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“Thank God,” she said, now sobbing, her voice broken. “Things are so bad. Do you know that Owen is getting death threats?” She sniffed. “Death threats! For something he didn’t do. And he won’t go to the police. Nuh-uh. Not after the way he’s been treated. He’s my only son, you know. The only one I can still talk to. Sometimes . . . sometimes I think God is punishing me.”
“Mrs. Le Roy—” he tried to cut in, but she was on a roll.
“Ezra seems to think I can find solace in the Bible and I try, I really try. My husband, he’s such a good man, a God-fearing man, so willing to forgive sins. Anyone’s. Even mine. Just like our Lord Jesus.” Her voice was thin again, the sobbing having given way to a steady whisper. “I don’t deserve him.”
“I’m sure that’s not what he thinks,” Reed said, though he had no idea what was in the reverend’s mind.
“Rosie can’t be dead,” she said suddenly, her conviction renewed. “She just can’t be! I can’t lose them all.”
He didn’t want to give her any false hope. “Mrs. Le Roy—”
“You find my daughter!” she demanded, not allowing him to placate her. “Find her before something happens!”
“I assure you, Mrs.
Le Roy—”
“Just do it, Detective. It’s your damned job!”
Click!
The connection was severed. He shook his head and caught Delacroix watching him. “Guess she told you.”
“Guess so.”
She was still holding the phone to her ear.
“Aren’t you . . . ?” he motioned to her cell.
“On hold.” She rolled her eyes. “Checking with Missing Persons about the new body. Hoping for an ID—something that matches.”
So far the body was still unidentified, though dental records were being checked. DNA would take longer.
He asked, “Did you hear that Owen Duval is getting death threats?”
She shook her head, took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “No.” “According to his mother, he’s being harassed by the press and tried and convicted by the public.”
“Great.” Again she shook her head and glanced out the window. “I bet he wishes he never moved back here.”
“Probably. You still on hold?” When she nodded, he asked, “Anything come in on the unknown teenagers who were in the lobby of the theater the last time anyone saw the Duval girls?”
“Nope, not yet. A copy of the tape of the lobby and with the teenagers went out to news stations. So far no one’s biting. But it’s still early.”
“Twenty years doesn’t seem so early to me.”
“You know what I mean.”
He turned back to the statement from one of the neighbors who had lived in the house next to the Duvals at the time of the girls’ disappearance. The paper had yellowed and smelled of dust, but he read the typed report about an interview with George Adams. He’d been seventy-nine at the time of his statement and had died in the intervening years. George had admitted to not having noticed anything out of the ordinary on the day that the girls went missing, but had claimed fiercely that there were “all sorts of shenanigans going on over there at the Duval place! Harvey, he’s an insurance salesman, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have him for my agent, and that wife of his? Margie or whatever she calls herself, she’s a nurse, but she got fired from the hospital, the way I hear it. To become a private nurse to the damned Beaumonts. Who does that? Something’s not right there, let me tell you. I heard, well, it’s just gossip really, but the missus and I, we don’t go for that swingin’.”
“Swinging?”
“You know. That exchanging partners in the bedroom if you know what I mean.”
“The Duvals are ‘swingers’?”
“Well, don’t quote me on that, but it’s pretty much common knowledge.”
“You mean Harvey had an affair.”
