Jeffrey had a similar collection of field interview cards back at the station. Every cop had their own stack of FIs, an informal record of the names and details of suspicious characters who hadn’t yet earned an official police file.
“All right, let’s see.” Chuck removed the rubber band from the campus FIs. None of them were written in his own hand. He left that work to the guards underneath him who actually patrolled the campus. He shuffled through the cards until he found what he was looking for. “Here it is. There’s an asswipe who’s always skateboarding near the library. Tears up the metal railings on the stairs. Older kid, maybe late twenties. Floppy brown hair. Eyefucks all the girls, the younger the better, but who can blame him? There’s not a name. According to this, everybody calls him Little Bit. He’s a small-time weed dealer. None of the hard stuff.”
Rebecca Caterino was a college student. Jeffrey had not been surprised to smell pot in her dorm. If Daryl was her dealer, that would explain why the burner phone number had been disconnected. Dealers were always changing up their numbers.
Jeffrey took the FI card from Chuck. Little Bit. Skateboarder. Late twenties. Pot dealer. The information reflected everything he’d just been told.
Chuck rolled his chair across the room to retrieve his apple from the corner. He bit it between his teeth so he could use both hands to pull his way back to his desk. “That all you need, Chief?”
Jeffrey tried another name. “Thomasina Humphrey.”
Chuck’s face showed recognition. “Her.”
“Yeah, her. What do you know?”
Chuck looked at Lena for the first time. Then he looked away. “Just scuttlebutt, mostly. She disappeared. Kids talked the usual crazy shit. She joined a cult. She tried to kill herself. Who knows what really happened?”
Jeffrey would’ve bet that Chuck knew, but he’d already humiliated this man once today. There would be other cases they had to work on together. He had to leave Chuck with some dignity. “Do you have access to Humphrey’s details?”
“Maybe.” Chuck tapped some keys on his computer. He found a clean notecard. He wrote down an address and phone number. “This is where her final transcripts were sent. I don’t know if she’s still there.”
Jeffrey saw that the address was in Avondale, which lined up with what Sara had told him. Tommi had been one of her patients at the clinic. That was why Sibyl Adams had called her for help.
Chuck had the apple back in his mouth. “Next time, just say please.”
Jeffrey tucked the address in his coat pocket as he walked out the door.
He could feel Lena dogging his heels like a needy puppy.
“Chief,” she tried.
He stopped so abruptly that she bumped into him. “Have you gone through those unsolved rape reports like I told you?”
“I filed the requests with the other counties. They should be emailed to me no later than this afternoon. There are only twelve Grant County reports.”
“Only,” he repeated. “Those are twelve women, Lena. Twelve lives that were irrevocably altered. I don’t want to ever hear you say only about them ever again.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We live in a god damn college town. There are thousands of young women in and out of this campus every year. Do you genuinely think that all of them are liars? That they fucked some guy and regretted it, so there’s no need for you as a police officer to help them?”
“Chief, I—”
“Follow up on that subpoena I put in for Rebecca Caterino’s medical charts. We need to make this official. Let me know the minute Bonita Truong reaches the station. I want to talk to her as soon as possible. She is not to hear about Rebecca Caterino from anyone else but me.”
“Yes, Chief, but—” Lena mulled the but. “When are we going to tell people that it wasn’t an accident?”
“When I’m damn good and ready. Take out your notebook. Make a list.”
She fumbled at her pocket.
He didn’t wait for her. “Go back to Caterino’s dorm mates and see if there are any photographs of her wearing the hair clip. Do the same with Leslie Truong. She was missing a headband. They might have a photograph. Next, track down this Daryl Little Bit or whatever the hell his name is. We’ve got probable cause on the pot, so search him. If you find weed, arrest him. If you don’t, take him in for questioning. And you don’t go home tonight until you’ve summarized every single rape report from the tri-county area. I want it on my desk first thing. Understood?”
“Yes, Chief.”
Jeffrey headed toward his car in the staff parking lot. His phone started to ring again. His mother. She would be well into the bottle by now. Jeffrey silenced the call. He got into the car. He bumped the gear into reverse and swung out of the space.
He tried to game out next steps as he drove toward Avondale. He would have to formally announce that Rebecca Caterino had been attacked. That would send shockwaves through the school. And it should. Some lunatic had attacked a defenseless woman with a hammer.
“Christ,” he whispered. If he thought about it hard enough, he could still remember the horror of Caterino’s sternum breaking. Jeffrey couldn’t imagine what it took to lodge a hammer inside another human being’s skull.
He shook out his hands, ridding himself of the sensation.
Leslie Truong’s mother would be at the station in a few hours. She would have questions that Jeffrey wanted to honestly try to answer. This Little Bit skateboard punk would have to be dealt with, too. If the kid was dealing pot around campus, and he was in fact the same Daryl from Rebecca Caterino’s phone book, then she was likely a client. Eliminating or confirming him as a suspect in the attack was a high priority.
Lastly, there was Lena Adams. Jeffrey would have to go back through every single piece of information she had collected and verify the work. As far as he was concerned, her training wheels were officially off. If Lena didn’t show him in real time that she could keep to the straight and narrow, he was going to send her packing.
His phone started to ring. His mother again. She was clearly on one of her benders. He couldn’t blame her. He was a shitty son. Hell, he had been a shitty chief, a shitty mentor, a shitty husband.
Jeffrey let himself stew on his missteps until he passed the sign welcoming him to the Avondale City Limits, population 4,308. Jeffrey referenced the address Chuck had given him. He should’ve run the information through his own system to make sure that the Humphries still lived at the same location, but he needn’t have bothered. Jeffrey could tell from the car parked in front of the house that the girl was still there.
Sara’s silver Z4 was in front of the mailbox. The convertible top was down to take advantage of the good weather.
“For fucksakes.” Jeffrey parked behind the $80,000 sportscar. He took a few seconds to swallow down his irritation. If Sara wanted to ride around with the top down, Dolly Parton blaring from the speakers like some sad version of a tricked-out hillbilly nerd, then godspeed.
He opened his notebook. He jotted down the list of action items from the ride over. He wasn’t as careful a note taker as he should’ve been. He was always riding Lena and Brad about making sure their asses were covered. Jeffrey hated to be thinking about it this way, but if Gerald Caterino really was going to sue the force, he needed to make sure his ass was covered, too.
He closed his notebook and pocketed his pen. He got out of the car. He looked up at the house. Avondale had at one time been filled with blue-collar workers from the railroad maintenance hub. The job had put them solidly in the middle class, and the architecture of the homes reflected that. Brick on all four sides. Aluminum-framed windows. Concrete driveways. All the modern conveniences of 1975.
The Humphreys hadn’t made any changes to the outside of the house. The white paint had yellowed, but it wasn’t peeling. The car in the driveway was an older model minivan. The front door was a high-gloss black.
Jeffrey knocked once, but the door was already opening.
The woman who answered looked drawn. She was only slightly older than Jeffrey, but her hair had gone completely gray. The curls were clipped tight to her head. Dark circles rimmed her eyes. She was wearing a house dress that zipped in the front. The way she looked at Jeffrey made him feel guilty for being here. He assumed Sara would make him feel worse.
“Mrs. Humphrey?”
She looked into the driveway, then the street. “Did you see a blue Ford truck?”
“No, ma’am.”
“If my husband comes, you’ll have to leave. He doesn’t want Tommi bothered with this. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”