Evie cast Gabriel a wicked look, and he grinned his reply. Linda was cutting a path for her toward the kitchen. This was going to be an interesting evening, even if it didn’t turn productive.
“Learn anything useful?”
Evie glanced up at Gabriel on the step above her. She was sitting on the stairway they had climbed two-plus hours earlier, edged over to the side so people still leaving could get around her. She sniffed the drink Gabriel put into her hand before tasting it. “I’ve got a headache again.”
“It’s the music. Most of their friends must have hearing aids they can turn off,” he quipped as he sat down beside her.
“I learned that the Florists’ relatives know more about me than anyone other than my mother.” She took another sip of the punch.
“The small-town rumor mill can be very efficient when stirred up by something this dramatic,” Gabriel said.
“I’m guessing the banker in the family ran a credit check, probably even looked at my recently canceled checks, since I keep an account with the same state bank.”
“Want me to go slap him on the wrist?”
She considered it briefly, then shook her head. “No. If I get in a bind and need to know details about someone, he now owes me a favor.”
Gabriel’s shoulder pressed against hers as another person passed. “They mean no real harm. They’re just protective.”
“Don’t they understand I’m trying to find their missing family members?”
“You’re State Police, a not-so-favorite badge around these parts.”
Evie thought she could understand that. She went back to his original question. “I think they were in marriage counseling over in Decatur—Scott and Susan Florist. It wasn’t all a happy family, going back about two years before they disappeared. The aunt kind of confirmed it for me. And money is missing out of their family assets. Mr. Florist-family-banker didn’t realize what he confirmed as he complained about the problems of maintaining, then settling an estate when the State Police won’t rule it a homicide and the courts won’t issue death certificates for seven years. If you ask the right question and sound like you know more than you actually do, that guy can talk himself into some useful tangents.”
Gabriel took the drink out of her hand. “Trust you to have made that kind of progress. Okay, this isn’t the place for this kind of conversation.” He pulled her to her feet, steadied her so she wouldn’t fall, led her down the stairs and out the door.
“You seem bothered I’ve gotten answers from the Florist family.”
He shook his head, kept her hand in his, and moved briskly down the sidewalk. “Lower your voice, please. Take a look around.”
Groups of friends were saying lingering goodbyes around a few cars on the street. She shut up. Gabriel strolled along, gave her hand a friendly swing as he said, “Pretend you’re having fun.”
Evie caught a few smiles directed their way, indicating they thought it nice the sheriff had a date, and found it interesting she didn’t mind the assumption. “I am having fun.”
Gabriel finally slowed. “Okay. You can safely say whatever you would like now.”
“Give me back the drink. This version is the best so far.”
He handed her the glass. She sipped at it and nodded. Her throat was dry from having talked quite a lot. “I want the recipe for this, if you can pry it out of the blender guy. Anyway, it was easier to talk about the case than duck questions about being your date. And most everyone I met brought up the subject of the Florist family. So I went with it.”
“Which is why I pulled you over to the party—well, one reason.” He unlocked the post office, guided her inside. “You’ve got some thoughts running around your head.”
She was grateful to step into the heated building after her brave words earlier about nixing the car. “They were in marriage counseling, probably over in Decatur, and there’s between forty and eighty thousand dollars missing from what their banker relative expected to find in the estate.” She walked over and set her drink on the table, pulled her phone out to check for messages. “I’m not sure where they were siphoning away cash that smoothly from their accounts. I maybe had a whiff of something being off in their finances before you pulled me away to the party, but I haven’t pinpointed it. I need to get my head back into those numbers.”
She started to move toward the open files, and he reached over to put a finger lightly under her chin. “Not tonight,” he said firmly, turning her to face him. “That’s a task for tomorrow. You’re sure on the marriage counseling?”
“Sort of. Sure of the location—Decatur—and that it was a standing Wednesday evening appointment for both of them. Pretty sure it started about two years before they disappeared.”
“Why didn’t we have this?” He looked puzzled and extremely frustrated, a combination that was rather appealing. She had known she would get his attention with this idea, so she hadn’t mentioned it until she was reasonably confident.
She patted his arm in sympathy. “Because it’s not really there, Gabriel. Not in their schedule books, not in what they told their family and friends, not in their finances—no checks have a memo line saying ‘marriage counseling.’ It wasn’t only Susan keeping something covert, or just Scott—it was both of them. They worked together to keep it under wraps.”
She studied the crime wall and the month-at-a-glance calendar pages. She’d found something new, and she wasn’t above admitting to herself it felt really good. “The aunt knew something. I think they were using her to cover up what they were really doing. A friend says, ‘I called you Wednesday evening, but didn’t get an answer.’ And they would say, ‘Sorry about that, we were over at my aunt’s, and cell reception isn’t good at her place.’ Like that. They’d stop by the woman’s place for ten minutes, use the stop to cover a three-hour gap in their evening.”
Gabriel pulled out a chair, draped his arms across the back of another one. “Tell me what you’re seeing to get to that conclusion.”
