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Josie nodded. “Speaking of vehicles, before we got here, my colleague checked and saw that a Ford Focus is registered to you at this address. We saw it outside. Sharon didn’t have her own car?”
“No. Couldn’t afford it. She always used mine. Paid for gas and repairs herself. I don’t use it much anymore, anyway. Don’t get around so great anymore.”
Josie asked, “Was Sharon seeing anyone that you know of? Dating anyone?”
Rosalie shook her head. “There was some boy she liked. Oh, I don’t remember his name, but it doesn’t much matter. I don’t think either of them had much time for dating. I know she didn’t. Not with the hours she worked.”
“How about her friends?” Josie asked. “Do you know any of their names?”
Rosalie rattled off some names which Josie committed to memory. “They don’t come here much. Shar meets them. All their numbers should be on her phone. Everything about her is on that phone. You’ll probably get a lot more from that than from me. I love my granddaughter, but she had her own life. That’s how I wanted it. I didn’t want her to feel like she always had to stay here and take care of me, or something.”
Josie smiled. “I understand. We found her phone, so we’ll get a warrant for its contents and take a look. Do you know if Sharon was taking any kind of medication?”
“Don’t think so,” Rosalie said. “You can check in her room if you’d like. Top of the steps, first door on the left.”
“Thank you,” said Josie.
Mettner stepped back inside. He crossed the room and handed Rosalie her phone. “Albert is on his way.”
Rosalie nodded. She looked back toward Josie. “You’re going to ask me if Shar did drugs, aren’t you? That must be next.”
“Yes,” said Josie.
“If she did, I never saw it. Couple of times, I smelled liquor on her but never saw her with anything else. Doesn’t mean she wasn’t, just that I didn’t know.”
“I understand,” said Josie. “One last thing. Sharon was wearing a glove—knit, gray, with her initials.”
“I made those,” said Rosalie. “They’re her favorite. She’s had them since the sixth grade. Wears them every winter. A few times I had to darn them. I told her this year I wasn’t sure if I could do it. My hands hurt so much now.”
Mettner said, “You sewed her initials into them?”
Rosalie nodded. “Some girl in the seventh grade stole them and tried to say they were hers. After we got them back, I put her initials on each one. Never had a problem after that.” She went silent. In the stillness, Josie sensed Rosalie’s newly minted grief creeping in all around them like a toxic cloud of pain. She offered a hand and Rosalie took it. Her skin was clammy. She’d started trembling. It wasn’t visible but Josie felt it in their fused hands, a low current working its way from her to Josie.
“Had she lost one of them recently?” asked Mettner.
Rosalie shook her head. “No, no. That would have been a crisis. Don’t know why she loved those gloves so much.” She looked past both of them at the front door. “You never know with these kids. You never know with anyone.”
“Know what?” asked Josie.
“What people hold onto.”
FOUR
The search of Sharon Eddy’s room turned up a few bottles of liquor, some birth control pills, and a vape pen with no cartridges. If Sharon had been using any type of drugs, she hadn’t kept them in her small bedroom. After years on the job, Josie generally found that parents or other caretakers of high school or college-aged kids knew very little about their kids’ true activities, but in this case, it appeared Rosalie Eddy was basically correct about her granddaughter’s activities—or lack thereof.
Back downstairs, Josie sat with Rosalie while Mettner knocked on the doors of her next-door neighbors. He returned with a woman in her forties who promised to sit with Rosalie until her brother arrived. Josie pressed a business card into Rosalie’s hand and told her to call them if she had any questions.
Outside, they walked down the pavement to their vehicles. Streetlights cast small circles along the sidewalk. The temperature had dropped even more since they’d been inside Rosalie Eddy’s home. Josie pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders, zipping it up all the way to her chin.
Mettner said, “That didn’t give us much to work with.”
Josie stopped at her SUV. “No, it sure didn’t.”
He took out his phone and scrolled through the notes he’d taken at the scene earlier. “That Hempstead Trail has no cameras nearby, so any type of video footage is out. I can run a check on LPRs in the area.”
LPRs, or license plate readers, were a valuable tool that the police department used in many different cases. Denton PD had equipped three of their patrol vehicles with cameras that linked up to their mobile data terminals. As those cruisers moved throughout the city, the cameras scanned the license plates of all moving and parked vehicles and sent an alert to the officers if any vehicles that had warrants out on them had been stolen, or had suspended tags. If any of the LPR devices had been near the creek trail where Sharon Eddy’s body was found that afternoon, it would have picked up which vehicles were nearby.
“Guess we should do a geo-fence, too,” Mettner mumbled.
