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“Yeah. I think it was just about catching up on their old days in the ICU.”
“They worked together? Your wife and Sofia?”
“It was fifteen, twenty years ago, at a hospital up in Maine. Then I got this job in California and we moved here. We went to Sofia’s wedding in Boston, but that was years ago.”
“Do you know why she called your wife?”
“I have no idea. Maybe for old times’ sake?” A pause. “What does this have to do with her being murdered?”
“I don’t know, sir. I’m just following up on every lead. Please have your wife call me if she has any information.” Jane hung up and looked at Frost. “Well, that was a dead end.”
“Or maybe it has something to do with these other calls,” said Frost. “They’re all to area code 207. Maine.”
“Where Sofia and Bouchard’s wife once worked together.”
“She called a really weird list of places. Gas and Go in Augusta. Bangor High School. Buffalo Wings Restaurant in South Portland. Eastern Maine Medical Center. Is there a connection between all these numbers?”
Jane picked up her desk phone again. “There’s only one way to find out. I’ll try the first one.”
As Frost swiveled around to his own phone, Jane dialed the Augusta number. After only two rings, a woman answered briskly: “Gas and Go.” It was the no-nonsense voice of someone who has more immediate business to attend to.
“I’m Detective Rizzoli, Boston PD. We’re investigating the death of a woman named Sofia Suarez. According to her phone records, she called Gas and Go on Monday, April twenty-first, at tena.m.Did you happen to speak with her?”
“Monday? Yeah, I’m probably the person who answered the phone that day. I don’t remember talking to a customer by that name.”
“And she would have been calling from Boston.”
“I don’t know why anyone would call us from Boston. Unless she was trying to sell us something, because we get a ton of those calls. Maybe she dialed the wrong number?”
“You’re sure you don’t remember talking to her?”
“Sorry, no. We also sell lottery and bus tickets and we get alotof people calling about those. And April twenty-first, that’s like a month ago. Whatever she called about, it wasn’t anything that stuck with me.”
So much for Gas and Go.
Next on Jane’s list was the Buffalo Wings Restaurant in South Portland, a call made at two-thirtyp.m.on April 24, lasting a scant thirty seconds. It was now noon, the worst possible time to be calling a restaurant, but Jane dialed the number anyway.
A man answered: “Buffalo Wings, how can I help you?”
Like the woman at Gas and Go, he could not remember a call from Sofia, nor did he even know anyone by that name.
Jane hung up, baffled by why Sofia had phoned these numbers. From the discouraged tone of Frost’s voice, she figured he was having no better luck with the numbers he was calling. She scanned down to the Wednesday afternoon before Sofia’s death. Dr. Antrim had witnessed her talking on the phone in the parking lot, a call that had struck him as strangely furtive, but the only call she made that afternoon was at 2:46p.m., and it had gone to the Pilgrim Hospital central switchboard. There was no way to track which extension Sofia had ultimately connected to.
“Any luck?” said Frost.
“No. You?”
“I spoke to the secretary at Bangor High School. She didn’t recognize the name Sofia Suarez and doesn’t remember the phone call. But she takes calls all day from parents and students.”
“And the call to Eastern Maine Medical Center?”
“It went to their medical records department. The clerk didn’t remember talking to Sofia.”
Jane flinched as her cell phone gave a murderous screech of violins.
“Oh no,” said Frost. “I completely forgot to tell you. She called me a few hours ago.”
“My mom calledyou?”
