CHAPTER 39
After being taken by surprise in the parking garage, Lizzy had spent two hours filling out police reports. The man she’d sprayed was nowhere to be found.
She never should have left the scene.
For the first time in her adult life, she’d panicked and ran.
There was absolutely no excuse. She’d been carrying a gun—had him right where she wanted him.
And what did she do? She ran.
So disturbed by her actions, or lack thereof, she found it next to impossible to concentrate. And she had to concentrate. At the moment, Lizzy sat across a kitchen table from Shelby Geitner’s boyfriend, Ben, while his mother hovered over them with her arms crossed, her mouth a tight line.
Ben was a cute kid. He had recently turned eighteen. He wore jeans and a dark-blue T-shirt. His blond hair was cut short, except for the bangs that fell across his forehead and covered his right eye when he wasn’t pushing the hair out of his face.
“How did Shelby seem to you the last time you saw her?” Lizzy asked the boy.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Ben seemed nervous. He twiddled his thumbs and had a difficult time keeping eye contact. What was he hiding?
“Over the course of the past few weeks,” Lizzy tried again, “did Shelby act different in any way? For instance, was she overwhelmed by schoolwork or preoccupied with teenage drama of any kind?”
“She does have a good friend,” Ben said, “who was afraid she might be pregnant. I know Shelby worried about her, but—”
“Ms. Gardner, I really don’t see how talking to my son is going to help you find Shelby.”
Lizzy looked at the boy’s mother, peered into her eyes. “If your son was missing, wouldn’t you want me to talk to everybody he’d been in contact with, including his close friends?”
The woman managed a barely discernible huff, but she backed off.
Lizzy turned back to Ben. “Mrs. Geitner remembers Shelby looking over her shoulder a lot, as if she thought somebody might be following her. Did Shelby seem nervous or skittish to you?”
Ben straightened slightly, and for the first time he looked right at her. “You know, Mrs. Geitner is right. Shelby didn’t even want to go to a movie because she said she had a bad feeling about going out at night. I asked her why, but she shrugged it off, said she really wasn’t sure. I laughed and told her she’d been watching too many scary movies. But I could tell she was feeling weird. Something was going on, but I didn’t take it seriously.”
Lizzy’s cell rang and she excused herself to take the call. It was Hayley. “What is it?”
“Mindy Graft is dead.”
Impossible. “How? When?”
“Not more than twenty minutes ago,” Hayley said. “We watched her house all morning, then followed her to the grocery store. She didn’t lock her car. I kept a lookout, watching the parking lot, but nobody stood out. About ten minutes after she went inside, there were sirens and emergency vehicles all over the place. Five people are dead. One person is hanging on, but it’s not Mindy.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“We overheard a man telling one of the officers at the scene that a woman was handing out free brownie samples. He said she ran out of samples fast. Described her as a white woman, overweight, curly red hair, wearing sunglasses and a long dress. The witness was adamant about what he’d seen, even recognized the first woman who was brought out on a stretcher as one of the people to eat a brownie.”
“Have you talked to the other three people on the list?”
“Two of the three have been warned—just like Mindy. We haven’t been able to get a hold of Gary Perdue. We’re on our way to his house in Auburn to see if we can locate him.”
“Be careful.”
“We’ll call you if we find anything.”
Lizzy hung up the phone. She needed to see Detective Chase sooner rather than later. She quickly thanked Ben and his mother for answering her questions. The woman must have felt badly about her initial reluctance to help out because she gave Lizzy a piece of paper with her number on it and told her to call if she had any further questions.
Before Lizzy got to her car, Ben called her name as he ran out of the house and caught up to her. “There’s one other thing I wanted to tell you, but not in front of my mother.” He looked over his shoulder toward the house.
They could both see his mom looking out the window, her shoulders stiff.
“Go on,” Lizzy said.
“Two days before Shelby disappeared, we had sex for the first time.”
Lizzy waited patiently for him to continue.
“We’ve been dating for three years,” he went on, “but Shelby told me more than once that it was important to her that we wait. Recently, though, I . . . I put a lot of pressure on her.” He swallowed, looked away. “I told her I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold off. Now I’m afraid I might be the reason she’s gone. I think I scared her off.”
Lizzy touched his arm. “I appreciate you telling me, Ben, but just between you and me, I don’t think you scared her off. Last time I saw her, in fact, she told me all about you. She seemed happy about the relationship.”
The boy visibly relaxed. “Thanks. That’s a relief. I miss her, and I would do anything to get her back. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Keep talking to Shelby’s friends, anyone who knew her. Ask them questions, lots of questions. Sometimes that’s all it takes to jar something loose. Somebody might not realize that what they saw or heard is a gold nugget of information that could help us find her.”
“I’ll do that.”
“You have my number. Call me if you learn anything new, anything at all.”
He nodded.
Lizzy got into her car and drove off.
Before she got more than a couple of blocks, she was overtaken by a painful tightening in her gut.
She pulled over to the curb, her knuckles white on the wheel.
Shelby had been afraid to go to the movies.
Shelby had been looking over her shoulder and was suddenly afraid of her own shadow.
There was no doubt in Lizzy’s mind—the answer to Shelby’s disappearance had been right in front of her all along.
She could feel it—a burning sensation inside, a flash of insight.
It was him.
Lizzy had been unforgivably stupid not to have seen it before now.
It was because of her that Shelby had been taken.
Lizzy closed her eyes, fought it for as long as she could, then loosed a scream of frustrated rage.