“It’ll have to wait until I finish my current task. Ms. Burlington-Duke would like me to make a few phone calls for her.” Vicky gave a satisfied tug to her charcoal gray cardigan.
Her self-possession rattled me. “Those phone calls can wait. This writer might be a murderer. He may very well have killed two women. Wives and mothers. So I need that address and I need it now.” I was practically snarling.
Vicky studied me for a second, swiveled in her chair, and pulled open a file cabinet drawer. “His name?” Her tone was calm and even.
“T. J. West.”
Her nimble fingers raced over meticulously labeled manila folders. She withdrew one and, without opening it, handed it to me. “Thank you,” I said, shoving the folder into my laptop case. “And I’m sorry for how I spoke to you just now. I feel helpless and responsible and scared, like I have no control over anything.”
Vicky gave me such a warm smile that the tears I’d been desperately trying to hold back nearly spilled onto my cheeks. “Don’t worry, dear. You just do what you need to do.” She hesitated and then reached into a desk drawer and drew forth a stainless steel flask. “I keep it for emergencies. Would you like a sip?”
I gaped in astonishment. Puritan Vicky, who wore starched blouses and orthopedic shoes, who drank herbal tea and refused to eat complex carbs, who ran the agency with the efficiency of a drill sergeant, kept a flask in her desk! The revelation forever endeared her to me and I managed a weak smile before politely refusing her offer.
“Everyone has secrets,” I mumbled as I jogged down the steps and outside to where my scooter was parked. I didn’t know the extent of T. J. West’s secrets, but I knew that if anyone could unearth them and expose them to the light, it was Officer Sean Griffiths.
WHEN I ARRIVED at the police station, I had little sense of how long it had taken me to drive from Inspiration Valley to Dunston. My mind had been consumed with replaying the brief but pleasant moments I’d spent with Tilly. Over and over again, I pictured her face and the way her expression had vacillated between anxiety and then, upon seeing her children, joy.
I was still caught up in reflections of that afternoon when the police officer manning the front desk gave me a sober greeting and then told a pretty female cop standing nearby to take me back to Sean. She led me through a warren of corridors and dropped me off in a small conference room. A computer and a mug of black coffee were the only objects on the surface of the table, and sitting in a corner on the floor was a cardboard file box. I had just taken a seat and dug Vicky’s file folder from my bag when Sean entered the room.
He looked terrible. His hair was uncombed, his cheeks and chin were dark with stubble, and his uniform was wrinkled. I wondered if he’d slept in it until his eyes met mine and I saw how bloodshot they were. He probably hadn’t had a wink of sleep last night.
Murder weighed heavily on this man. And he saw all angles of it from the bodies stretched out on a coroner’s slab, to the effect it had on loved ones, to the ripples it created in a community. He faced the ugliest parts of human nature without backing down. I was ashamed that I’d been feeling neglected because of Sean’s job. What choice did he have with killers on the loose?
“Let me see what you’ve got,” he said, wasting no time on pleasantries.
I showed him the address West had printed on his registration form, and Sean hurriedly examined the paper and then stuck his head into the hall and shouted, “Hastings! I need you to run an address for me!”
The other cop took the sheet, gave me a curious glance, and then said, “You want me to bring this joker in?”
Sean shook his head. “T. J. West isn’t his real name. Get me that first. And let’s see if he has any priors. I want an idea of what we’re dealing with here. There’s no telling if this is even our guy, so we’ll spend a few minutes on a background check before we kick his front door down.”
“Got it,” Hastings said and hustled off.
“Now.” Sean pointed at the short stack of papers I’d placed on the conference table. “Read me the murder scene.”
I did as he asked, and while I read, he compared the details of T. J. West’s fictional killing with the photographs and written reports from Tilly’s real-life homicide.
“We’ve got a dead mother and a teddy bear. It’s suspicious, but not enough to make me surround this guy’s house with a SWAT team,” Sean said when I was done. “West’s victim was struck on the head by a blunt object. Mrs. Smythe was strangled.”