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I closed my eyes and leaned back in the seat. “I’m not going to fight with you on this, Mom. Now, was there a reason for you to call other than to establish that you know I’m gallivanting around town, possibly tarnishing the family name?”
“I wanted to remind you of the dinner tonight. Your attendance is mandatory.”
“What’s with this dinner?”
“Show up at seven o’clock and you’ll find out. Dress up.”
“Why?” I pressed.
“I’ll see you tonight.” Then she hung up.
What was she up to? I didn’t have the bandwidth to figure it out, and even though I’d rather swim in a shark tank than attend a semiformal dinner at my parents’ house, I couldn’t not go. I was living in their apartment rent-free.
After I took a deep breath to try to clear my head, I told myself to focus on what to do next for Ava’s case. If murders were really that rare around here, it seemed like a very strange coincidence that a body had been discovered the night Ava Peterman was kidnapped. I also couldn’t ignore that the murder had taken place in the direction of the laundromat.
I searched for murder and Jackson Creek on my phone, but nothing current showed up, so I looked up Ricky Morris, the owner of the laundromat. His name popped up on my first search. While he’d made the news for being linked to some drug cases, as far as I could tell, he hadn’t ever gone to trial or been convicted. This was helpful but nowhere near as efficient as running his name through a database would be. Too bad I didn’t have access anymore…
But I knew someone who did. Louise.
I hoped to get some information from her about the murder, but how much should I tell her about Ava?
I pulled up her number and called, not surprised when she didn’t answer. Somehow, even though she was relatively new to the department, she’d found herself on a daytime shift. I figured it probably had something to do with the sheriff trying to add more women to visible positions in the department. When her voicemail message came up, I asked her to call me back when it was convenient.
What now?
Even though I believed Ava had been kidnapped, it was still procedure to talk to the people closest to her. Her family was obviously out, but I could still talk to her friends and maybe her teacher. Kids’ friends often knew things their parents didn’t—like if they’d made an adult friend either in person or the internet. The internet seemed doubtful in this case, given TJ’s tight control on her internet access, but maybe one of her friends had noticed a man following her home after school or someone who’d paid her more attention than customary at church. Anything would help.
I also needed to find out more about the laundromat. If TJ was messing with criminals, he might have naïvely—or not—jumped into the frying pan. Kidnapping a family member to shut someone up wasn’t outside the realm of possibility, especially since TJ planned to bring up shutting down Suds and Duds at next week’s city council meeting.
I should also conduct an informal interview with James Malcolm. TJ was going after him too, after all, and he’d been at the station earlier.
No, I wasn’t ready to go back to Scooter’s.
I considered my other two options for a few seconds, then decided going to the laundromat won out since it sounded like the laundromat was first on TJ’s shit list. While I didn’t expect to get any real information, I could at least look around and get a feel for the place.
After a fifteen-minute drive up Highway 24, I pulled into the parking lot and took note of the two cars in the lot. I parked next to a beat-up Ford Taurus and headed inside.
The space was gray and dingy and looked like it hadn’t been updated since it was built, probably a good forty or fifty years ago based on the look of the washers and dryers lining both sides of the walls. If Ricky Morris was making any money from this place, he wasn’t reinvesting it.
An older man sat in a plastic chair next to two tumbling dryers, a laundry basket on wheels parked in front of him. He didn’t seem to notice me walk in, his intense gaze on a flat-screen TV that hung on a wall—the only thing inside the building that looked younger than twenty years old.
In the corner was a window to a back room, with a sign overhead offering personal services. I headed that direction, realizing I had to take a different approach than what I would have used if I were wearing a badge.
A man in his late teens to early twenties sat in a chair behind the counter, watching something on his phone with his feet kicked up on the desk in front of him. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of some obscure band. His dark brown hair was long enough to touch his collar. He looked like he was attempting to grow a beard and a mustache but struggling to pull it off.
I rested my hand on the counter and tried my best to make my voice sound inquiring and not authoritative. “I have a few questions.”
He glanced up, looking annoyed. “It’s a laundromat. What’s there to ask?”
“Buster!” a man shouted from the back. “Customer service!”
Buster offered me a weak smile, dropping his feet from the desk and turning to face me. “What would you like to know?” he asked in an overly polite tone that didn’t reach his eyes.
I looked for some sign of recognition now that he’d really looked at me, but all I saw was not so thinly veiled annoyance.
“I’m new to the area,” I said. “My apartment doesn’t have a washer or dryer, so I’m looking for a laundromat. What are your hours?”
He looked at me like I was an imbecile and gestured toward the front. “As it says on the door, we’re open from seven a.m. until midnight.”