Evie thought about where to begin, decided to simply walk him through it. She made herself comfortable in her chair and propped her feet on the next one over. “I’ve been looking for motive to harm the family, digging for something that would be a trigger, trying to track their movements, what happened in their lives. I’ve been looking at any schedule or calendar I can find, anything with dates on it. You’ve collected a lot of paper on this family, Gabriel. Name the subject, and an officer put together a file on it. That’s proved very helpful when I have a feeling something is there but hiding beneath the surface. I’ve been into the guts of those boxes today.” She looked around at the stacks.
“I found that Susan suddenly developed an interest in speaking Spanish. That’s what I first noticed. She audited classes over in Decatur at the junior college. Spanish I, then Spanish II, Advanced Spanish—two years’ worth of Spanish classes. Always on a Wednesday night. No grades, no exams, but merely auditing the courses. She started about three weeks into the semester, so it wasn’t something she planned and began at the term’s start—she just abruptly joined that first class. I figured they were planning a vacation to Mexico when I first noticed it, but that much Spanish over that length of time didn’t make sense. And I checked—she had four years of Spanish in high school and another year in college. She could have skipped all the classwork and simply bought a refresher set of audios to brush up.
“I figured maybe there was an affair on the side, with a standing appointment on Wednesday evenings when she knows her husband is at work. If she gets asked about the Spanish classes, she can rattle off a sentence and say how fun it is.
“I looked up Scott’s schedule to confirm he was regularly working Wednesday nights. What I found was the opposite. Scott never drew a paycheck for work on a Wednesday night. If he was scheduled to work that night, he’d arrange to swap with someone. Or he would work a double the day before and flex the time off the rotation. In the two years before they disappeared, Scott was never paid for
work done on a Wednesday night. That’s just weird, isn’t it?” She paused and looked at Gabriel, and he nodded his agreement.
“So then it was like, huh, both doing something on Wednesday evenings. Are they taking tango lessons, then a room at a hotel, and don’t want humorous digs from family? They tuck Joe in with a friend or relative, have an evening away on their own, a date—they’re married, why not?”
She glanced again at Gabriel, but he simply signaled that she should keep going. She looked back at the crime wall. “Joe’s schedule, such as they had for him, says baseball coach, Decatur, on Wednesday nights. To work on his hitting, throwing, and field work? I’m thinking, wow, I wish my parents had sprung for private coaching when I was learning to hit a ball. So I looked at Joe’s game records—he kept information like that for himself. His performance over the two years in his actual league goes down, even with a weekly coaching session. Joe’s running a bluff, same as the parents.”
“They were covering up family counseling, or counseling for Joe. It fits better than marriage counseling,” Gabriel suggested.
Evie nodded. “That’s what I thought at first, but it doesn’t track. Counseling for a kid is triggered by something, and his school reports are fine. Good attendance, good grades, a rather popular boy. I checked his medical records. Precautionary X-rays after a bad fall and tumble on his bike are in file. The kid has fewer broken bones than I do, less stitches than I have right now. I checked for changes in his behavior the last two years—disruptive, grades changing, fights with a classmate—nope, it’s all good, the boy is cruising through life on a happy arc. There’s no sign of a trauma—walked in on a crime, got molested or did some molesting, walking in his sleep, developed a serious disease. The last one kind of made sense, actually. The kid is sick, got a childhood cancer or something, get him counseling to help along with the doctors.
“So I went looking at medical claims against Scott’s insurance, Susan’s. There’s nothing for doctors of any kind for Joe beyond normal checkups and shots for school and league play. There are single prescriptions written to Susan for anxiety, Joe for sleeping pills, issued once and not refilled. Issued two years before they disappeared, by a doctor in Decatur, a private practice, same date on the prescriptions. So I tracked down the prescribing doctor.” She pulled over her laptop and opened it.
“Some interesting things about Dr. Richard Wales,” she said as she typed his name into the search box. “He’s a psychiatrist, works with cops who have discharged a weapon in the line of duty or had to take a life in the line of duty. He does the general ‘you’re fit for duty’ psych eval most cops have to pass before they’re hired. One of the other things he’s known for is counseling couples after they have lost a child due to a tragic accident or a miscarriage.” She turned the screen so he could see the doctor’s web page.
“Deputy Florist never fired his gun on the job that I can find. But he no doubt got cleared by Wales before he was hired here. Dr. Wales’s business card is probably tacked on your employee human-resource board. Susan Florist is holding down her job, her friends see her as happy, the photos show a contented woman. Maybe they lost a child to a miscarriage. It hurt, made them sad, but it wasn’t crippling. They hadn’t told family yet that she was pregnant again.
“They want some counseling. Maybe they were trying to decide if they would try for another child, or adopt, and the decision was making the marriage a bit rocky, they wanted some help sorting matters out. But two years? It’s either a lot of small things or the issue has some size to it. Friends aren’t seeing problems in the marriage, neither Scott nor Susan are talking about troubles, neither expresses a worry about Joe. But these two are keeping Wednesday in Decatur on their schedule and hiding the fact they are both going over there.”
