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Greta resumed trekking from house to house with the photos. Thirty-four houses to finish on Ocean Drive, then back south along parallel Sea Swallow Drive, and another eighteen houses before darkness. By then, the coastal fog rolled in.
She walked back to her parked car. With every step, she felt tired, though it was more mental than physical. It felt good to sit, even though the drive home lasted less than a minute. Looking at the maps discouraged her. She didn’t see how they’d canvass every house in Pacific City in time. Inside her house, she checked her phone—seven messages. Wallace’s
office wanted to know whether she’d told people a dangerous man was roaming loose in Pacific City. She’d deal with that one the next day. Emily asked whether she would be at the basketball game Wednesday night.
Five of the houses with no one home earlier that day had also left messages. She called them first. One woman claimed to vaguely remember a strange car around the neighborhood, couldn’t specify when she saw the car, and didn’t know the make or the exact color. Greta categorized her report as useless. The other four houses didn’t answer her call. She left a message that she’d come by their houses again the next day or call later that evening.
She phoned Emily and said she planned on attending the basketball game, unless there were pressing affairs with work. Emily said she understood and hoped Greta could come because the girls looked forward to her being at the games.
No sooner had she finished the last call when her computer beeped a new email from Alex Boylan. It contained the new list of individuals with local burglary histories or suspicions of such activity. She glanced over the list until she came to one name: Kyle Umstead. The pit bull man. One of the few names on the first Toompas list she hadn’t interviewed because he either was never home when she stopped or was home and she couldn’t get past the pit bulls to find him.
She pulled up the first list to see why Umstead had made the “suspected associate” list of Toompas, meaning there had been suspicion of the two being involved in some unspecified illegal activity.
Bingo, she thought. Could this be it?
A second association between Umstead and Toompas concerned an altercation at a Lincoln City bar. Toompas had lost.
Christ! she thought. Isn’t there anyone Toompas didn’t lose a fight to?
The time it would her take to check out Umstead would be about the same as knocking on twenty or more houses, but he had to be checked. Otherwise, why bother with the lists? She already felt abashed that she hadn’t finished with Umstead before, so she couldn’t put him off any longer. However, the more she thought about Umstead, getting out of her car, and being surrounded by the pit bulls, the more nervous she got. Something about the place made her uneasy.
Perhaps she could ask Plummer to come along. She wondered whether a male deputy would feel the same way. It was typical of the questions she asked herself during her first months on the job, but she did it less so as time went on. Yet this was a first-of-a-kind situation.
Am I nervous about the Umstead place? she wondered.
Yes. Because of the dogs and his name coming up on two lists. What was the logical thing to do? It made sense to have more than one officer, but a man might go alone just to avoid admitting to nerves.
Fortunately, I’m not a man, she thought. So, what the hell?
Despite feeling tired from the canvassing, she needed air and space. She bundled up and walked out of the development, through the dunes, and onto the beach. The last ray of sunlight was gone, and the sky was full of stars. She ambled a hundred yards south, then back north, and repeated the route for the next hour until the sea air brought on a chill.
Back at home, she made a salad, heated a can of soup, and sat, eating. She pondered the Toompas case, her life, and any stray thoughts that popped into her head.
She looked at the clock—almost ten. Not knowing Plummer’s schedule, she emailed him that she would call the next morning at eight o’clock to see if he could join her in trying to find Umstead on his property.
With a plan in place, she retired to bed and picked up the book on the nightstand: Voyager by Diana Gabaldon, the third book in the author’s Outlander series. Greta opened it to the bookmark on page ninety-three and resumed reading. She was a steady, if not voracious, reader. Her taste roamed across genres and included romantic adventure novels. She didn’t read every night, perhaps every third night, so when she resumed, she re-read the previous two pages to jog her memory before continuing.
She started reading. Claire Fraser, a modern-day woman thrown back in time to 1743 Scotland for a long series of adventures and romances, was worried. Therefore, so was Greta.
Plummer called her at a quarter to eight the next morning after she had dressed for work and looked over the Toompas case information yet again.
“Morning, Greta, this is James Plummer. Figured if you were going to call at eight, you’d probably be up. Didn’t want you to wake my wife.”
He has a wife? Greta thought.
“She always goes back to sleep after we get the kids up and off to school.”
He has kids? she wondered.
She realized she knew nothing personal about Plummer. It was like a whole new library opening up with books she’d never heard of. Images of Plummer with his family and doing daily and weekly family activities didn’t project into her mind.
“Good idea for you to call first, Jimb . . . James. So, you got my email about Umstead?”
“Yeah, and you’re right. It’s best if both of us go out there. I had dealings with him a time or two. He fashions himself as some kind of hard case, one of those fantasy outlaws. He never served any major time, but a month or so here and there in county jails for destruction of property, firearm violations. There’s been suspicion of petty thefts and burglary, nothing proved. He’s also known to have pit bulls running around. He lives out in the woods; otherwise, we’d probably have had more neighbors’ complaints.”
“You’re right about the pit bulls. Several times I’ve been out there looking for him, and he has them tied up so you can’t get out of a vehicle.”
“I’d guess he’s there, pretending he’s not.”
