Alafair Burke - Long Gone

She thought about Jeff and how badly she wanted to contact him. He was supposed to call her when his depositions were over, but she had turned off her phone so the police couldn’t track it. If he didn’t hear from her soon, he was going to think she was having regrets about last night.

“Their what?”

“Local usage details. Incoming and outgoing calls. Just don’t call anyone but me, all right? I got one for me, too. The number’s already in there as the last number dialed.”

She fiddled with the keys to be sure she could find the entry. A chirp escaped from his coat pocket. “See? We’re all set. Call me if there are any problems. Otherwise, you’ll be hearing from me when it’s time to pick me up. No speeding. Come to full stops. Don’t get pulled over. That’s how they caught Ted Bundy.”

“Great. Now I’m being compared to a serial killer.”

He rolled his eyes, and she smiled.

“You’ve told me everything you know? Absolutely everything?”

“Yes. Absolutely.” She could tell from the way he looked at her that, once again, he believed her. “Agent Beckman?”

“Call me Hank.”

“Thank you, Hank.”

He got out of the car two blocks from the police station, and she crawled across the console to take his place at the wheel, waving before taking the direct route back to the highway, as cautious as a first-time taker of the driving exam.

Hank had never had reason to step inside the police station in Lolo, Montana, where he was raised, but he imagined it would have looked something like the one in Bedford. With clean concrete steps and upgraded glass windows, the building was not actually old, but had been designed to appear old-fashioned. Small towns did not want to admit that they were home to criminal acts and those who committed them. If they had to have a police station, better it at least be quaint.

A gray-haired woman sat at the desk nearest to an unstaffed reception window at the building’s entrance. He tapped gently on the glass, and she let out a little yelp.

“Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to startle you there.”

“No worries. Guess I let myself get carried away on my Sudoku.” She made her way to the window, no doubt slowed by the fact that her chubby feet looked like two bratwurst forced into her hot pink pumps, color-coordinated to match her black-and-pink-flowered blouse. Up close, he could see that her reading glasses were bedazzled with rhinestones. The photo ID hanging from the New York Giants lanyard around her neck identified her as Gail Richards.

“I have an aunt who can plow through an entire Sudoku book in three hours straight, then still be searching for more. I tell her she needs to go to Sudoku rehab.”

“Oh, don’t I know it. What can I do you for today?”

He flashed his FBI identification. Before he could even get a word out, she was pointing to the back of the building. “Oh, I’ll show you to the detectives.”

“No, ma’am, this is more likely to be a matter for the folks who sit up here near the window. It’s my understanding that a journalist by the name of Robert Atkinson has been trying to obtain a copy of a police report from you all. I believe it may have been a report from some time ago?”

“Oh my, yes. That’s not a name I’ll soon forget. He must have called me six different times. First he thought I had the name wrong. Then he said I had the date wrong. Then he seemed to think I was some silly girl who didn’t know her way around our archive files, but I gave him some choice words on that one. Next thing I know, here he waltzes up to the window yesterday-right when I’m trying to close up for the night-claiming that someone’s on the take. Someone destroyed records. Acting like we’re Enron or something, standing around shredding documents just to keep them out of the hands of the important Mr. Atkinson.”

Hank could suddenly imagine perky Miss Gail with the bedazzled reading glasses tearing out a man’s throat if properly motivated.

“And what police report was he trying to obtain?”

“A nonexistent one, if you ask me.”

“And according to him?”

She sighed at the mere thought of having to remind herself of the inanity of his request. “At first, all he’d give me was a date. April 18, 1985. Well, it was either late at night on April 18 or sometime April 19 or maybe early in the morning on April 20, which would have been a Sunday. But it had something to do with something that happened on April 18. I told him that we might not be a hotbed of crime up here, but we’d have more than one incident report on a spring weekend, that’s for sure. I asked him for an address or a suspect or the nature of the crime, and he just wasn’t willing to budge. Believe it or not, that was probably his first three phone calls. Then he finally calls back and tells me, fine, the name of the complainant would have been Christie Kinley.”

Something about the name sounded familiar. He had taken in an ocean of information from Alice Humphrey in the last few hours, but he could hear her voice speaking a similar name during their manic exchange of data. Kinley. It was the last name that was familiar.

“Do you mean Julie Kinley?” He recalled Alice mentioning a plagiarism claim that ITH had settled with a woman named Julie Kinley. If the woman hadn’t passed away last year, she would have risen to the top of his list of suspects.

“I was about to say, legal name Julie Kinley, but she was known as Christie. Trust me, that was a name I took note of. I thought maybe Atkinson was playing a joke on me, but apparently the mother named her after the actress Julie Christie.”

“And you remember all this without notes.” He tried not to go too heavy on the marveling tone, but knew he needed to make up for trying to correct her about the complainant’s first name. “I’d like to have someone at the bureau with that kind of memory.”

“You darling man, I can’t even tell you what I had for breakfast this morning. This just goes to show you how that Atkinson fellow hounded me. But my job’s my job, so off I go to archives, digging through the paper files. Some people aren’t the best about their dates, you know. April gets in with August. May winds up before March. And I knew I’d never hear the end of it from this guy if I told him we didn’t have the report when in fact we actually did. So, let me tell you, I looked . Hard. And there were no reports filed by Julie or Christie or anyone else named Kinley any time in 1985, or even the spring of ’84 and ’86, which I checked just to be clear. I did not appreciate him suggesting that I hadn’t searched properly.”

“That’s where the choice words came in, huh?” He flashed a conspiratorial grin.

“Oh, don’t you know it. Choice indeed. So choice you could cut them with a knife and eat them with Heinz 57 sauce. Don’t tell the mayor, but I’m pretty sure I dropped some bombs you can’t say on the radio.”

“Sounds like Atkinson deserved it.” He felt bad dishing on the man under the circumstances.

“Once I told him-in fine detail-just how thorough my work had been, I thought we were over and done with. But sure enough, he showed up here yesterday asking to see the chief. Like the chief of police is just going to march to the front window because Gail says so.”

He shook his head at the insanity of the suggestion.

“Then he goes and accuses us of destroying documents.”

“Us?”

“Well, and that was the thing, right? He was so sure records had been destroyed, but he refused to say how he was so certain they had ever existed in the first place. I finally had to get a sergeant to deal with him, but you know I was listening in.”

Hank had no doubt at all.