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“Duck when you tell him,” Mike said.
“—he’ll want to begin the search for her where she was last seen. How will he react to Easton’s resignation?”
“With glee. And he’ll want to kill him for pulling this stunt. I’m glad it’s you, not me, who has to tell him. Good luck. We’ll see you when you get here.” Gif clicked off.
“Poor guy.”
Mike had his back to the room, looking out the front window. In a low rumble, and a rare show of empathy, he said, “Chalk up another victim to this son of a bitch.”
“Number nine.”
“Shit, Gif.”
He sighed. “Yeah. And we have no way of knowing how many we’ve missed.”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
Gif said, “I’ll text Drex about the coroner’s ruling. It won’t come as a shock. He already knew.” He sent the text to the last cell number he had for Drex, not knowing if that phone was still in existence.
The news about Elaine Conner had cast a pall over him and Mike. They maintained a lengthy silence, then Mike snorted with his customary disdain. “Those two uniforms are searching the bushes across the street.” They had asked the two young officers who’d been guarding the house to take a look around the immediate neighborhood for a sign of Drex and Talia. “Do they really think they’re going to find them in the thicket?”
It was a rhetorical question, which Gif didn’t bother answering. Mike turned away from the window and posed another. “How the hell did they disappear in such a short amount of time on foot? Even for Drex, it was slick as owl shit.”
“She knows the neighborhood, and you can bet he has committed it to memory in the time he’s been here. He got to my motel the other night by jogging to a local mini-mart and calling Uber. I dropped him back there the next morning.”
“Should we drive over, check it out?”
“He wouldn’t use the same location, and I doubt he’d use the same method.”
“I don’t think so, either,” Mike said. “I only suggested it because I’ve got nothing else.”
Gif did some rough calculation in his head. “When I came through the kitchen, they were nose-to-nose in conversation.”
“Was she still in her pajamas?”
“Yes, but they had a good ten, twelve minutes after I joined you,” Gif said.
“Enough time for them to make their getaway while we were waiting for peeing cops and fetching Nutter Butters. Jesus,” Mike said, ridiculing his own gullibility. “How did he talk you into leaving him alone with her?”
“He didn’t. I volunteered to check on you.”
“You only thought you volunteered,” Mike said. “You were manipulated.”
Gif shot him a grim smile. “And here just last night, he told me that we were too smart for him.”
“Not this morning, we weren’t.”
“What worries me?” Gif said, idly scratching his frowning forehead. “This time he might have been too smart for his own good.”
“Worries me, too,” Mike said. “I told you the woman was a hazard to Drex’s thinking. He’s off to God knows where with her, which, mark my words, will lead to nothing good. Not only that, he’s left us to Rudkowski.”
Gif’s gaze shifted to the cookbook still on the dining table. “He also left us with an assignment.”
The envelope addressed to Rudkowski was waiting for him on the dining table. He fingered the mocking note from Drex as he glared at the two young police officers who’d served as guards the night before.
“Where are they?”
His bellow made one of the officers jump. “We don’t know, sir. We’ve been combing the neighborhood. A lady down the street knows Mrs. Ford, but she—”
