“Oh,” Mrs. Fleur said suddenly. “Should I be letting you do this?”
“I’ve been hired by her next of kin to try to find her,” Aidan assured her.
“You’ll take her backpack, then, right?” Mrs. Fleur asked, as if she had decided that she needed to back off from anything that might have belonged to the girl, as if that would distance her from anything bad that might have happened.
Aidan nodded. “Yes, I’ll be taking it.”
“I only saw her when she checked in, you know, and then before she went out for the night,” Mrs. Fleur said nervously.
“So you don’t know if she actually came in or not after Vinnie here walked her home?” Aidan asked.
“She made it to the porch. I know that,” Vinnie said.
Lily Fleur shoved the backpack quickly into Aidan’s arms. “I hope you find her.”
She sounded sincere, but she was clearly dismissing them.
Aidan thanked her for her help. “Mrs. Fleur,” he asked, “do you remember any commotion that night—late, after she would have gotten back to her room?”
“Good heavens, no. I run a quiet place.”
“And you’re sure that if anything was going on in a room here, you would hear it?”
“Of course! I’m old, not deaf,” she said huffily, as she led them back through the house and down the hallway to the front door. Aidan picked up one of her cards as he passed the front desk, thanking her again and alerting her that he might need to call her again.
Distressed, she nearly pushed them out the door.
“We can check out the pack at my place,” Vinnie suggested. “It’s closer than your hotel.”
He still seemed worried. As they walked, he met Aidan’s eyes. “I don’t know why you’ve decided you don’t like me, but I swear to you, I’ve never hurt anyone in my life.”
Aidan decided going to Vinnie’s was a good idea. It would let him watch the other man’s reaction to whatever they found.
When they dumped the backpack, they found several guidebooks, along with a hairbrush, ten pairs of skimpy underwear, several bras, a heavy sweatshirt, two pairs of jeans, a pair of shorts, and two knit dresses that would work for a casual occasion or a night out. Aidan noticed Vinnie staring at one of the dresses.
“What?” Aidan asked.
Vinnie looked at him. “She definitely went back to her room after I left her. She was wearing that dress when she came to the bar.”
Aidan looked at Vinnie assessingly. “You said you two just flirted. She obviously liked you, and she let you walk her home. Why didn’t you try to get her into bed?”
Vinnie flushed. “I didn’t say I didn’t try. I understand signals, and I respect the word ‘no,’ so I left her on the porch and went home. I swear.”
“Did she seem anxious about anything?” Aidan asked.
Vinnie pursed his lips, thinking. “She did keep looking at her watch. And she was excited, but she was one of those bubbly people, anyway, so I just assumed she was all excited about her trip.”
Aidan picked up one of the guidebooks as Vinnie spoke. He leafed through it, and something fell out.
He picked it up.
“Well, now we know she never left the country,” he said.
“Why? What is it?” Vinnie asked.
“Her passport.”
12
Aidan started with Jonas Burningham.
Jonas was in his office, and he came right out when Aidan asked for him, ushering him back to his office quickly.
“I was going to call you,” Jonas said.
“Oh? You have something, too?”
Jonas frowned. “Too? Why are you here?”
Aidan flung the backpack onto Jonas’s shiny wooden desk. “The other day I went out to see Jenny Trent’s cousin-in-law. And I traced her last charge to a bar—the same bar where we all seem to be hanging out these days, by the way. Our guitar-playing friend Vinnie walked her back to a B and B, where she’d paid cash for her room. She left this backpack there. Her passport is in it, by the way.”
He had returned everything to the backpack. Except for the brush. He wasn’t sure why, but something had just told him to hang on to it, even though it was the most reliable source of Jenny’s DNA that they’d come up with.
Jonas stared blankly at the backpack for a moment, then turned to Aidan. “Oh.”
“Why did you think I was here?”
“I thought maybe…nothing.”
“Okay, yes. I heard Matty came looking for you, and that you were fooling around. That’s your business. You’re an idiot, but hey, you’re a grown man.”
“I love Matty,” Jonas said guiltily.
“I told you, your marriage is your business. Now pay attention to me, damn it. This girl came to New Orleans and was most probably murdered here. Would you get on the stick?”