Hard Eight (Stephanie Plum 8)

“Quiet street,” I said. “Where is everybody?”

“Soccer games. Every dad and every kid on this street goes to soccer on Saturday.”

“So what's weird?”

“Do you know the Pagarellis?”

I shook my head, no.

“They live next door to Betty Lando. Moved in about six months ago. Old Mr. Pagarelli sits out on the porch all the time. He's a widow, living with his son and daughter-in-law. And the daughter-in-law won't let the old guy smoke in the house, so he's always out on the porch. Anyway, Betty said she was talking to him the other day, and he was bragging about how he was working for Eddie Abruzzi. He told Betty that Abruzzi pays him to watch my house. Is that creepy, or what? I mean, what's it to him that Evelyn took off? I don't see what the problem is as long as she makes her rent payment.”

“Anything else?”

“Evelyn's car is parked in the driveway. It showed up this morning.”

That took some of the wind out of my sails. Stephanie Plum, master detective. I'd driven past Evelyn's car and never noticed. “Did you hear it drive up? Did you see anyone?”

“Nope. Lenny discovered it. He went out for the paper, and he noticed Evelyn's car was here.”

“Do you ever hear anyone next door?”

“Only you.”

I did a grimace.

“In the beginning there were lots of people looking for Evelyn,” Carol said. “Soder and his friends. And Abruzzi. Soder would just walk into the house. I guess he had a key. Abruzzi, too.”

I looked over at Evelyn's front door. “You don't suppose Evelyn's in there now?”

“I knocked on the door, and I looked in the back window, and I didn't see anyone.”

I moved from Carol's porch to Evelyn's porch, and Carol tagged along behind me. I knocked on the door, hard. I put my ear to the front window. I shrugged my shoulders.

“Nothing going on in there,” Carol said. “Right?”

We walked to the back of the house and looked in the kitchen window. As far as I could tell, nothing had been touched. I tried the knob. Still locked. Too bad the window was repaired, I would have liked to get inside. I did another shrug.

Carol and I walked over to the car. We stood four feet away.

“I didn't look in the car,” Carol said.

“We should do that,” I told her.

“You first,” she said.

I sucked in some air and took two giant steps forward. I looked in the car and blew out a sigh of relief. No dead people. No body parts. No rabbits. Although, now that I was closer, the car didn't smell all that terrific.

“Maybe we should call the police,” I said.

There have been times in my life when curiosity has pushed aside common sense. This wasn't one of them. The car was sitting in the driveway, unlocked, with the keys dangling in the ignition. It would have been easy for me to pop the trunk and peek inside, but I had no desire to do this. I was pretty sure I knew the reason for the odor. Finding Soder on my couch had been traumatic enough. I didn't want to be the one to find Evelyn or Annie in the trunk of Evelyn's car.

Carol and I sat huddled together on her porch while we waited for the blue-and-white. Neither of us was willing to articulate our thoughts. It was too awful to speculate aloud.

I stood when the police arrived, but I didn't leave the porch. There were two patrol cars. Costanza was in one of them.

“You're looking white,” Costanza said to me. “Do you feel okay?”

I nodded my