A Glimpse of Evil (24 page)

Loraine shook her head. “She didn’t answer the phone. So then I got worried and called my neighbor to go over and check on her, but Patrice wasn’t home and my neighbor said it didn’t look like she’d come home from school.”

“Did you call the police?”

Loraine bit her lip and lowered her eyes. “No.”

Candice and I exchanged a look. “No?” she asked.

Loraine took a deep ragged breath. “Patrice was only ten years old. She was mature for her age, but I was scared the police would ask me why she was home by herself and call CPS on me. I had just gotten my nursing license and we was living in my mama’s house—she was in hospice by then—and Mama said that me and Patrice could stay there rent free until I could save up enough to get us our own place. Weren’t no one to look after Patrice but me, and I had to work to put food on the table.”

“So when did you alert the police that she was missing?”

“The next day, after I spent all night looking for her myself.”

I could tell that Loraine had been harshly judged for that decision. It showed in her eyes as she stared defiantly at Candice, as if she was waiting for her to say something cruel like Loraine should have known better.

“That must have been a very difficult call to make,” Candice said kindly. “I’ll bet you’ve second-guessed yourself about waiting to place that call a thousand times since then.”

Loraine looked surprised. “More like a million times,” she said. “I knew I could lose Patrice either way.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Patrice smoked her cigarette for a minute before saying anything else. “The police didn’t find her until six weeks later, and I knew the minute that patrol car stopped in front of my house she was dead. They told me they found her in a pond a mile away. I told them that if that’s where they found my baby, then they needed to find out who killed her ’cause Patrice wouldn’t go there by herself. She just wouldn’t.”

“What’d they say?”

“They gave me some bullshit about letting the medical examiner determine the cause of death first. If the ME could say it was a homicide, then they’d investigate.”

“And the medical examiner couldn’t rule out that Patrice had accidentally drowned, so they dropped the case?”

Loraine made a derisive sound. “I’m a nurse, miss. I know what happens to a body that’s been left in a pond for weeks on end. With no other evidence, wasn’t no way they were gonna say that Patrice didn’t drown on her own.”

Candice glanced at her notes, then asked, “In the days leading up to Patrice’s disappearance, did you notice anyone out of place in the neighborhood?”

Again Loraine made a derisive sound. “There’s a lotta folks in that hood gotta get by any way they can, miss. So there’s a lotta other folks comin’ and goin’ that’s outta place, if you know what I mean.”

Candice smiled. “Right,” she said. “What I mean is, did you ever notice any vans or contractors or workmen that might have looked out of place in that neighborhood?”

“Probably,” she said bluntly. “Like I said, we used to get all kinds on that street.”

“Did you ever notice anyone taking a special interest in your daughter?”

Loraine sighed. “No. Patrice was a good girl, but she was shy and I had put the fear of God into her early on. She didn’t have many friends and she stayed inside a lot ’cause Pecan Valley ain’t no place to play.”

Candice looked over at me, silently asking if I had anything to add, but there was nothing here to go on. Loraine didn’t know anything about who might have abducted and murdered her daughter—of that I was certain—and try as I might, there wasn’t a lot of her daughter’s residual energy around for me to bounce my radar off. I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head slightly to let her know there wasn’t anything I wanted to ask.

Candice stood then and offered Loraine her hand. “Thank you so much for meeting with us,” she said. “I promise you that we will do everything in our power to find out what really happened to your daughter.”

“No offense, but I heard that before.”

Something pinged in my head then and I asked, “Who told you that?”

“The last private investigator who came here promising me some answers.”

Candice turned her head slowly to look at me before addressing Loraine again. “
Last
private investigator? Who and when?”

“I don’t know,” Loraine said dismissively. “Some tall strappin’ man came by here about six months after Patrice’s funeral and said he thought she was murdered and he was gonna look into it for me.”

“Did he leave you his card?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still have it?”

“No.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“No.”

