“You’re absolutely right. She must be out with someone else.”
Ashley almost jumped when her phone rang. She dug into her purse and answered quickly. It was Jan.
“Well?”
“She wasn’t home, her car is in the drive, and the house is as neat as a pin.” And there were little specks of what might have been blood in her bathtub. She didn’t say that, though. There was no reason to alarm Jan further. Not until she actually knew what she had found.
And she would know. Tomorrow morning, she would pour her heart out to Mandy Nightingale, who would help her. She hadn’t been under Mandy’s wing that long, but she knew the woman would listen to her and help her, not mock her. And in a pinch, there was always Jake.
“Are you all right?” Jan asked anxiously. “I shouldn’t have let you go there alone.”
“I wasn’t alone. I’m not alone.”
“Oh?”
“Len Green is with me.”
“Oh, good. You’re with a cop.”
A cop who might have turned bad. What the hell was she thinking, and why on earth should she be thinking it?
“So what do we do now?” Jan asked.
“See if she comes home tonight. And if we don’t hear from her tomorrow, we fill out a missing persons report. And get people who know what they’re doing in on it.”
“She hasn’t even been gone twenty-four hours,” Len reminded her gently, interrupting the conversation.
“We’ll both keep trying her tonight,” Ashley said, ignoring him. Jan agreed, and they hung up.
A few minutes later, they reached Nick’s. Before Ashley turned off the engine, she said, “You’re certain you have a ride.”
“Yep. Curtis and Sandy both thought it was a good idea if I went to check on you. Sandy was going out, so he dropped me, and Curtis promised to wait until we were back.”
“Okay, I’m going to bed then.”
They both got out, and Len looked at her over the roof of the car. He saluted. “Good night, then. I’ll just go find Curtis.”
She nodded, then felt ridiculous and guilty. “Len?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for coming after me.”
“Sure. Keep me posted. I—I do like her, too, you know.”
He walked around to the terrace entrance. Ashley let herself in by the side door. “Sharon?” she called, as she walked in. “Nick?”
No one replied, and she didn’t want to go back through the bar to see if they were there. She went into her own room. This time, nothing had changed. She shook her head, still convinced that someone had been in there earlier. She flopped down on her bed, exhausted, though it wasn’t even that late. She and Jan might have been ridiculous, checking up on Karen so quickly. Still…there were those spots in the bathtub.
Jake hadn’t even reached his car before his cell phone rang. He was surprised to hear Carnegie on the other end. “Jake, I just wanted to let you know I’m real glad you arranged for those off-duty guys to stand guard at the hospital.”
“Has something else happened?” He felt more than a twinge of guilt. He had told Ashley that he would look into the case, but his own affairs had taken such precedence that he hadn’t even thought about the Stuart Fresia investigation since he’d handed the matter over to Marty.
“Not really, but I decided to talk to that guy again, the one who was writing for the same paper Fresia was. Guess what I found out? He doesn’t exist.”
“What do you mean, he doesn’t exist? I thought he was screaming louder than anyone that people needed to look into the accident, that Stuart Fresia had been on to something.”
“Yes, that’s true. But when I went to call him today, the number he gave me was a pizza parlor. So I went to the paper, talked to personnel and got his social security number. Checked up on that, and it belonged to a guy killed in World War Two. I went back to the hospital, where he’d been hanging around like a leech. All of a sudden, he’s nowhere to be seen. What it means exactly, I don’t know. But I’ve got the department picking up the bill for round-the-clock protection. I just wanted to let you know.”
“Thanks, Carnegie. Thanks a lot. I’m going to be out of town the first half of tomorrow, at least, but I’ll have my cell phone. If you get anything else, let me know. And if you don’t mind, I’ll do some prying myself when I get back. And if you think of anything specific I can do, just yell.”
“All right. I’ll keep you posted.”
“You’re working late,” Jake said, glancing at his watch.
“Not that late. And hey, I’m willing to bet you didn’t knock off according to the clock.”
“Think we’ll die young?”
A chuckle came over the wire. “Too late for me,” Carnegie said wryly. “But you—you watch your back.”
“Will do.”
They rang off. Jake thought about calling Marty to let him know he would be out in the morning, then decided against it. Marty probably had gone home or gone out. After all, he had a life.
A life…