“What are you doing?” Mettner said.
Maybe Amber kept the other letters in the back of the frame and that’s why it was so thick? Josie hadn’t ever seen her change the message on the letter board but then again, she hadn’t really paid that much attention to what Amber did at her desk. She placed it on its face again and flipped the small latches on the back of it, lifting the black backer board off. As she suspected, in a small baggie, there were several white letters. Under the baggie was something else. A bright yellow Post-it note in Amber’s compulsively neat handwriting read: “Josie Q.” It adhered to what looked like a young girl’s diary. It was a small book with a plain, pink vinyl cover and a broken strap dangling from its side. A heart-shaped lock was still affixed to the front of it, no match for whatever had simply torn through the strap itself.
“What’s that?” asked Noah.
“I don’t know,” said Josie. She ran her fingers over the Post-it. How many Josie Qs were there in the world? In Amber’s world? Noah and Mettner stood beside her suddenly, staring down at it in her hands.
“Is that yours?” asked Mettner.
“No,” said Josie. “It was in the back of this frame.”
“Open it,” Noah said.
Mettner put one hand on Josie’s forearm. “Don’t. What if it’s private? She hid it for a reason, right?”
Josie looked into his eyes. “Mett,” she said softly. “Right now nothing is private if it helps us find her.”
Josie felt his hesitation in the heaviness of his palm. He eased it from her arm, his face a picture of conflict. With a sigh, he said, “Okay, open it then.”
Thirteen
Josie opened the cover of the diary. On the first page was an ornately drawn box. Inside it, in faded pencil, was Amber’s name. As Josie turned another page, the book nearly fell apart in her hands. Several pages fluttered to the floor and both Noah and Mettner scrambled to pick them up. They laid them out on Amber’s desk, turning them onto one side and then the other, but all of them were blank. Josie put the book onto the desk’s surface and carefully paged through what little remained inside the diary. Jagged edges of paper poked from the spine. One of the pages bore the ghostly imprint of words that had been written on the page right before it, which had obviously been torn out. Josie tried to make out the letters but couldn’t. On one of the last pages, Amber had made a list of numbers. Josie counted the rows. There were eleven in all.
625800049595
112786009
900017623343
07b-32-004-01-111
334689006
99-16-03
175821451
99-23-46
04c-00-321-32-009
09a-66-127-19-131
900016528173
These, too, were in pencil and they were faded and smudged. “This is old,” said Josie. “It has to be from when she was a kid or a teenager.” She pointed to the list of numbers. “These mean anything to you, Mett?”
He stared at them for a long moment. “No.”
Again, Noah picked up each page they had spread across her desk and looked at each side. “These are all blank.”
“Every page is blank,” Josie agreed. “Looks like the ones that she wrote on were torn out. Except the one with the numbers.”
Noah fingered the open letter board frame. “Why would she hide this, though?”
Mettner reached across Josie and turned the cover over so the Post-it note was visible. “And why is your name on this?”
Josie said, “I have no idea.”
Noah said, “What do those numbers mean? Do you recognize them, Josie?”
“No,” said Josie. “They’re not phone numbers or zip codes or social security numbers.”
“Maybe bank account numbers?” Noah asked.
“I suppose they could be,” Josie said. “Although some of them have letters in them. Do some banks put letters in their account numbers?”
“I’m not sure,” Noah admitted.
“Maybe they’re from different banks?” she suggested. “Or they could be something else entirely. We don’t even know if this is relevant to her disappearance.”
Mettner said, “Why would she want you to have this diary?”
Mystified, Josie continued to stare at the numbers. “I have no idea.”
She and Amber had not been close. They had a solid professional relationship, but they didn’t even see one another outside of work unless it was in a larger social setting like a wedding or the holiday party.
“But Amber didn’t give it to Josie,” Noah pointed out. “She kept it hidden here.”
Josie muttered, “Why keep it at work, though? If it was something you wanted to hide, why not keep it at home? Amber lives alone. Mett, have you seen her with this before?”
He shook his head. “Not that I remember.”
Noah asked, “Do you stay at her place a lot?”
“Sometimes,” said Mettner. “But most of the time we’re at my place.”
“Why is that?” asked Josie.
Mettner glared at her. “How is this relevant?”
Josie put a hand on her hip. “If she always insisted on staying at your house because she was hiding something and that something led to her disappearance, then it’s relevant to this investigation.”
Noah said, “Mett, we’re just trying to get a picture of her life, especially in the weeks leading up to yesterday. You two have a fight; she goes missing; someone who looks a hell of a lot like her turns up dead; there’s some weird message on her car; and you’ve broken into her house. Now we find this strange blank kid’s diary hidden on her desk at work, but you’ve never seen her with it. There’s a Post-it with Josie’s name, not yours. We have a lot of questions, Mett, and no answers. No good ones, anyway. We’re just trying to figure out what the hell’s going on here.”
At his sides, Mettner’s fists clenched. “You mean you’re trying to figure out if I killed her and buried her body somewhere and am now pretending that she disappeared?”
“Mettner,” Josie said, gathering up the pages of the diary and tucking them back inside. “No one is saying that.”
“But you’re thinking it. You’re all thinking it. I didn’t do anything to Amber!” His voice rose to a shout. One of his fists slammed down on Amber’s desk.
Josie closed the diary and tucked it under one arm. Unflinching, she met his glower. “No one said you did, Mett. We just want to talk.”
He pointed a finger at her. “You think I don’t see what you’re doing? I know how you operate. I’ve seen you in the interrogation room dozens of times. You’re manipulating me.”
“I’m asking questions,” Josie said.