Candice had asked those questions in rapid-fire succession, and I could see her posture stiffen as she again worked to rein herself in and be patient. “Can you describe this man for me?”

“Why?”

“Because as far as we know, Mrs. Walker, we’re the only private investigators to look into your daughter’s case in the past two years. If someone already did some legwork, then they might have come across something that could be vital to not only solving your own daughter’s mystery but our other two cases as well.”

Loraine reached for her cigarettes again. “Was a brother,” she said. “And a big handsome one at that. He didn’t say much except to ask me some of the same questions you-all did.”

“How tall exactly?” I asked, hitting on that descriptive detail.

Loraine shrugged. “Maybe six four, or six five. And probably close to two hundred fifty pounds. But not a ounce of fat on him. He looked like a bodybuilder.”

“Was his name Antoine LaSalle?”

Loraine’s lids blinked heavily and she pressed the two fingers not holding her cigarette to her temple. “Maybe,” she said. “That does sound familiar, but I can’t say for certain.”

Candice and I exchanged another look. “Thank you again, Mrs. Walker,” my partner said. “Here is my card. If you can remember anything more that might help us, please don’t hesitate to call me day or night.”

Loraine accepted the card and laid it next to her pack of cigarettes. I had no doubt that the moment we were out the door, she’d toss it in the trash. She just didn’t appear to have any more hope in her.

We left Loraine to her chain-smoking, and as soon as we got in the car, Candice set the fan on high. “Blach,” she said. “I smell like an ashtray.”

“At least you can take a shower,” I groused while we pulled out of the driveway.

My friend looked over sympathetically. “Don’t they make some sort of dry shampoo or something?”

“That stuff’s for cats and dogs.”

“We could find a pet-supply store,” she said with a smirk.

I glowered at her. “Ha, ha,” I said flatly. “
High
larious.”

“How about a hat store?”

I brightened. “What kind of hat?”

“We’re in Texas, darlin’, home of the ten-gallon.”

I pulled down the visor and eyed myself in the mirror. “Do you think I could pull off a cowboy hat?”

“I do.”

“Then I’m game.”

“Terrific. There’s just one stop I want to make first. Then we’ll find you somethin’ purty.”

The stop turned out to be Antoine LaSalle’s. I had a feeling that Candice would want to speak to him again after what we’d learned at Loraine’s. Still, when we pulled up to his house, it didn’t appear that he was home, and after ringing the doorbell and knocking a few times, we gave up and headed to the highway. “What are you going to say to LaSalle when you see him?” I asked.

“I’m going to ask him if he did a little investigating on his own after Keisha went missing.”

I knew in my gut that he’d been the “PI” that had talked to Loraine. I was pretty sure that he’d posed as a private investigator in an attempt to find out what might have happened to his baby sister. “You know it was him, right?”

“Yep.”

“But you’ll remember to be nice to him when you ask, because he saved my life and all, right?”

Candice sighed dramatically. “Oh, if I must.”

“He won’t tell you anything anyway.”

“I said I’d be nice.”

“It’s not that. It’s that he read you like a book at the hospital when you said you’d loop him in, but we all knew you wouldn’t.”

“It was that obvious, huh?”

“Pretty much,” I told her honestly. “And LaSalle’s just the kind of guy that won’t give you something for nothing. If we want to find out what he knows, we might have to be honest with him.”

Candice was silent for a bit before she said, “I don’t know that I trust him, Abs.”

I could see her point—Antoine was simply scary and formidable—but I kept thinking about how he’d risked his own life just to save mine. “I know,” I told her, “but maybe we don’t tell him everything we’ve discovered. Maybe we just string him along with the unimportant details until we get what we need from him.”

Candice looked at me sideways. “You’re forgetting that we know next to nothing, so there’s hardly any information to protect.”

“All the more reason to bring him into the loop, then. I mean, what harm could it do?”

