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Size-thirteen tennis shoes were still tucked into the feet of the suit. All a tall person had to do was don the costume, slide into the shoes, adjust the headpiece and voila: Big Foot, alive and well in Grizzly Falls, Montana.
Alvarez and Zoller hung out less than fifteen minutes, then headed back to the station. Once back in the offices, she decided to let the Tufts kid sweat a little longer, let him feel what lock-up was all about. Though he wasn’t Marjory Tufts’s baby daddy, he probably knew all about it, that his brother had been sleeping with his stepmom. Let him think about it.
So she started with Kip Bell.
/> He didn’t so much as glance her way as she entered the room and introduced herself. Again. For the record. For the camera and recording. “We need to find your brother,” she said, laying a slim file folder on the small table between them.
His eyes barely moved, but he glanced at the folder with its white pages showing a bit. “Don’t know where he is.”
“I think you do.”
Still no eye contact.
“We located an ape suit. Probably the one that was stolen from the Big Foot Believers.”
He shrugged.
“You’re a member of the club.”
Sneering, he said, “Me and like a couple hundred others.”
“But you knew Destiny. And Bianca.”
Kip sent a bored expression her way. “Your point?”
She tried a different tack. “We know Kywin’s the father of Destiny Rose Montclaire’s baby. We know he was in contact with both Destiny Rose Montclaire and Lindsay Cronin on the day each girl disappeared. He was one of the last people to communicate with them.”
“You don’t know shit,” he said.
She smiled. “I think we do.” She kept calm. Stared at him, and though she wanted to shake the answers from his lying lips, she played it cool. “Both Lindsay and Destiny texted him.”
“He never got the texts.” He looked up then, his eyes harboring a secret, and she saw that he was silently laughing at her, that he seemed to think he had one up on her, on the police in general.
But she knew better. She slid the file folder in his direction.
“How do you know he didn’t get the texts?” she asked.
Again the silent mockery. “Because he said he never got ’em.”
“He could have lied. The phone company records say otherwise.”
“So what? Kywin says he never saw ’em.” A lift of one massive shoulder. “I believe him.”
“He’s lied about a lot of things. Including being involved with Destiny.”
A roll of one big shoulder. Defiance in the set of his jaw, and throughout the rest of the questioning, the attitude that he knew more than she and he wasn’t going to tell her a thing.
“So, let’s talk about Lindsay Cronin.”
He flinched slightly. Not much, but a little twitch near his eye that told Alvarez he was listening. Worried.
“We have phone records,” she said, nudging the file folder closer to him. “And the interesting thing, Kip? Not only did Lindsay text Kywin, but she also called you.”
“What?”
“On your cell. What appears to be a pocket-dial or butt-dial.” She leaned back in her chair and eyed him. “Go ahead, take a look. It’s almost as if Lindsay was warning you. Kind of like Destiny. She did it too. Why? So that you could . . . what? Tell Kywin that she wanted to talk to him, to make certain he got the call?”
He didn’t respond. Just froze and stared at the folder.
