Unfinished Business (20 page)

I did want to kiss my boyfriend goodbye. But
he was unsteady on his feet as it was, so it was safer not to take
any chances.

“I’ll help you out to the car,” I told him
instead, and slipped my arm around his waist. Partly, it was
because I wanted to be close, but partly, it was also because I
figured he could use the support and wasn’t the type to ask. The
arm he draped over my shoulders was heavy, and our progress out of
the kitchen and along the hallway was slow. I rubbed my head
against his shoulder. “Be careful out there.”

He nodded. “Always.”

As if
. “Keep us updated on how things
go. If you find him. Or even if you don’t.”

“If we do,” Rafe said, as we passed through
the front door and onto the porch, “you’ll be the first to hear
about it. Trust me.”

We started down the stairs, one careful step
at a time. He gave a grunt with each one. I guess the impact jarred
his torso, and more than it normally would because he wasn’t
exactly his usual graceful self. He’s a big guy—six-three and
muscular—but under most circumstances, he moves quickly and
silently. Now, I felt like I was guiding a lumbering bear.

He was a shade paler by the time we got to
the bottom of the steps, too. “I’m sorry,” I muttered, feeling
wretched. “You really should be flat on your back in bed, not
walking around chasing bad guys.”

“Getting Huron back behind bars so he’s not
out there will do me more good than being flat on my back,” Rafe
told me, although I could hear the strain in his voice. “Not that
bed doesn’t sound good...”

I bet. Bed sounded good to me, too—or would
have, if it hadn’t been for the dead body currently occupying it.
Rafe had had a much worse night than I had—obviously—but between
the worry yesterday and the trip to the hospital in the middle of
the night, I wasn’t feeling my best, either. Under normal
circumstances, on a Sunday morning, we’d both be taking it
easy.

“Tonight,” I told him. “When you get back
from Wilson County, and the boys have brought in the new mattress
and we have clean sheets, we’ll lock and bolt all the doors and
crawl in and sleep.”

He nodded.

By now, we’d reached Wendell’s car, and I
opened the passenger door and steadied Rafe while he maneuvered
inside. It took a lot longer than usual, and when he was finally
inside, he relaxed against the seat with another grunt and a
grimace. “Shit.”

I twisted my hands together. “Are you going
to be OK?”

He smiled, but it lacked some of its usual
energy. “Long as I don’t have to move.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Please don’t. Just
sit there. Rest. Let Wendell and the boys do the heavy
lifting.”

He nodded, putting his head back against the
seat. “Gonna need a painkiller soon, I think.”

God
. Another sign, if I needed one,
that he was feeling terrible.

“Wendell will stop at the drugstore,” I told
him, my heart knocking hard against my ribs. I hardly ever hear him
admit to weakness. “Five minutes from now, you’ll be doped to the
gills.”

“Sounds good.” The smile was tired, and his
eyes half closed.

“Maybe you can take a nap on the way to
Wilson County.” I reached over him to buckle the seatbelt so he
wouldn’t rattle around. He hadn’t done it himself, which might just
mean that he couldn’t. “It would do you good.”

“Maybe.” He sounded like he was already half
asleep, although when Wendell opened the driver’s side door, his
eyes flicked open and in that direction. “Ready?”

Wendell nodded.

“Just one more second,” Grimaldi said,
coming to a stop next to me. “The two girls from four years
ago...”

Rafe nodded.

“Can you give me a description?”

“I only saw’em for a minute.” And it was
four years later, which he didn’t bother to point out. “One was
white. Blond hair to her shoulders, blue eyes. Five-six,
one-thirty. The other looked Hispanic. Shorter. Black and brown.
Five-three, maybe one-ten. Long hair.”

“And young,” Grimaldi said.

“Nineteen. Give or take.”

Grimaldi nodded, and took a step back. “Keep
your phone on. We might be sending you pictures.”

“Don’t have a phone,” Rafe said.

“Did Hernandez take it?”

He shrugged, sounding groggier by the
minute. “Dunno. I didn’t stop to look for it. Wallet’s gone,
too.”

“If it’s in the cabin, the crime scene crew
will have found it,” Wendell said, putting the car in gear. “We’ll
check with them. Meanwhile, send anything you find to me.”

Grimaldi nodded. “Come on, Ms.... Savannah.
Let’s go.”