“Why do they take Joe along with them to Decatur if they’re the ones getting counseling?” Gabriel asked as he turned the laptop back to her. “Where is he during those hours? For two years, Joe doesn’t say anything about his parents seeing a therapist every week? That doesn’t fit any kid I know. A kid has a secret, eventually he has to tell at least one of his friends.”
Evie reached for the sweet-tarts roll, took one, gave the last to Gabriel. “I think Joe’s there at the office with them. Maybe they didn’t feel comfortable leaving a then-nine-year-old with friends, didn’t want to explain where they were going or why.” Evie pulled another folder out of the stack, thumbed through the photos inside, slid several over to him. “From the photos of his room, Joe had several well-thumbed books about how to play and win DDM. It’s a multiplayer online video game that charges users by the hour, the kind a young boy would relish playing. In one of the boy’s notebooks, there are pages diagramming levels and moves and ideas for how to proceed. But he doesn’t have the computer hardware to run the video-intense game, and there are no charges on his parents’ credit cards for game time. He’s playing the game somewhere. I think he’s playing it at the doctor’s office.”
“Interesting . . .” Gabriel said.
“Yeah. I think the kid was getting to play video games for two hours if he would keep his mouth shut about what the family was doing on Wednesday nights. A decent trade-off. If asked, say you were practicing baseball. Some weeks, one or the other parent might actually take him to that coaching session. Other weeks he’s at the doctor’s office playing video games while the parents talk with the doctor.”
“All right, we need to talk with this doctor,” Gabriel decided. “And I need to find out if anyone around the sheriff’s office had any suspicion this was going on. I sure didn’t. But others worked with him more closely.”
Evie nodded. “I’ve already called the doctor. We’re on his schedule for Wednesday lunch, the first decent-length interval he had open. I don’t want a ten-minute ‘I can’t say anything because of client privilege’ round robin with him. We need him to confirm the appointments were going on for that length of time and who in the family the sessions were with. It may tell us absolutely nothing about the crime, but if it tells us more about the family, that itself might point to something useful. What was it that caused them to begin going to counseling? I want to know that detail.”
Gabriel nodded. “This is big, Evie. We didn’t have this.” He leaned back, arms linked behind his neck as he looked over at her. “Nice job finding it.”
She appreciated the compliment but did her best to shrug it off. “If I can’t find something, I’m not looking hard enough. We see if and where this leads, then we decide how frustrated you should be at not having discovered it before.”
He looked from the crime wall back to her. “You’ve been searching for a day and you’re finding things. The cop in me is both impressed at that and bothered I didn’t have these results before. Seriously, thanks.” He nodded to the finance paperwork. “This will still be here tomorrow. It’s late. You need to get out of here and get some sleep. ”
“I know. Ann will be here in the morning. We’re going to put a pause on this one and shift over to the Dayton girl’s disappearance.”
“That won’t slow things down much. I’ve got names on my list to finish interviewing, and I want to talk with officers in the department about what you’ve found here. Wednesday lunch, you said, to interview the doctor?”
“Noon. For an hour.”
Gabriel smiled. “I’ll make sure it’s cleared on my schedule.”
“Let’s hope it’s worth the time.”
“It will be, one way or another.”
Evie got to her feet when Gabriel did. He was right—it was time to call it a day. She needed some downtime.
He locked up the building behind her, nodded to the security officer on his way over, and escorted her to the yellow convertible. “Drive careful, Evie.”
“Always do.” Evie settled in the driver’s seat. “I really like the car.”
Gabriel grinned. “I’m glad. It’s cold enough you should raise the roof tonight.”
“The heater is like a
blast furnace. I’d put up the top, but what’s the fun in that?” She started the engine, lifted a hand in farewell, and headed back toward the house.
A good, productive day, she decided. She could feel this new lead had substance. It would tell them something, and hopefully that would point them in the right direction.
A few more days like this one and she’d be looking at solving the case. She smiled at the thought. She’d take it.
SEVEN
Joshua Thane
Josh found himself on full alert, anticipating Grace’s appearance. He figured she would come by the bait shop, as Ann had, rather than call, so he found reasons to stay around the dock rather than go out on the lake as he normally did. At dawn Tuesday, he went into Carin for groceries, his dogs with him, and then came back to his shop, which wouldn’t open for another hour. Those who needed bait before hours helped themselves from the outdoor cooler, leaving cash in the honor box.
He pulled around to the pier side of the parking lot. A slender woman with shoulder-length light-brown hair was perched on one of the picnic tables, feet dangling, hands tucked in the pockets of a down jacket against the cool morning. He took a breath, stepped out of the truck, and let his dogs out. The two Labradors rolled on the grass and then ran to the docks to explore. He turned toward his visitor.
She looked at him. “I’m—”
“Grace Arnett,” he finished with a smile as he approached. “I remember you, Grace. I made you a valentine in the sixth grade.” He thought the small, blond, blue-eyed girl she’d been back then the most beautiful person in the world. Two years behind him, she’d been in the fourth grade, and he had ridden his bike in circles, waiting for her class to dismiss so he could give her the valentine before she got on the bus. He could still remember her surprise and pretty blush, the dropped gaze, when he handed it to her. Her thank-you was soft and sweet and had lingered in his mind for a long time.