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“I have a lot of things I need to tell you,” Nick said. “A lot of things I need to explain. But right now Alexa is all that matters, and I need you to tell me everything you know.”
“She didn’t show up for brunch,” Russell Nash said. “We didn’t worry too much at first. Traffic.” Heshook his head. “But then she was twenty minutes late, and then thirty, and she wasn’t answering her phone.”
“I tried calling too,” Nick said.
“You know about her accident?” Russell said. “When she was a teenager?”
Nick nodded.
“Her mother and I have been pretty protective since then, and Alexa has always been understanding about that, good about keeping in touch so we don’t worry. It isn’t like her to be late and not pick up her phone, so I took the car out, drove around the neighborhood looking for her in case she’d had an accident. Took me less than ten minutes to find her car.” He pounded his fist on the granite countertop. “I should have gone sooner.”
“This isn’t your fault,” Nick said. “Did you call the police?”
“Immediately. The driver’s side window was broken, and her bag had tipped over onto the floor of the passenger side.” He paused. “There was a gun, but they said it was registered to her.”
Nick left that alone. It wasn’t up to him to explain the gun to Alexa’s parents. “What else did they say?”
Russell’s face hardened. “That it looked like a fender bender, that Alexa might have been hurt andconfused, that she might have gotten a concussion and wandered off.”
“They won’t do anything until she’s been missing twenty-four hours,” Nick said. “At least.”
Russell nodded. “That’s what they said.”
It was SOP for any missing person situation that didn’t involve a child, including teenagers. The cops always assumed the person had run away, that they’d gone missing voluntarily. Nick hated it, but statistics made the procedure hard to argue. Most people over the age of thirteen who went missing did go missing voluntarily, were later found to have run away or met up with a boyfriend or girlfriend without telling anyone. Some of them just wanted to ditch their lives for a while.
But none of that accounted for the intangibles, for the fact that friends and family sometimes knew their loved ones better than anyone else.
That they knew when something was wrong.
“I take it the scene didn’t look like an accident?” Nick asked.
“At first… maybe. The car looked like it had been stopped suddenly, and the broken glass… I thought maybe someone had hit her and run again, but other than the window, there was no damage to her car, andwhen I saw the phone I knew something was wrong,” Russell said.
Nick flashed to Alexa’s phone, crushed and shattered in her dad’s hand. “Someone did it on purpose.”
Russell nodded. “The SIM card was removed too, and it was too far from the car to have been the result of a fender bender.” He scowled. “Not that that mattered to the police.”
“They probably insinuated she’d done it herself,” Nick said. “That she wanted to disappear and used the accident as a setup to do it.”
Russell looked at him with surprise. “Exactly. And then they asked if her behavior had changed recently, if she’d been having any trouble…”
“Fuck.” Nick glanced at Russell. He knew very little about Alexa’s dad; that he’d been a good father and husband, he was an accountant, he cared enough about following the rules that Alexa’s relationship with Nick was problematic for him. Did he mind cursing? Was he that much of a straight shooter? “Sorry,” Nick said, just to be safe.
Russell shook his head and the look on his face made Nick think he’d done his share of cursing since he’d found Alexa’s car.
Nick could hear BPD’s theories in his mind: woman loses her high-profile job, under investigation for improper behavior, starts seeing a new man, also under investigation, but this time for criminal activity. Woman disappears out of the blue, phone damaged so she can’t be traced… The conclusions wrote themselves.
The police would be on his doorstep in forty-eight hours.
“I came to you because I didn’t know where else to go.” Russell stared down at the island’s countertop, his drink untouched. “My wife stayed home in case Alexa calls or shows up, but she has a feeling you know something about this, about what might have happened to Alexa.”
Nick chose his words carefully. “I don’t know how much Alexa has told you.”
“We don’t talk about you,” Russell said. “It’s been… better that way.”
Nick’s heart clenched in his chest. Alexa had told him as much, but it still killed him to be relegated to an off-limits topic in the Nash household, like he was some derelict, someone who wasn’t good for Alexa, who would hurt her, when the truth was, he would lay down his life for her without a second thought.
Nick pushed his feelings aside. This wasn’t about him. “I understand.”
