*
I located Derrow’s actual house, a well-maintained but ugly two-story with an attached garage and green siding and black shutters. Most of the yards on the street were still covered with a thick blanket of fallen autumn leaves, but Derrow’s was just an expanse of grass. I drove past it and parked a few houses down, where the street widened into a cul-de-sac. Two women in patterned leggings and neon jackets with reflective trim were speed-walking on the other side of the street, engaged in a loud, breathless conversation about low-fat slow-cooker recipes. I tried to tune them out as I looked at Derrow’s place. There were lights on in the lower level, glowing pale yellow behind miniblinds. I hadn’t heard Derrow on the scanner since I got back to Belmont, so I didn’t know if he was home or not.
If Veronica was in there, I didn’t think she was calmly reading next to a table lamp.
My head was pounding. The speed walkers had stopped on the sidewalk to finish their conversation before parting ways. “Go away,” I muttered. I wanted to check out the house, but I didn’t want anyone to see me and call the police. It seemed likely enough that someone might call on me just for sitting here for too long anyway.
The house looked so normal. Like just a house. I felt nothing when I looked at it, unlike the old house earlier today. Did that mean something? I looked through the binocs but it was too dark to see any detail. On the scanner, there was a scuffle between teenagers at the skate park, a complaint of someone smoking too close to the door of the mall. Shanahan caught another fender bender on Clover Road.
I wondered how many fender benders on Clover Road there were each week in Belmont.
I wondered if the dispatcher somehow screened the calls before even putting them on the radio, because I’d heard no actual crime all day, which was a little weird even for a suburb. Especially one as fucked up as Belmont.
I wondered if I could return the overpriced scanner to Radio Shack for a refund and spent a minute looking for the receipt, but gave up.
I looked at my phone—a text from my brother asking me if my Mercedes took diesel, another call from Tom. He didn’t leave a voice mail this time. I texted yes to Andrew and dropped the phone onto the seat. I rubbed my eyes, forgetting again about the scab on my cheekbone.
“What are you doing,” I said out loud, not for the first time recently.
No one ever solved a case from staring at a house.
I went back to my notebook. I’d written hardly anything down.
Red sedan.
Big green pickup.
Long wool coat.
Marisa?
No one ever solved a case with notes that looked like this.
I dropped the notebook on the passenger seat and massaged my forehead, waiting for a clear thought to shake loose.
Derrow had been involved in the SHOCK program for at least eighteen years. Based on those pictures hanging in the lobby of the station, I guessed an average of fifteen students per class. That was a lot of kids, a lot of girls. The department surely kept records. I thought for a minute about how I could wheedle a list out of them, track down Derrow’s former students to establish a pattern. But I could spend months on end tracking down a few hundred formerly troubled teens. And Veronica didn’t have months. Just like Brad didn’t have months.
I thought about Derrow’s friendly little wave when he drove past me on Shelby’s street Monday night. When I said to tell Lassiter hello for me. What if that was when he got the idea? The other day I’d consoled myself with the knowledge that Veronica’s disappearance wasn’t my fault, but maybe it was. I got the flask out of my bag and ran my thumbnail back and forth over the cap, debating. Whiskey might kill the edges of the feeling I had, but it wasn’t going to help Veronica. I put the flask down. Then I scrolled through the names in my phone, pausing for a second on Tom’s again. But I couldn’t. I still felt something hot and dark squeezing my insides when I thought of it, my father using his dying breath to remind me that I didn’t know what I was doing.
The speed walkers hugged and went into their separate houses.
A garage door behind me opened and a rusty Chevy Nova wheezed down the street and turned left onto Clover just as another vehicle turned onto Derrow’s street.
I squinted against the LED headlights, momentarily blinded.
Then Derrow’s garage door went up, and the vehicle turned and the headlights were no longer shining right at me.
I saw that it was a green pickup truck.
My hands squeezed into fists.
A dark green pickup.
One of those big new ones, just like Danielle Stockton had said.
What if Sarah wasn’t buried somewhere in the ravine?
What if she was alive?
THIRTY-THREE
I fumbled around on the seat for my phone as the garage door closed again and glanced at Tom’s number but scrolled to Peter Novotny’s instead. “Who do you know in the sheriff’s office?” I said when the old PI answered. I was thinking I needed to go bigger than Belmont. To an agency with the authority to swoop in over their heads. “Or the Ohio BCI?”
“Wait a minute, wait just a minute,” Novotny said. He sounded confused. “What’s going on? Are you in trouble?”
“Not in trouble, no,” I said. “But I need a name. Someone you trust.”
“Listen, honey.” He cleared his throat. “You sound a little wound up. Tell me what’s going on.”
Derrow’s garage door opened, and he dragged out some long sheets of drywall, which he leveraged into the truck with some difficulty. I took a deep breath. “I think there was a Belmont cop involved in the Cook murders,” I said. It was like ripping off a bandage and then waving around the open wound for all the world to see.
Novotny didn’t say anything for a while. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Why?”
“Petey, listen, I don’t think Sarah Cook is dead. I think she’s in his house. Right now. I don’t know if she helped with the other girls or not but—”
“Roxane,” he said slowly. “Have you been drinking?”
I ground my teeth together. “No—”
“Because you sound like you’re out of your goddamn mind. I know I drink a little too, and so did your daddy, and it’s fine. But you have to learn to keep work and whiskey separate, okay?”
“Listen—”
“No, you listen, I mean it,” he said sharply. “You don’t play around with stuff like this.”
“I’m not playing—”
“Oh, you’re not playing, okay,” Novotny said. “So you’ve got evidence, then?”
“He knew all the girls. He’s driving the same truck that Danielle saw that night at the gas station—”
“Danielle is your frame of reference? That’s not a point in your favor. And what other girls are you even talking about?”
“Please,” I said. “Do you know anyone in Ohio BCI?”
“You just got a wild idea and I know it sounds right to you, but that’s just the booze talking. Shit, I could tell you all kinds of stories, cases I was sure I cracked after a drink or five.”