A Trace of Crime. Блейк Пирс

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      “I’ll let you know if we learn anything,” she said to her husband as she gave him a kiss on the cheek. He nodded, then pulled her in for a long, tight hug.

      Keri glanced over at Ray, who was watching the couple. Despite himself, he glanced over at her. She could still see the hurt in his eyes.

      “I’ll call you when we get to the school,” Keri said quietly to Ray. He nodded without replying.

      She felt stung by his coldness but she got it. He had opened up and taken a big risk. And she had shut him down without explanation. It was probably good that they had some space for the next little while.

      As the two women stepped outside and began to walk away from the house, one thought reverberated in her head.

      I have screwed up massively.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Ninety minutes later, back at her desk, Keri let out a sigh of deep frustration. Most of the last hour and a half had been fruitless.

      They hadn’t found anything unusual on the walk to the school and didn’t come across any obvious signs of struggle. There were no odd tire marks near the spot where Mrs. Rainey had found Jessica’s stuff. Keri had stopped at every house nearby to determine if any residents had street-facing video cameras that might be of use. None did.

      When they got to the school, Ray was already there talking to the principal, who promised to send out an email blast to all school parents asking for any information they might have. The security officer had all the surveillance footage from the day queued up so Keri suggested Ray stick around and view it while she got Mrs. Rainey back home and returned to the office to call all the potential leads.

      To Carolyn Rainey, it must have simply looked like two partners effectively multi-tasking. And to a degree, it was. But the thought of sitting awkwardly in the passenger seat as Ray drove her back to West LA division was something she wasn’t up for right now.

      So instead, they got a Lyft back to the Rainey house and Keri continued to the station from there. That’s where she’d spent the last half hour calling all Jessica’s friends and classmates. No one had anything unusual to share. Three friends all remembered her leaving school on her bike and waving to them as she left the parking lot. Everything seemed fine.

      She called both the boys Jessica had crushes on in recent weeks and while both knew who she was, neither seemed to know her well or even be aware of how she felt. Keri wasn’t shocked at that. She remembered that at that age, she’d filled up whole notebooks with the names of boys she liked, without ever actually speaking to them.

      She spoke to, or left messages with, all of Jessica’s teachers, her softball coach, her math tutor, and even the head of the neighborhood watch group. No one she reached knew anything.

      She called Ray, who picked up on the first ring.

      “Sands.”

      “I’ve got nothing here,” she said, deciding to focus solely on the matter at hand. “No one saw anything out of the ordinary. Her friends say everything seemed fine when she left school. I’m still waiting for some calls back but I’m not optimistic. You having better luck?”

      “Not so far. The video camera range only extends to the end of the school’s block in each direction. I can see her saying goodbye to her friends, just as you describe, then biking off. Nothing happens while she’s visible. I’m having the guard queue up footage from earlier in the week to see if there was anyone loitering around on prior days. It might be a while.”

      Unspoken in that last line was the assumption he wouldn’t be returning to the station anytime soon. She pretended not to notice.

      “I think we should post the Amber Alert,” she said. “It’s six p.m. now. So it’s been three hours since her mom called nine-one-one. We don’t have any evidence suggesting this is anything other than an abduction. If she was taken right after school, between two forty-five and three p.m., she could be as far as Palm Springs or San Diego by now. We need to get as many eyes on this as possible.”

      “Agreed,” Ray said. “Can you honcho that so I can keep reviewing this footage?”

      “Of course. Are you coming back to the station afterward?”

      “I don’t know,” he answered noncommittally. “Depends on what I find.”

      “Okay, well, keep me posted,” she said.

      “Will do,” he replied and hung up without saying goodbye.

      Keri ordered herself not to focus on the perceived slight and put her attention into preparing the Amber Alert and getting it out. As she was finishing up, she saw her boss, Lieutenant Cole Hillman, walking toward his office.

      He was wearing his usual uniform of slacks, sport coat, loose tie, and short-sleeved dress shirt that he couldn’t keep tucked in because of his ample girth. He was a little over fifty but the job had aged him so that there were deep lines in his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. His salt-and-pepper hair was more salt than pepper these days.

      She thought he was going to come over to her desk and demand a status update but he never even looked in her direction. That was fine with her, as she wanted to check with the CSU folks to see of they’d found any prints.

      After she submitted the Amber Alert, Keri walked though station bullpen, which was unusually quiet for this time of night, and down the hall. She knocked on the CSU door and poked her head in without waiting for permission.

      “Any luck on the Jessica Rainey case?”

      The clerk, a twenty-something girl with dark hair and glasses, looked up from the magazine she’d been reading. Keri didn’t recognize her. The CSU clerk job was a grind and had a lot of turnover. She typed the name in the database.

      “Nothing from the backpack or bike,” the girl said. “They’re still checking a few prints from the phone but the way they were talking, it didn’t sound promising.”

      “Can you please have them let Detective Keri Locke know as soon as they’re done, regardless of the result? Even if there are no usable prints, I need to check that phone.”

      “You got it, Detective,” she said, burying her nose back in the magazine before Keri had even closed the door.

      Standing alone in the quiet hallway, Keri took a deep breath and realized there was nothing else for her to do. Ray was checking the school surveillance footage. She had put out the Amber Alert. The CSU report was pending and she couldn’t look at Jessica’s phone until they were done with it. She’d either spoken to or was waiting to hear back from everyone she had called.

      She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, allowing her brain to relax for the first time in hours. But as soon as she did, unwelcome thoughts flooded in.

      She saw the image of Ray’s face, hurt and confused. She saw a black van with her daughter inside rounding a corner into darkness. She saw the eyes of the Collector as she squeezed his neck, draining the life out of the man who’d abducted her daughter over five years ago, even as he was already dying from a head wound. She saw grainy footage of a man known only as the Black Widower as he shot another man in the head, took Evie from the man’s van, and shoved her into the trunk of his own car before disappearing forever.

      Her СКАЧАТЬ