“Your father drives a cab.”
“Jeez Louise. I’m reporting a missing person, okay?”
“It hasn’t been twenty-four hours since I suggested we back off a little on our relationship and already you’re with Ranger.”
“I work with the man. I have a professional relationship with him.”
“I love you, but you give me acid reflux,” Morelli said.
“Yeah, well, you gave me a pimple.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
Morelli gave a bark of laughter. “I’ll pass the word on Lula. Let me know if she turns up.”
I thunked my forehead on the steering wheel. My life was a mess. A car drove by, and someone in the backseat threw an egg at me and yelled “Zeta!” It splattered against my driver’s side window and oozed down into the door. I looked at my watch and wondered if it was too early to start drinking. A glass of wine or a beer. Just one. Maybe two at the most. Reality check. I’m not good at drinking. I get very happy and then I fall asleep. Since I had to work with Ranger that night, I thought I should delay drinking. Donuts would be a better way to go. A dozen donuts would significantly improve my day.
I hit a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru and started working on the donuts in the parking lot. By the time I got home there were six left in the box, and I didn’t want to see another donut ever again. Not ever. Perhaps a Boston Kreme, but that was it.
I live in a modest apartment building on the fringe of Trenton proper. It’s ten minutes from the bonds office, ten minutes from my parents’ house, and fifty years out of date. It’s a solid three-story building with cheap aluminum windows and an unreliable elevator. My second-floor apartment looks out at the parking lot at the rear of the building. Not exactly scenic, but I have a front-row seat for the occasional dumpster fire.
I was feeling sick from the donuts so I took the stairs, thinking exercise would help. I let myself into my apartment, dropped a morsel of a maple glazed into Rex’s cage, and set the rest of the donuts on the counter. Rex rushed over to the piece of donut, stuffed it into his cheek, and hustled it back to his soup can home.
I have a very small area when you first enter my apartment that I like to call my foyer, but probably that’s too grand a name for the space. I have a small, practical kitchen, a living room that sort of combines with my dining room, a bedroom, and a retro bath. Retro is another way of saying that my bathroom is really old and ugly.
My dining room serves as my office. I’d inherited the table and chairs from a distant relative. No one else in the family had wanted them. They were nothing I would intentionally buy, but for free they were fine. Rectangular table. Six chairs. Brown wood.
I’m not any kind of cook, and I eat most of my meals standing over the sink, so using the table as a desk wasn’t a hardship. I sat down, opened my laptop, and downloaded the new file from Connie.
Julie Ruley was in her senior year at Kiltman. Her parents were divorced. One brother, two years younger. He was enrolled at Penn State. Her mother and stepfather live in South River. Julie’s current local address was 2121 Banyan Street. Connie had a side note informing me that this was not on campus.
I checked Banyan out on Google Maps and saw that it was within walking distance of the school. The aerial view told me 2121 Banyan was a large house in a residential neighborhood. Most likely subdivided into student apartments.
Morelli called my cellphone.
“Lula turned up,” he said.
“Is she okay?”
“She’s okay, but the people she was with are a mess. The story I have is that she was at the curb in front of the deli and two idiots got in with guns drawn and told her to drive. Turns out they’d just robbed the Korean grocery two doors down from the deli. I guess they thought Lula’s Firebird was a step up from the stolen Kia they’d been driving.”
“Where did they take her?”
“Chop shop in Camden.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yep. Big mistake. Originally it seems these morons just wanted to get away. The plan had been to acquire enough money to get a bus ticket to Texas, where they’d steal enough money to buy themselves a car wash. They told Lula to take them to the Camden bus station, but then they got to thinking they could make more on the Firebird than they stole from the grocery.”
“Lula loves her Firebird.”
“That’s an understatement. I’m not sure how she managed it, but when they got to Camden and ordered her out of the car, she disarmed the guy in the front and beat the crap out of the two of them. They were happy to see the police arrive.”
“Why Camden?”
“They didn’t want to leave from Trenton. Too easy to track.”