She headed for her sedan. “Take care,” I
told Rafe, and closed the door. Wendell backed up a couple of feet
and cut onto the grass to move around Grimaldi’s car. They crunched
down the driveway while I got into the sedan. Grimaldi cranked the
engine over, and we followed. At the bottom of the driveway, they
went one way and we went the other.

“So how does this work?” I asked. “Is
everybody working the same case?”

She shot me a look. “Not exactly. They’re
looking for the guy who abducted and tortured one of their agents.
I’m looking for the guy who killed a prostitute and dumped her in
your bed.”

“But it’s the same guy. Doesn’t that make it
the same case?”

“Two different crimes,” Grimaldi said. “You
and I’ll focus on the murder investigation. They’ll focus on the
abduction and torture. And we’ll cooperate on finding the
suspect.”

The way she kept repeating ‘torture’ made me
feel queasy. I realized that that’s what it was—what it had
been—but it’s a disturbing word. I put a hand on my stomach, where
the baby felt like it was doing cartwheels. Most of the morning
sickness was gone now that I was a couple of weeks into my second
trimester, but something like this could easily bring it back to
the forefront again.

I swallowed hard. “D’you think the truck
stop sells ginger ale?”

“I’m sure they do,” Grimaldi said, taking a
right onto Dickerson Road. “Feeling sick?”

“It’s the way you keep saying
‘torture.’”

“Sorry.” She glanced at me. “You’re not
going to boot in my car, are you?”

“Hopefully not. Maybe we could talk about
something else for a while?”

“Sure,” Grimaldi said. “After we go to the
truck stop, we’ll go downtown. You’ll be spending most of the
afternoon in a nice air-conditioned office looking at pictures of
runaways. There’s a soda machine just around the corner. I’m not
sure there’s ginger ale, but I know we have plenty of Coke.”

“That’ll work, too.” I could also use
something to eat. Queasiness notwithstanding, the baby demanded
sustenance. Hopefully, the truck stop would have something edible,
as well. “So while the guys are trying to figure out where this guy
Hernandez might be holed up, we’re trying to find the girls Rafe
thought he killed four years ago?”

“It’s a long shot,” Grimaldi admitted. “If
they couldn’t find them then, our chances of finding them now are
slim.”

“But they couldn’t really look for them back
then. Rafe was still working the case, and Wendell was backing him
up.”

Grimaldi nodded. “That’s why we’re going to
try to identify them, and then match the identifications to any
Jane Does we can find. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Maybe. “I won’t have to look at crime scene
photos, will I?”

Grimaldi glanced at me. “What’s the matter?
You handled the real crime scene well enough. You even went back
upstairs to get your boyfriend a pair of socks.”

“Only because I didn’t want him to attempt
the stairs again himself,” I said. “He was in bad shape the first
time. I’m amazed he isn’t flat on his back in bed. I would be.”

Grimaldi nodded. “Most people would. But
he’s trained himself to focus on the job. It was the same thing
when he was shot last fall. Most people would have taken a day off.
He let the doctors patch him up and went into cramming so he could
take on the persona of Jorge Pena.”

I glanced at her. “Have you ever been
shot?”

“I haven’t had that pleasure. Most of us go
through our careers without shooting anyone, and without being shot
ourselves. But I hear it hurts.”

“It does.” I had had the pleasure. A week or
so after losing Rafe’s baby last fall, I’d managed to put myself in
the crosshairs of the person who killed my sister-in-law, Sheila.
Rafe and I had matching bullet wounds. “I certainly wasn’t up and
running the next day.”

Grimaldi shook her head. “No sane person
is.”

My lips curved. “You’re telling me my
boyfriend is crazy?”

“In a good way,” Grimaldi said. “Sooner or
later he’s going to crash, though. If not sooner, then when he
comes home tonight. Has anyone taught you to shoot a gun?”

I blinked. “No. Don’t you just aim and pull
the trigger?”

“Squeeze,” Grimaldi said. “Squeeze the
trigger. Although if Hernandez took your boyfriend’s wallet and
phone, chances are he took the weapon, too.”