Candice inhaled deeply and focused on the road. “Maybe you’re right,” she said softly, and I almost didn’t hear her. “But I still don’t trust him.”

“Well, think about it at least,” I encouraged. I was all for working together as long as it advanced the cause, and I figured we had more to gain by cooperating with Antoine to get the information we needed, because I was fairly certain he had some detail important to our case that he was withholding. I didn’t know for certain why he would keep information from us, but thought it might be his army training that caused him to be cautious about what he revealed.

“Okay, Abby, ” Candice promised, “I’ll work with him.” She then pointed ahead. “There’s the outlet mall.”

I squinted. “Do you think they’ll have cowboy hats there?”

“Sundance, they’ve got
everything
at the outlet mall.”

Candice was right. The huge span of name-brand stores lining the south side of I-35
did
have everything. We discovered a Western store almost immediately and found some awesome hats. I even got one for Dutch, although I doubted he’d be caught dead in it. After that, we grabbed lunch and discussed our next steps.

“Other than talking to the lieutenant again, I’m not sure what other leads we have,” Candice said, glancing over her notes from the case.

“How about the church?”

“What church?”

“The one that Mrs. Dixon goes to.”

Candice looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. “Huh?”

“Remember?” I asked, even though she clearly didn’t. “She told us that she got the name of the painter off the bulletin board at her church. I know it’s a long shot, but maybe the painter was a member of the congregation and someone can help identify him.”

Candice beamed at me. “God, I’m glad you’re my sidekick!”

Candice dropped me off at home around three and I was surprised to find Dutch already there, tossing a ball in the backyard to Eggy and Tuttle. “You playin’ hooky?” I asked, bringing out two beers from the fridge before settling into a lawn chair.

Dutch came over to get one of the beers and eyed me with a smile. “Nice hat.”

“Covers the staples.”

“You look good in it.”

“Yeah?”

He took a swing of the frosty beer, then leaned down to give me a cold nibble on the neck. “Yeah,” he said, his voice low and throaty.

I giggled because his lips tickled, then remembered my original question. “So, what’re you doing home, again?”

“I’m waiting for the test results,” Dutch said. “Brice said I could work from here if I wanted to.”

I did a mental head slap. “That’s right! I forgot that the doctor was going to call you today. Have you already heard from him?”

“Nope.”

“Did you call his office?”

“Nope.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s after three.”

“Yep.”

“Feeling pretty monosyllabic today, aren’t you?”

“Yep.”

With a sigh I got up and headed toward the door.

“Where’re you going?” Dutch asked.

“I got you a hat too. You shouldn’t be out here in the sun without one.”

“I’m wearing sunscreen.”

“You still need a hat.” When I got inside, I pulled Dutch’s present out of the bag. I’d had to guess at the size, and I hoped I got it right. Then I moved over to the phone in the kitchen, where we kept all the important numbers and messages. Digging through the pile, I located the doctor’s office number and picked up the phone to carry it outside.

I finished dialing the doctor’s number just before I reached Dutch’s side again. When it started ringing, he frowned. “What’d you do?”

“Just ask them for the results and put us both out of
your
misery.”

With a smirk, Dutch took the phone and I listened to his half of the conversation. At one point there was a lot of silence and he whispered to me, “She’s putting me through to the doc right now.”

After an exchange of pleasantries, the doctor seemed to get right to the point, and I read the relief in Dutch’s eyes even before the smile spread to his lips. “That’s great,” he said. “Thanks, Doc. I really appreciate it.”

He chatted for a few more minutes and then hung up the phone and threw his new hat on without hesitation. “I’m in the clear,” he said, pulling me into his arms and hugging the stuffing out of me.

“I told you!”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and squeezed me tight one more time.

When he let go and I looked up, I realized how sexy he looked in that new hat. “Lord, cowboy,” I said with a drawl and a headshake.

“What, purty lady?”

“You sure are a good-lookin’ son of a gun, ain’t cha?”