“One of the fellows will be bringing up one of our demo trucks in a second. We can talk after?”
Even though Jennings was still on her phone, I bolted out of the showroom and walked briskly across the lot toward her. She saw me coming, held up an index finger to indicate that she’d be just another second. I stood patiently, like a kid waiting to see the teacher, while she finished her call.
It didn’t exactly sound like police business. Jennings said, “Well, what do you expect? If you don’t study, you’re not going to do well. If you don’t do your homework, you’re going to get a zero. It’s not rocket science, Cassie. You don’t do the work, you don’t get the marks…. Yeah, okay…. I don’t know yet. Maybe hot dogs or something. I got to go, sweetheart.”
She flipped the phone shut and slipped it into the purse slung over her shoulder.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to listen in.”
“That’s okay,” Kip Jennings said. “My daughter. She doesn’t think it’s fair that you get a zero when you don’t hand in an assignment.”
“How old is she?”
“Twelve,” she said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Richard Fletcher get into the gleaming new pickup and drive it off the lot. But I was focused on Jennings, what she might have to say.
She must have seen the look on my face, a mixture of hope, expectation, and dread, so she got to it right away. She took half a step back so that when she looked up at me she didn’t have to crane her neck so much.
“You have time to take a ride with me?” she asked.
“Where?” I asked.
Please don’t say the morgue.
“Up to Derby,” she said.
“What’s in Derby?”
“Your daughter’s car,” Jennings said.
FIVE
“WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?” I asked, sitting up front in Kip Jennings’s gray four-door Chevy. It had none of the trappings of a regular police car. No obvious markings, no rooftop light, no barrier between the front and back seats. Just lots of discarded junk food wrappers and empty coffee cups.
“I didn’t find it,” Jennings said. “It was found in a Wal-Mart lot. It had been sitting there a few days. The management finally called the cops to have it towed.”
“Was there anyone…” I hesitated. “Was there anyone in the car?” I was thinking about the trunk.
Jennings glanced over at me. “No,” she said, then looked at the tiny satellite navigation screen that had been stuck to the top of the dash. “I always have this on even when I know where I’m going. I just like watching it.”
“How long’s the car been there?”
“Not sure. It was parked with a few others, no one really noticed it for a while.”
I closed my eyes a moment, opened them, watched the trees go by as we headed north up the winding two-lane Derby Milford Road, about a twenty-minute drive.
“Where’s the car now?” I pictured a brilliantly lit forensics lab the size of an airplane hangar, the car being gone over for clues by technicians in hazmat suits.
“In a local compound, where they take cars they’ve towed for parking illegally, that kind of thing. They ran the plate, which I’d had flagged in the system. That’s when they called me. Look, I haven’t even seen the car yet. You know the car, you can tell me if you notice anything out of the ordinary about it.”
“Sure,” I said.
Everything about this was out of the ordinary. My daughter was missing. At times over the last couple of weeks, I’d tried to find comfort in the thought that while Syd might have run off, that didn’t have to mean harm had come to her.
The first couple of days she was gone, I told myself it was about the fight we’d had. My questioning her about the Versace sunglasses, asking about the receipt. That had pissed Syd off big-time, and I could imagine her wanting to punish me for thinking she might have stolen them.
But as the days went on, it seemed unlikely that that argument had sparked her disappearance. Then I tried to tell myself that it was something else that had made her angry enough to run away. Something I’d done, or maybe Susanne.
Maybe she was punishing both of us, I imagined. For splitting up. For ruining what had been, for a long time, a pretty decent little family. For making her shunt back and forth between houses for five years, for having to move now, at seventeen, into Bob’s house. Sure, it was a bigger place, he had more money, could give her things I couldn’t, but maybe all this change was unsettling, messing her up.
Now, though, there were more logistical questions. I wasn’t just asking myself why she was gone. I was asking myself how. If she didn’t have wheels, how had she gotten to wherever she’d gone? Why leave the car behind?
I couldn’t think of any reasons that made me feel optimistic.