I hung up and turned my eyes to Laura who was sitting forward on her chair, gripping the edge of my desk.
“Clint found her phone in a bean field west of town. He’s bringing it in so we can catalog it and check it out.”
“Nothing else though?”
“No. So it could be somebody just threw her phone out a car window. It could be she was never there.”
“Or we may know what direction they were going. Did he take a picture of exactly what the phone looked like before he picked it up? We could tell which direction it was thrown from if that’s what we suspect.”
“I don’t think Clint thinks much about trajectory. He’s already picked it up and touched the screen without gloves on. I’m glad he found it, but he’s due for a refresher course on not disturbing evidence before you collect it,” I said.
“Are you saying he’s stupid?” she teased.
“I’m saying it’s a mistake you or I wouldn’t have made, touching the phone ungloved before it was photographed.”
“I hope it didn’t fuck anything up,” she said, and I nodded in agreement. We had so little to go on, we couldn’t afford any mistakes.
“Clint will be here soon. Will you tell Mrs. Rook to send him right back here?” I asked. She nodded and left.
9
Laura
My mom had saved me a plate of dinner. When I got home, practically dead on my feet but also wired from the worry and frustration over the missing teen, Mom heated up the plate and set it in front of me while I downed a tall glass of her sweet tea.
“You make the best tea in the universe. I’ll swear it on a bible,” I said with a sigh. I looked at the baked chicken and vegetables and couldn’t even imagine having the energy to lift a fork to eat it. I shouldn’t have sat down. The tiredness really hit me when I stopped moving. Brody had sent me home after fourteen hours on the job and said to get some rest. I wondered if that was possible.
“I heard about the Simms girl. I went all through school with Kayla Pritchett’s aunt Angie—this would be Angie’s great niece. Becky’s a good girl. Angie’s torn up about it, and she says something’s fishy. Becky came and cleaned out Angie’s gutters last year when Angie broke her ankle in the Fall Festival square dancing competition. She was beside herself about the leaves piled up on her roof and that gutter guard didn’t do much even though she paid a fortune for it…” My mom’s chatter soothed me, and I ate a few bites.
I listened and tried to calm my thoughts. Then I heard her ask, “Can you tell me anything about the search? They don’t think she’s—already gone, do they?”
“Mom, you know I can’t tell you stuff like that. Confidentiality and everything,” I said. “We all hope for the best outcome for Becky and her parents. And we’re doing everything we can do to find out what happened and locate her.”
“So you’re still treating it as a missing person? Not as a body recovery? I know that the guys from the mill that work with her daddy are going out on their ATV’s tonight and searching for her. They got night vision cameras.”
I sighed, “I wish people wouldn’t do that,” I said. “They can run over tracks we haven’t found yet that might be a clue, and they can destroy evidence accidentally. I know they mean well, but amateur searchers usually do more damage than good.”
“I understand that, and I know cops have their procedures they have to stick to. But I know if it was you gone missing, I’d want every man I know out there with their night vision goggles and their heat-seeking drones they use for hunting and—,”“Mom, it freaks me out that all these guys around here have that stuff. I mean if Damon told me he wanted a heat-seeking drone for Christmas—”
“Then you’d ask him if he was having that much trouble getting laid, I know,” she said with a shrug, and I barked a laugh.
“Or I’d say I thought he was a heat-seeking drone.”
“True,” she said, “but I want to know what’s going on with the Simms girl. She’s not the kind of girl to run away and scare her folks like that. Angie says she’s a smart kid, and she got grand champion at the state fair for her solar robot thing in 4-H a couple years ago. It was a tiny little thing but it could pick up sticks in the yard.”
My mom shook her head, marveling. I was pretty impressed myself since I never built anything but a birdhouse in school and I ended up hot-gluing that when I bent the nails on accident. Truth was, I was lucky to make mac and cheese without burning the house down, so solar-powered stick-picker-uppers sounded pretty brainy to me. She seemed more like she was a science geek than a kid who went off looking for a party and some drugs and no phone, car or money. She wasn’t stupid. I thanked my mom for the information and texted it to Brody. Even if it just gave us insight to her personality, it was useful. She’d spent weeks designing and building a robot that won awards at the state fair. That seemed like a whole different type of teenager than the sort who scared the shit out of her whole family by running off to parts unknown.