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I did what he asked. He sat me down on a stool in the kitchen, my hands still secured behind my back. There was another officer upstairs, this one a woman. Young, and attractive, with blond hair tied in a low ponytail. I tried to get her to listen to me.
“I’m Nina Fraser’s mother. Nina’s been missing since last weekend. If you call Detective Matthew Wright at the state police he’ll confirm that I’m telling the truth. I came here because this house was where Nina was last seen. I shouldn’t have broken in. I know that. I’ll pay for the window. I know the owners of the house. Okay? I’m a friend of the family.” A lie. Maybe an obvious one. The blond officer exchanged glances with the man who’d handcuffed me. He was the one who spoke.
“Ma’am, we know about your daughter. But you broke into this house. You’ve just admitted that. So you’re under arrest for breaking and entering right now. I’m going to read you your rights, and then I’m going to take you to the station.”
“I’m just trying to explain—”
“Ma’am,” he cut me off with a warning tone.
I closed my mouth and listened as he read me my rights.
CHAPTER SIX
Matthew
Matthew was halfway to the Stowe house when he got a call from Sarah Jane, telling him that Leanne Fraser had just been arrested for breaking and entering. He swore, turned the car around, and drove back to the station. The arresting officer was waiting for him. He was defensive, as if he expected Matthew to give him a hard time for bringing Leanne in.
“If you think I should have done differently, with her daughter being missing and all, I get that, but I couldn’t just let her go.”
Matthew settled him down and took all the details, and then he made a call and had a difficult conversation with Rory Jordan. When all of that was done, he went to find Leanne. They’d stowed her in an interview room, rather than a cell. The interview room was a lot more attractive than a cell, but that didn’t mean it was a welcoming place. The windows were small and opaque and nailed permanently closed. The linoleum on the floor was peeling, and the room smelled strongly of bleach. They’d given her coffee, but they’d also handcuffed her right hand to the table. She looked pale and shaken. Matthew crossed the room and unlocked the cuffs. What idiot had decided that was necessary? He sat opposite her, taking his phone from his pocket and putting it on the table.
“I’m pretty sure I asked you to stay home and wait to hear from me,” he said.
Leanne rubbed at her wrist where the handcuff had been. “I should have gone there yesterday. Nina might have had an accident. She could have been in that house, not able to get to a phone, needing me.”
“Uh-huh. She wasn’t, though, was she?” Matthew took a seat opposite her.
“You weren’t doing anything to find her. I’m her mother. You can’t expect me to sit at home and just wait.”
“Leanne, we met for the first time this afternoon. And almost the first thing I did was have an officer go out to check the house.”
That threw her. “You already searched the house?”
“No. We don’t search without a warrant, not unless we have the owners’ permission. But after I left you and Andy today, I called the local station and an officer came out to do a wellness check. She rang the doorbell and knocked on the doors. No one answered.”
Leanne made a face. “She knocked on the doors. That’s not enough. Are you kidding me?”
“I had also planned to visit the house this evening myself. You got there at most an hour before me.”
“An hour is a long time if someone is injured. What if she had fallen down the stairs?”
Matthew leaned forward. “Leanne, you broke into the house. Presumably you’d already been upstairs before the officers found you?” He waited for her nod, then continued. “You’ve been all over, then. You’ve touched surfaces, maybe you shed some hair. If something did happen to Nina there, you’ve just completely contaminated those rooms. If they were a crime scene, and I’m not saying they were, then you’ve just destroyed them as a source of evidence.”
Leanne flinched. “You think something happened to Nina? While she was in that house?”
“I’m not saying that. What I am saying is, you tramping around the place, going off on your own initiative, that won’t help the investigation and it won’t help Nina. I understand that it’s hard to see progress from the outside looking in, but we really do know our jobs.” Matthew tapped his phone screen. “The warrant just landed in my inbox. It allows us to search the Stowe house legally, which I would have done without your intervention. So I hope you can see that you didn’t achieve anything by breaking in. And you might have done a lot of damage.”
“Why didn’t you just ask the Jordans’ permission to come into the house and look for her? Why did you wait for a warrant?”
Matthew didn’t answer. She was a smart woman, and she was drawing conclusions he didn’t want her to reach.
“Did they say no? Did you think they would say no?”
He said nothing. If he denied it, she wouldn’t believe him.
“What about Nina’s phone? Did you check it? Has she made any phone calls?”
“We’ve confirmed that Nina has not made any calls or sent any messages since Friday. The last ping sent from her phone was on Friday night, to one of the towers near Stowe.”
