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A sly smile lit up his face. “It’s nothin’ personal, Harper.”
My brows shot up to my hairline. “Really? Because it sure feels personal, Chief Larson.”
We locked gazes for several seconds before he finally said, “I know what you think of me. You think I bungled your sister’s case. You think I’ll bungle this one, but you can keep your opinions to yourself, because this is my town.” His face flushed as he worked himself up. “My people. My cases. I’ll handle them as I see fit, and you’ll keep your damn mouth closed and stay out of it!” He’d started shouting again and spittle flew out of his mouth, landing on his desk.
How had he found out that I thought he’d screwed up my sister’s case? While I believed it to be true, I’d kept my thoughts mostly to myself. My parents knew. And my ex-partner/ex-boyfriend, Keith, knew. I’d told Kara, my old roommate and best friend in Little Rock, and a handful of other friends from college, because it was in college that I’d really started to tease Andi’s case apart. Larson had been slow to bring in bigger agencies with more resources and manpower to find her. He’d also failed to release information to the public that could have led to finding my sister before she was killed. And he hadn’t locked down the crime scene or called in the county crime scene team until over twenty-four hours after her abduction. But no one official and definitely no one in town other than my parents knew my disgust at how he’d handled the case.
Someone had told Chief Larson how I really felt about him.
Who?
Then again, half the state thought he’d screwed up—an official state investigation into how he’d handled the case agreed—so maybe he just figured, correctly, that I shared the public opinion of him.
But one thing was crystal clear: this man was a loose cannon who resented the hell out of me, and I could see him pursuing the runaway angle just because he knew I thought she’d been kidnapped. But would he really put her life in danger like that?
Based on the fury on his face, I’d say yes.
Goddammit.
There was absolutely no way I’d tell this man about the photo and message on the glass. I was even more certain he’d try to make it my fault.
“Good chat,” I said, getting to my feet and turning toward the door.
“I never said we were done!” he shouted after me.
I turned back to face him, my face a mask of patience. “Am I being detained?”
“What?” He grew flustered. “No—”
“Then have a good day, Chief Larson. I hope you can sleep at night.” I opened the door and headed out to the hall, the police chief shouting after me as I walked out of the building.
While I was beyond curious to know who had told Chief Larson my opinion on his investigation of my sister’s kidnapping, if someone had indeed tattled, I wondered if it mattered.
There was probably no saving me. But I’d be damned if I’d stop trying to find Ava Peterman before it was too late.
Chapter 12
When I got back in my car, I needed a moment to collect myself. The bottle of vodka had glued all the pieces of me back together enough to get me through the interview, but I was starting to fall apart again. Even if I hadn’t already drunk my last mini-bottle of alcohol, I was smart enough to know that drinking wouldn’t help me figure this out.
I suspected I was working two different cases—Ava’s kidnapping and whoever was stalking me. It just didn’t make sense for the stalker to have kidnapped Ava. In all likelihood, they’d followed me to the Petermans’ and taken the opportunity to put the photo in my car. If they’d been watching me for a while, they probably knew that my parents had surveillance cameras on their property. Breaking into my car at their property would be too dangerous, but it had sat unobserved on the Petermans’ street for an hour and a half. It had provided them with an opportunity they may have been looking for.
Ava’s case took precedence, of course, but what if I was wrong? What if the person who’d left the frame had kidnapped Ava? Even if it was unlikely, it wasn’t totally inconceivable.
Maybe it didn’t matter. I didn’t have any leads on the broken frame, but I had something solid in Ava’s disappearance: that strange van that had been noticed by a couple of neighbors. For now, I’d focus on that.
I needed to get out of the police parking lot, so I drove downtown and parked in an empty space on Main Street. Pulling up a search engine on my phone, I looked up B&G Woodworking. There weren’t any hits in Arkansas, but there was a business with that name in Memphis. I placed a call to them, wondering how to introduce myself and get them to talk since I wasn’t Detective Adams anymore.
“B&G Woodworking,” a man answered.
“Hi,” I said, my mind still scrambling, and then it hit me. “This is going to sound crazy, but I live in Jackson Creek, Arkansas, and all last week a van with your business name was parked on a street near downtown. It showed up last Tuesday and left on Friday. Could that be one of your vans?”
“No shit?” the guy asked, sounding excited. “We had a van stolen two weeks ago. Sounds like it might be ours. Jackson Creek, Arkansas, you say? How far away is that?”
“About three hours from Memphis.”
“And you said it’s gone?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It left last Friday night, but it struck me as odd that it was parked there all day and night for several days and then it was just gone. I guess maybe I should have called sooner, but I thought they were doing work on the neighbor’s house. Then I checked with my neighbor today and they said they hadn’t hired them.”
