Tucking the paper under her arm, she made her way inside and spread the newspaper open, reading the long article:
DETECTIVES INVOLVED IN “WILD ELK” CHASE
“Thanks, Manny,” she said as she scanned the article that put Alvarez and herself in a very unpleasant light.
No wonder she had sixteen calls on her voice mail already this morning, over half of them from local news stations.
That’s what you get for being an idiot and even talking to Douglas.
It was going to be a long day.
Pushing aside her thoughts about what was literally yesterday’s news, she painstakingly went over all the evidence on the case, then wrote her report about the events leading up to, and what had actually happened at, Samuels’s cabin.
Half expecting a text or a call from Jeremy, she kept an eye on her phone as she would have liked to give him a heads-up about what had happened. After eight, she sent him a text, but still he didn’t respond, and she decided he either had the day off or was marked to show up in the afternoon. Hopefully by then some of the backlash from yesterday’s botched assignment would have dissipated.
As the morning progressed and the day shift arrived, the familiar noises of the department reached her ears: phones ringing, the fax machine chunking out information, the old heating system rumbling, and the click of Joelle’s heels as she arrived. Cell phones buzzed or chirped while the smell of coffee seeped through the offices and feet shuffled or marched in the hallway outside her door. Brett Gage’s belly laugh erupted from somewhere near the interrogation rooms, and she couldn’t help but wonder if she were the butt of the department’s recent jokes.
Now you really are getting paranoid, that inner voice kept reminding her.
She refilled her cup of coffee in the lunchroom and told herself the sidelong glances from the other officers weren’t smirks, that the open paper with her picture on the front page wasn’t all that unusual. People read the paper every day.
Besides, most of them were too busy with their own workload to worry about her screwup.
“Hey, Pescoli?” Rick Hanson called to her. He was a thin guy with short-cropped red hair, tall enough to have played basketball, and sometimes thick as a brick. He and his partner, Dale Connors, were seated at the table, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the sports page before hitting the road. “I heard you made a big catch yesterday.” Hanson was grinning wide, glad for a chance to needle her.
Polishing the lenses of his glasses with a napkin, Connors, who had his partner beat by a good fifty pounds, chuckled. “So what’re you serving for New Year’s? I hear elk steaks are great.”
“Or a roast,” Hanson said. “Hey, Pescoli, how about everyone coming over to your place for a roast?”
Connors added, “Of you!” as if she hadn’t caught the joke.
“Sure. Why not?” She wasn’t going to let them get to her.
“Oh, the mighty, how they have fallen,” Connors added, sliding his glasses onto the bridge of his nose and smirking. He’d always been a jerk, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing he bugged the crap out of her.
She didn’t bother responding, just walked out of the lunchroom doing a slow boil.
“Do you know what time it is?” Wanda Verdago was not pleased to be woken up even though, according to Alvarez’s watch, it was after ten in the morning. In the same too-small bathrobe but without makeup, she looked younger and fresher. “I don’t know why you’re here. I told you everything I know!”
“I just need to clear up a few details,” Alvarez assured her.
“Couldn’t you have called?”
“I was over here anyway,” Alvarez lied and waited while Wanda reluctantly opened the screen door and let her inside an apartment that hadn’t changed much since their previous interview. Alvarez purposely hadn’t called because she wanted to catch the woman’s reaction.
“I read that you and that partner of yours really messed up yesterday, looking for Maurice and coming up with a poacher.” She plopped into her spot on the couch again, on the opposite end from an overflowing basket of laundry. “What is it you want to know?”
“It’s about Joey Lundeen,” Alvarez said, sitting down and watching the big woman stiffen slightly.
For a split second, fear flashed in her eyes, though as quickly as it flared, it vanished. “I didn’t know him.”
“But you heard he disappeared, right, around fifteen years ago. You were with Maurice then, when he was out of the military.”
“We were married,” she agreed, frowning at the mention of her husband. “Okay, I know that he and Joey had it out the night before Joey disappeared. The police came nosing around then, too, but they couldn’t pin anything on Maurice.” The hint of a smile teased her pale lips. She was holding out and proud of whatever it was she was hiding.
“Now that your husband has gone missing and might be involved in some other crimes, the Joey Lundeen disappearance is being looked into again.”
“So what?”