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They parted ways again, Dan and Pam talking animatedly about finding the bullet. When they reached Pam’s house, the dogs were barking wildly.
“I guess I’d better let them out before they bust through the window.”
“Are we okay?” he asked, switching his finger between the two of them.
“I guess so,” she said. “Don’t you have a date with Rene Johnson tonight?”
“I do.”
“Have fun, and let me know how it goes. I think it would be pretty funny if you ended up with Jack’s niece.”
“It wouldn’t be that funny,” he said, frowning.
He left, walking around the house to the front, and she let the dogs out. There was no sign of Hocus, which was just as well. Pam needed to nurse her wounds in private.
Whether or not she loved Jake, he had been a part of her life for nearly a year. She’d slept with him, shared intimacies, secrets. She thought he loved her. It was a farce, and now she had to heal from it. Maybe she’d do what Dan said he was doing but failed at, and stay away from the opposite sex for a while. So many had marched through her house since Jack died, she should be ashamed of herself.
She ran the beach with the dogs for twenty minutes, not stopping at Lisa’s. Back at home, she fed them and then decided she wanted to dig into a cake that was left over from the party. It was five days old, but she didn’t care. Cheesecake got better with age, didn’t it?
For lunch she had a piece of cheesecake with coffee. Ten minutes later, she was sound asleep on the veranda.
Dropping off new evidence for Charlotte Timpson, Laura listened intently as Detective Wong explained the log-in procedure they used. She’d never log in evidence herself, but he felt it was important that she know the protocol to make sure her evidence was always logged in properly, and that she received a receipt for it.
Back at Jake Stevens Private Detective Agency, Laura couldn’t wait to dig into the case file. The one thing she wanted to check; Charlotte’s hair color at time of death. Sitting at her desk with a cup of coffee, she opened the file folder. The cover page included a photo, not a mug shot or an autopsy photo, of a carefully made-up young woman. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was definitely attractive, with clear, bright eyes and even white teeth. Well taken care of, well nourished. In the photo, her hair was short, spiked and bleach blond, the kind of hairstyle a punk rocker used to wear. She flipped through the pages to the autopsy photos and saw that in death, she was more angular. She’d lost weight; her skin was broken out, perhaps from drug use. She’d read the autopsy report to find out, but her hair was the same short blond. The hair she’d found tangled in the grasses at the site of the body discovery was long and brown.
Hesitating calling Henry Wong to talk to him about the hair, she was curious if they’d bother to do DNA testing on it. She took a step out in faith and called him, leaving a message when his voicemail came on about the discrepancy in hair color.
She began at the front of the file again, reading the report. Charlotte’s mother, Valeria Timpson, had come into the precinct with another daughter, Charlotte’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Maria, to file a missing persons report.
Charlotte was a known sex worker who advertised on Craigslist, but she was faithful about checking in with her mother daily. They had not heard from her for a week, which was unusual. She had a four-year-old daughter who spent every weekend with her grandmother, and when Friday arrived with no word from Charlotte about bringing the child for her visit, they grew frantic. They waited the requisite forty-eight hours and were back at the station to file the report.
Timpson had complained continuously that the police weren’t taking the case seriously because her daughter was a sex worker. Six months passed with no news.
Finally, one night a man walking his dog on the desolate public beach discovered two bodies. Earlier that year other bodies had been discovered farther north, all sex workers with police histories, identified by their fingerprints. They had all been strangled.
The recent findings included a woman and a small child who had been stabbed. The bodies were in an advanced state of decomposition, but the stab wounds to the ribs, cranium and sternum were evident in both bodies.
Laura continued reading, lost in the file. She imagined what it had to be like for Valeria Timpson to wait for her granddaughter’s visit and, when Charlotte didn’t show up and she was unable to contact her, to have to wait for forty-eight hours before she could file the report. It must have been agonizing.
A commotion out in the waiting room got her attention. Jake had returned. She stuck her head out the door.
“Hey, how are you?”
“Can you two come into my office in fifteen? I’m going to order lunch, too.”
She didn’t want to stop reading the file. “Jake, I got the case file for the Charlotte Timpson murder.”
“You did? From Will?”
“He got it from Henry Wong. I was out there this morning, at the site, and found a few things sifting through the sand and took them back to the precinct.”
“We need to talk.” He looked at his watch. “Fifteen minutes?”
She nodded. When he disappeared into his office, the receptionist motioned to Laura.
“He looks like crap.”
“I’m sure we’ll be getting an explanation this afternoon.”
