Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

The tall woman, dressed in jeans and a bomber jacket, stepped into the doorway. Her red hair and shoulders were dusted with snow. She smiled at Rhyme and Sellitto. “Merry Christmas and all that.”

Thom headed down the hall with the bags.

“Ah, Sachs, come on in here. It seems Detective Sellitto has volunteered our services. Amelia Sachs, Carly Thompson.”

The women shook hands.

Sellitto asked, “You want a cookie?”

Carly demurred. Sachs too shook her head. “I decorated ’em, Lon — yeah, Santa looks like Boris Karloff, I know. If I never see another cookie again it’ll be too soon.”

Thom appeared in the door, introduced himself to Carly and then walked toward the kitchen, from which Rhyme knew refreshments were about to appear. Unlike Rhyme, his aide loved the holidays, largely because they gave him the chance to play host nearly every day.

As Sachs pulled off her jacket and hung it up, Rhyme explained the situation and what the girl had told them so far.

The policewoman nodded, taking it in. She reiterated that a person’s missing for such a short time was no cause for alarm. But they’d be happy to help a friend of Lon’s and Rachel’s.

“Indeed we will,” Rhyme said with an irony that everyone except Sachs missed.

No good deed goes unpunished...

Carly continued. “I got there about eight-thirty this morning. She wasn’t home. The car was in the garage. I checked all the neighbors’. She wasn’t there and nobody’s seen her.”

“Could she have left the night before?” Sellitto asked.

“No. She’d made coffee this morning. The pot was still warm.”

Rhyme said, “Maybe something came up at work and she didn’t want to drive to the station, so she took a cab.”

Carly shrugged. “Could be. I didn’t think about that. She’s in public relations and’s been working real hard lately. For one of those big Internet companies that went bankrupt. It’s been totally tense... But I don’t know. We didn’t talk very much about her job.”

Sellitto had a young detective downtown call all the cab companies in and around Glen Hollow; no taxis had been dispatched to the house that morning. They also called Susan’s company to see if she’d come in, but no one had seen her and her office was locked.

Just then, as Rhyme had predicted, his slim aide, wearing a white shirt and a Jerry Garcia Christmas tie, carted in a large tray of coffee and tea and a huge plate of pastries and cookies. He poured drinks for everyone.

“No figgy pudding?” Rhyme asked acerbically.

Sachs asked Carly, “Has your mom been sad or moody?”

Thinking for a minute, she said, “Well, my grandfather — her dad — died last February. Grandpa was a great guy and she was totally bummed for a while. But by the summer, she’d come out of it. She bought this really cool house and had a lot of fun fixing it up.”

“How about other people in her life, friends, boyfriends?”

“She’s got some good friends, sure.”

“Names, phone numbers?”

Again the girl fell quiet. “I know some of their names. Not exactly where they live. I don’t have any numbers.”

“Anybody she was seeing romantically?”

“She broke up with somebody about a month ago.”

Sellitto asked, “Was this guy a problem, you think? A stalker? Upset about the breakup?”

The girl replied, “No, I think it was his idea. Anyway, he lived in L.A. or Seattle or some place out west. So it wasn’t, you know, real serious. She just started seeing this new guy. About two weeks ago.” Carly looked from Sachs to the floor. “The thing is, I love Mom and everything. But we’re not real close. My folks were divorced seven, eight years ago, and that kind of changed a lot of things... Sorry I don’t know more about her.”

Ah, the wonderful family unit, thought Rhyme cynically. It was what made Park Avenue shrinks millionaires and kept police departments around the world busy answering calls at all hours of the day and night.

“You’re doing fine,” Sachs encouraged. “Where’s your father?”

“He lives in the city. Downtown.”

“Do he and your mother see each other much?”

“Not anymore. He wanted to get back together but Mom was lukewarm and I think he gave up.”

“Do you see him much?”

“I do, yeah. But he travels a lot. His company imports stuff, and he goes overseas to meet his suppliers.”

“Is he in town now?”

“Yep. I’m going to see him on Christmas, after Mom’s party.”

“We should call him. See if he’s heard from her,” Sachs said.

Rhyme nodded and Carly gave them the man’s number. Rhyme said, “I’ll get in touch with him... Okay, get going, Sachs. Over to Susan’s house. Carly, you go with her. Move fast.”

“Sure, Rhyme. But what’s the hurry?”

He glanced out the window, as if the answer were hovering there in plain view.

Sachs shook her head, perplexed. Rhyme was often piqued that people didn’t tumble to things as quickly as he did. “Because the snow might tell us something about what happened there this morning.” And, as he often liked to do, he added a dramatic coda: “But if it keeps coming down like this, there won’t be any story left to read.”

A half hour later Amelia Sachs pulled up on a quiet, tree-lined street in Glen Hollow, Long Island, parking the bright red Camaro three doors from Susan Thompson’s house.

“No, it’s up there,” Carly pointed out.

“Here’s better,” Sachs said. Rhyme had drummed into her that access routes to and from the site of the crime could be crime scenes in their own right and could yield valuable information. She was ever-mindful about contaminating scenes.

Carly grimaced when she noticed that the car was still in the garage.

“I’d hoped...”

Sachs looked at the girl’s face and saw raw concern. The policewoman understood: Mother and daughter had a tough relationship, that was obvious. But you never cut parental ties altogether — can’t be done — and there’s nothing like a missing mother to set off primal alarms.

“We’ll find her,” Sachs whispered.

Carly gave a faint smile and pulled her jacket tighter around her. It was stylish and obviously expensive but useless against the cold. Sachs had been a fashion model for a time but when not on the runway or at a shoot she’d dressed like a real person, to hell with what was in vogue.

Sachs looked over the house, a new, rambling two-story Colonial on a small but well-groomed lot, and called Rhyme. On a real case she’d be patched through to him on her Motorola. Since this wasn’t official business, though, she simply used her hands-free cord and cell phone, which was clipped to her belt a few inches away from her Glock automatic pistol.

“I’m at the house,” she told him. “What’s that music?”

After a moment “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” went silent.

“Sorry. Thom insists on being in the spirit. What do you see, Sachs?”

She explained where she was and the layout of the place. “The snow’s not too bad here but you’re right: in another hour it’ll cover up any prints.”

“Stay off the walks and check out if there’s been any surveillance.”

“Got it.”

Sachs asked Carly what prints were hers. The girl explained that she had parked in front of the garage — Sachs could see the tread marks in the snow — and then had gone through the kitchen door.

Carly behind her, Sachs made a circuit of the property.

“Nothing in the back or side yard, except for Carly’s footprints,” she told Rhyme.

“There are no visible prints, you mean,” he corrected. “That’s not necessarily ‘nothing.’ ”

“Okay, Rhyme. That’s what I meant. Damn, it’s cold.”