Then his sister came back into town, flame-haired and smart-mouthed and it felt like she was made for me. Like the top of her head would fit under my chin when I held her. And I had thought about holding her. I’d thought how good it would feel and how right, especially when the call had come from Clint about the phone. I’d had to tamp down the instinct to round my desk and take her in my arms because we both had hope and fear and frustration over the missing girl, and it would’ve grounded me, would’ve comforted us both to hold each other. It had seemed like it would be natural to do it. I wanted to. Even worse than the fantasies, the dirty dreams about Laura, was the longing. The fact that it roared to life right in my face that I was so goddamned lonely. I wanted to hold her and just—sit on the couch and watch TV or argue over what takeout to get for dinner and end up kissing. I wanted to find out if she still cheated at cards like she did as a kid, and if she’d cook dinner with me.
I wanted to make her waffles. I loved breakfast for dinner as a kid. Missy always said that wasn’t a real dinner, so I didn’t push her to do it. But I wanted to make waffles for Laura, pour warm maple syrup over the butter until they were golden and swimming in sticky sweetness. I wanted to see her take a bite and make a big deal over how delicious they were and then kiss her lips. I wanted to lie under the covers and drink coffee out of the same cup and read each other the headlines off our phones.
Imagining a life with her wasn’t just too soon or inappropriate. It was wrong. It was faithless to my dead wife and disloyal to my best friend, and it was a blight on my badge. My heart and my body just wouldn’t listen.
Admittedly, I was brooding about it at my desk when a sharp knock at my door was followed immediately by Laura. She walked in with a file in hand. I nodded for her to sit, but she rounded my desk and opened the file in front of us. She stood so close that I was intoxicated by the vanilla smell of her auburn hair. I shut my eyes for an instant and dragged myself into the present.
“We cracked the passcode on her phone—the one she’d given her parents was fake, by the way—and went through Becky’s call log. Her friend had said she left at 11:30 to go home. There’s a call at 11:35 to her mom’s cell. Kayla said she’d called to say she was on her way. It’s a two-block walk to her house. Then, twenty-five minutes later there’s a call to an unknown number and the location pins it near where the phone was found.”
“Okay, then we know she wasn’t by herself,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Because there’s no way she could’ve gotten that far on foot in twenty-five minutes, besides the fact that there’s no obvious reason for her to go to a remote bean field in the middle of the night on a weeknight.”
“Right. So somebody picked her up in a car. Somebody she knew or not, and either she made the call or someone else did right at that location.”
“I’m calling Overton. They have a dive team. I want the fishing pond checked. That’s the only thing out there.”
“If they killed her and dumped her in the pond they would’ve thought to find the cell phone and take it with them,” she pointed out.
“Unless they were in a panic and finding a smartphone in a bean field is tricky, especially in the dark.”
“Alright, but there were no signs of any struggle or anything, not where the phone was found and not around the pond. Her mom said she weighs around 135- 140. That’s gonna make a deep print if somebody was carrying her body along with their own bodyweight. There would’ve been some sign.”
“You think we shouldn’t drag the pond?” I said.
“Not yet. We both know something’s going on here. I’m going to go talk to the friend again after she gets off school. Maybe she heard a car or knew about a secret boyfriend or something.”
“I think she would’ve said something by now. Kid’s scared shitless for her best friend,” I said, “but you can bring her in if you want.”
“I thought I’d go to her house.”
“Scares them more if you bring them in here. We’re not like the fire department. We don’t give tours to kindergarteners so they don’t grow up scared. I give Damon shit about it all the time.”
“Well, kindergarteners probably like the fire trucks more than they’d like sitting in a holding cell,” she said, going back around the desk and sitting down in a chair.