Mike opened his mouth to share more of his thoughts from that morning, but Lena held up a finger. She moved to a file cabinet and took out several thick folders – she had the chain of custody on the CPS files photocopied on the previous day. She laid them out on her desk; the most promising leads were cases occurring in the mid-2000s involving men who might seek revenge against caseworkers thereafter.
“But,” she said, “none of that involves Lavoie. These cases – and your theory about something that happened upstream – this is where our focus should be right now.”
She grabbed one of the files and held it up. “Someone who spent a long time thinking about this, someone with a personal stake.” She tapped the file with her finger. “Dodd Caruthers was at SCI Cold Brook for thirteen years. Before that, CPS investigated him twice. Once for the incident with his son in the car, and again following a domestic violence call. I want to talk to him.”
“Okay.” Mike stood up. “Let’s do it.”
She spread her hands. “Well… hold on. Take a minute. You’re always ready to blast off into space. I need to speak to my chief, you need to run it up the pole to your supervisor.”
“I’ll do that right now.”
She just watched him a moment, the corner of her mouth twitching into a sly smile. “You’re a pain in my ass, Mike.”
“You and my daughter already agree on something.”
“She’s here?”
“Yeah.”
“Poor thing.”
“One last thing,” Mike said. “Bobbi Noelle.”
Lena’s eyebrows went up, she waited.
“Placid PD has been having someone roll through each night, keeping an eye,” Mike said. “And we’re still looking for her ex.”
“Okay…”
“Until we’re sold on Caruthers, or one of these other old CPS cases, it’s still possible this was meant to be her, and Lavoie is a coincidence.”
Lena sighed, dropped her gaze, nodded. “Lavoie is a coincidence if this is Pritchard, or if this is Noelle’s ex. Which is why we’ve got to get through these cases. We have to know if she’s connected or not. If it’s Caruthers, then she is.”
“Agreed,” Mike said.
Her eyes found him again. “Where are you at with that? With Jameson Rentz?”
“Well, he managed to charm Bobbi’s mother into giving out her phone number. It crossed my mind that maybe he’s out there working that same charm on other people, getting information on Bobbi and her co-workers. That he’s a dejected lover turned psychopath.”
“My favorite kind,” Lena said dryly.
Nineteen
The night was hot, muffled by the humidity. The apartment was quiet, the fridge fixed and no longer rattling since Connor had replaced the evap motor. Maybe it was the silence that made it harder to sleep. Bobbi sprawled on her mattress, looking up at the ceiling, sweating, unnerved by every sound.
She picked up her phone, seeking a distraction. She knew about the evidence that said looking at your phone kept you awake, but she dimmed her screen and looked anyway, unable to focus on much.
Someone was moving around outside the apartment.
She set her phone on the floor and stretched toward the open windows, tense and listening. While it was normal to hear a car passing, a dog barking, or even a late-night burble of conversation as people walked home from the bars, this had been different, closer.
There it was again: the tympanic sound of metal dragged over asphalt.
She got up from the mattress, padded across the carpeted floor to the windows. Hot as it was, she rubbed her arms, suddenly chilled. No one out there, though, just the stone church looming in her window, the edge of St. Adams School, and a slice of Saranac Avenue beyond.
Then a figure emerged from the shadows, down in the alley between the church and her building. He was hefting a trash bag, and he walked it toward the street.
She heard a thoomp and then the metal-on-metal sound of the lid over the bin. He started back into the alley, and she saw a bit of light reflected off his balding head: Frank Gilbert.
She relaxed. Gilbert was one of her neighbors. He lived alone, from what she knew – she’d said hi to him only once since moving in; it had been early in the morning on her way out to work and he was standing in that same alley, cleaning up a drift of brittle leaves from the previous autumn.
He moved out of sight and she heard the front door open and close, felt the slight vibration of it. Tomorrow was trash day. Maybe Gilbert was old and a night owl, just didn’t give a shit, or maybe he was OCD.
Bobbi lay back down, knitted her fingers behind her head, and stared up. The street light on Saranac Ave shining through the windows formed two parallelograms of light on the ceiling. The image recalled her childhood bedroom in Almond, when a car would turn and drive down the hill beside her house, and its headlights would slide over the ceiling. She missed her family and had only spoken to her parents once since the whole Harriet thing had happened. That’d been on Sunday. Four days ago. She’d promised them a follow-up phone call that she’d never delivered on, too afraid of what she might say, how she’d be liable to blurt out her lingering fears that this whole thing could be about her.
Mike Nelson had told her that local police would be checking on her each night, at least driving past her building, even hanging around if time permitted. She hadn’t seen anyone so far that night.
She rolled onto her side, looked at her phone sitting on the carpet. She was tempted to text Connor, but surely he was asleep. Maybe Lennox was up. He’d told her how he sometimes had trouble sleeping, but she worried a vibrating or chiming phone might wake him if he was actually getting some rest, and anyway he’d called in sick that day, presumably struck down by what had been going around.
Time for a glass of warm milk; one of those silly things that sounded like hokum but with proven science behind it. Bobbi got up and left the bedroom, passing by the apartment door. The door was hung with about an inch to spare at the bottom.
As she stepped past, she saw a shadow in the hall light sneaking beneath the door and heard a creak.
She stopped cold, her heart beating hard again, listening for more. She thought maybe she heard the soft groan of a floorboard coming from a slightly different location. Someone was definitely out there. Gilbert? He lived on the first floor, but perhaps he’d come upstairs for some reason. Hunting for more trash to take to the curb? Or maybe it was her one third-floor neighbor, the apartment across the way…
With no peephole in the door, Bobbi lowered to all fours, put her head to the floor, and peered through the gap.
Nothing.
No one standing there.
She got back to her feet, hurried to the bedroom, and picked up her phone. She was about to call the police when she stopped, thinking it through. She’d seen enough of this behavior in her line of work to know what it was – she was behaving like a paranoiac. Gilbert had spooked her with his activity, and now she was jumping at phantom sounds.
She kept the phone, though, dialed 911, and moved her thumb over the Call button as she left the bedroom. There was a reason she’d spent years learning self-defense. Not to be foolish, but to have the courage to stand up for herself, to fight back when necessary. First her brothers, then Jamie, and she wasn’t going to be pushed around any longer. She unlocked the door and pulled it open.
Bobbi stepped into the hallway, her feet bare. There was only darkness in the gap at the bottom of the neighbor’s door; no one home. Then – a noise from her left, a bit of a scrape, and another creak. She thought the sound had drifted up from the floor below. Like someone who had been on her floor was going back down.