AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Aren’t you curious?” she returned.
I shifted in my seat. “Yeah. Sure. But?—”
“Raye, calm down and think. Divinity is a lady of the evening. ‘Take two hundred dollars,’ means you’re gonna have to pay her for info, and that means she probablyhasinfo. The stuff about Roosevelt is Divinity’s patch, where we’ll find her, on Roosevelt between Sixteenth and Twenty-fourth. CD is Clarice Davis, and she’ll reimburse you for said info. Whoever this is knows something about those missing women, and whoever it is can’t do anything about it. Something’s up. Maybe it’s a cop whose hands are tied or something like that. But we can’t talk to Divinity unless we get a feel for this Clarice woman. So we’re gonna talk to Clarice first, then we’re gonna go look at whatever car that is, because…”—she reached, grabbed the fob and brandished it at me—“this is to a Mercedes. So whoever this is, isnotplaying.”
She was right.
They were not.
Because it wasn’t just the Mercedes.
The bulk of that stack of papers, which I hadn’t entirely gone through, were detailed dossiers of the men who assaulted the co-ed.
And when I said detailed, I’d only glanced at them, but still…they weredetailed.
“Don’t you think this is dangerous?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she huffed out. “And I thought the tight end was dangerous. And Paul Nicholson. And that wife beater whose car you poured sugar into the gas tank. And?—”
“All right, all right, you’ve made your point.”
“So are you gonna stop now? Or is the last year of work you’ve got pinned to your bedroom wall, with pink yarn twirled around tacks, pointing to places on a map of the Phoenix metro area and Post-its with descriptions of possible players, gonna be just a weird piece of artwork of a slightly unbalanced mind?”
“I’m not unbalanced.”
“It depends on the day,” she said into her wineglass.
Honestly?
I couldn’t argue that.
Her tone had changed when she said, “I didn’t like that Paul Nicholson business because it cut too close to Macy.”
I tried not to flinch.
I failed.
“Honey,” she said carefully. “By some miracle, you tracked down Elsie Fay. And that’s good. I’m glad. But, girl, that hit too close to the bone.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“But this,”—she tossed the fob to the coffee table—“I don’t know. Something about it is intriguing. I also don’t like you going out there alone. But if we go together…”
She let that hang.
“I’m not a fan of that,” I informed her.
“Welcome to how I’ve been feeling the last year.”
That hit me, and it did it hard.
So I said, “Maybe I should just quit.”
“And maybe you should just go talk to this Clarice woman. It’s just a chat. Call her. Set it up. If we don’t like the feel we get, we’re out. But…why not?”
I wondered how many people, before they met their grisly end, asked “Why not?” prior to engaging in the endeavor that led to their grisly end.
I had a feeling that percentage was high.