“There are other weapons.” And if Wendell
had any sense, he’d make sure Rafe got one. Rafe might not think
about it—I had a feeling he might already be asleep—but Wendell had
been in the business of protecting Rafe for a long time; he’d take
care of things. “I can tell you right now, I’m not going to be able
to stay awake all night to be on guard. I didn’t sleep more than a
couple of hours last night, and it’s been a rough couple of
days.”

Grimaldi nodded. “We’ll get you some
protection,” she told me, as she took a left onto Trinity Lane.
“Your boyfriend’s rookies will probably fight it out for the
privilege of spending the night on your sofa, clutching a gun.”

I smiled. Probably.

The underpass for Interstate 65 was at the
bottom of the hill in front of us. Gabe’s was on the other side.
And the truck stop was coming up on our left. Grimaldi signaled,
and we pulled into the parking lot.

I’d driven by on the road before, but I’d never made the turn
around the building and into the lot. Now I looked around curiously
while Detective Grimaldi slotted the car into an empty parking
space and turned off the engine.

A half dozen big rigs were parked under
roofs, their engines turned off, like sleeping giants. Several more
were rumbling, filling the air with noise and exhaust. Burly men in
jeans and ball caps stood in clusters talking, while three women
with big hair and small clothes had their heads together on the
other side of the parking lot.

Grimaldi headed for them. After a second, I
scurried after.

Not too long ago, I had watched Grimaldi
walk into a bar where a table of men scattered like cockroaches
when she passed. Rafe had told me it was because she smelled like
cop.

Obviously, that was a figure of speech,
since as far as I could tell, she smelled more like Ivory soap and
shampoo. But she had that flat-eyed cop look to her. The women saw
her coming, and the youngest of the three looked like she was
thinking of bolting. It took one of the others holding her back to
keep her in place.

The oldest of the three raised her voice.
“Something we can help you with, Officer?” She sounded like Harvey
Fierstein, like her vocal chords had been exfoliated with
sandpaper.

“Detective,” Grimaldi said, flashing her
badge. I slid to a stop next to her and gave the trio a more
thorough look.

One was around my age, or maybe a few years
younger, but hardened by the life she lived. Dishwater blond hair,
faded blue eyes, too much makeup, and lips that were already a lot
tighter than mine. I might have looked something like that if I
hadn’t grown up with the privileges I’d had, and it was a sobering
thought.

One was older: a buxom fake redhead who must
have been pushing forty, unless she, too, looked years older than
she was. Which wasn’t unlikely. She had brown eyes and the roots of
the burgundy hair were a faded brownish gray. No longer svelte, she
had a roll of fat hanging over the waistband of the cutoff jeans
she was wearing, and her breasts threatened to spill out of a
flaming red halter top. It clashed horribly with the hair.

The last girl—the one who had tried to
bolt—was really just that: a girl. She had soft, brown hair and
round cheeks, and was dressed in a short skirt and flip-flops. She
even had a backpack in lieu of a purse, and looked like she might
have been on her way home from high school, instead of selling
herself at a truck stop off the interstate.

She also looked like the girl Rafe had
described; the one who had been walking through the parking lot at
Gabe’s on Friday night with our dead redhead.

Grimaldi gave her a thorough look. “How old
are you?”

The girl swallowed. “Eighteen.”

“Can you prove that?”

She dug into the backpack, and even I could
see that her hands were shaking. While she was searching for
her—probably fake—ID, Grimaldi addressed the other two. “I’m
looking for information about a girl. Around five-five, one-twenty.
Maybe eighteen years old, but probably not. Red hair, blue eyes.
She was seen walking in this direction on Friday night.”

The two of them exchanged a look. The girl
was still bent over her backpack, but I noticed her cheeks turning
pink.

“Why d’you want to know?” the older of the
women asked. I guess maybe she was—or saw herself as—the mother
figure.

Grimaldi didn’t pull any punches. “Because
she’s dead, and I need to know who she was, so I can notify her
family.”

There was a moment of shocked silence.
Nobody spoke, but everyone blinked. The girl with the brown hair
straightened, her face pale now. “Dead?”

Her voice was hardly even a whisper.

Grimaldi nodded. The girl had no ID in her
hand, and I’m sure Grimaldi noticed, but she didn’t say anything
more about it. “I need to know who she was, and I need to know
anything any of you know about what happened to her.” She glanced
around the parking lot, with the rumbling rigs and the clusters of
men. “Why don’t we go inside and get a table? This could take a
while.”