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The mess was strange and unlike Kat. Although she may have led a more unconventional life than most, that didn’t mean she wasn’t tidy.
“Because when you’re a nine-to-fiver and your friend starts her shift at ten P.M., that doesn’t exactly make meeting up for coffee easy.”
She cocked her hip to the side, still regarding me with skeptical eyes.
“Listen, I don’t know you. If you want to see Kiki, I’ll tell her that you’re looking for her.”
“You know what? I don’t have time for this.”
I stepped forward as I spoke, blasting past the woman and barging into the apartment.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Looking for my friend. You want to call the cops? Go ahead.”
The woman let out a sound of indignant annoyance as I made my way into the apartment. The living room led to a small hallway, a bathroom at the end and two doors on either side.
“Which one’s hers?”
I glanced over my shoulder, the roommate pursing her lips and looking as if she was trying to decide whether or not she wanted to bring the police into the matter.
“Call the cops,” I said again, taunting her, challenging her. “Unless there’s a reason why you don’t want to talk to them. Hell, maybeI’llgo ahead and call them.” I slipped my phone out of the back pocket of my jeans, holding it up. “It’s been more than two days since I’ve heard a word from her, and we talk at least once every day; I could technically report her as a missing person.”
The woman’s eyes flashed, panic appearing on her face for the first time since I’d arrived. Her expression told me two things—that something was up, and that thatsomethingwas most likely illegal.
“She’s the room on the right. Just find what you’re looking for and leave.”
She was trying to act as if she had the upper hand in the situation, but with every word that came out of her mouth, I became more certain that something was amiss and that she knew more than she was letting on.
I hurried into the room on the right, a small bedroom with floor-to-ceiling windows, a little balcony big enough for two chairs and a small table on the other side. The room was a mess, clothes strewn everywhere as if Katherine had been there and packed in a hurry. Aside from the disorder, there was nothing personal about the space—no art on the wall, no personal mementos or pictures that indicated the room was used for anything but sleeping.
I poked around, lifting up scattered clothes, trying to find any sign of Kat. But I found nothing—no keys, no purse, no money, nothing. As I looked around, I felt the back of my neck burn the way it did when someone was watching you. I turned to see Kat’s roommate standing at the bedroom door, her arms crossed and a worried expression on her face.
“What’s your name?” I asked. I slipped into lawyer mode; my tone sharp.
“Um, Diamond.” No doubt that wasn’t her real name. Didn’t matter.
I stepped over to her. “Here’s what we’re going to do, Diamond. You and I are going to cut the bullshit, and you’re going to tell me what happened to Kat.”
A flash of her previous indignation returned. “She was here one day then she just left.”
“She just left? Without a word?”
Diamond crossed her arms under her big boobs. “That’s what I said.”
“And what about work? Has she been going? Or did she just stop showing up there, too?”
Her eyes flicked to the side, a telltale sign that someone was about to try to feed you a line of BS.
“Uh, she had her Friday night shift and then she was gone. That’s the last time I saw her.”
“So did she leave from here or from work?”
It was the oldest cross-examination trick in the book. Most people weren’t very good liars even though most thought they were. One of the easiest ways to catch someone in the middle of spinning you a tale was to give them the chance to say one thing, then try to trip them up by asking for details and specifics. Ninety percent of the time, they’d stumble over their own words trying to remember what they said. The other ten percent of the time, you were dealing with a true-blue sociopath that had no qualms about looking you dead in the eye and lying.
Diamond, sassy as she might’ve been, was no sociopath.
“She was… here. Right here. I mean, on the couch watching TV. Then she started acting all weird, went to grab her stuff. Then she was gone.”
