3. Cassidy
Detective Lewis looks up from his desk where he’d been craning over a manilla folder, and regards me with narrowed eyes like he’s wondering what sins he committed in a previous life to deserve me bursting into his office on a Sunday morning.
The detective is average in every way. Average height, average weight, brown eyes, brown hair in a standard issue crew cut. If it wasn’t for his cleft chin and one eyebrow arched in permanent skepticism, I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out from a lineup.
I took a chance coming to see him without an appointment. That he’s here, and not at home or out on an investigation, must be a sign. I’m hopeful for the first time in months…until he recognizes me.
His face falls. He’s on his feet a moment later, hand outstretched. “Miss Monroe, I told you to?—”
“I found it!” I wave the Filofax at him, and he frowns like I’m threatening to bludgeon him to death with it.
“Found what?”
“A new lead.” I plop down on the creaky chair positioned on the other side of his desk, keeping my eyes on his messy table as I mentally will him to sit down and listen to me.
He sinks into his chair, and I swear I hear him let out a faint groan, but maybe it’s just my imagination. “Do you remember what I told you the last time we spoke?”
I refuse to look at him. Jaw clenched, I shrug. “That you had limited resources, and working on a missing persons case with no new leads after three months wasn’t top priority,” I ramble. “Or something like that.”
“Close enough.” He flips closed the file he’d been working on and props his elbows on the table, resting his chin on his meshed fingers. “I also told you we haven’t stopped looking. We’ll revisit your mother’s case every chance we get, but you can’t keep coming in here?—”
“New lead!” I interrupt, shoving the black leather organizer over the table at him. It hits his coffee cup on the way, but it’s one of several, and thankfully one that’s empty. He really needs to clean up this place. “Guess it’s time you ‘revisit’ my mom’s case.”
He shakes his head. “We found that the night of your mother’s disappearance.”
“Oh.” My eyebrows draw together. “And you did nothing about it?”
“If there’d been anything helpful in there, we’d have admitted into evidence, Miss Monroe.”
“So you just dismissed it?” I’m trying not to get angry, but the thought that they had this evidence in their hands and didn’t even bother following up makes me want to scream.
He glances to the side, a tic in his jaw. “We called all of those numbers.” He taps the Filofax. “Most of these numbers have been disconnected. Of those that still worked, none of them had heard from your mother recently.”
“She contacted one of them recently though. Which you’d have known if you’d done a thorough search.”
His already arched eyebrow cocks even higher at my tone, but he sits back in his chair as he drags the organizer closer to him and flips it open.
“E. Remington.” I shuffle to the edge of the chair, leaning over the desk and gesturing for him to flip to the contacts section of the organizer. He sends a stoic look my way and then obeys. I’m standing now, leaning on the desk with one hand so I can stab at the page with my other.
“There.”
“How do you know she contacted this person?” He keeps his eyes on the Filofax, paging idly through it while his index finger keeps the place I’d pointed out.
“I found this.” I dig in my purse and take out the folded piece of paper, opening it up and smoothing it out. He glances over and then gives the paper a double take. As soon as he picks it up and brings it closer to the organizer, I tap my finger on the desk. “See? It looks like she tore it out of here.” When he says nothing, I add, “She was going to meet Remington the day she disappeared.”
He studies the paper again. “Where did you find this?”
I don’t like his tone of voice. Not one fucking bit. I shrug. “In one of her purses.”
“A purse she used regularly?”
I drop my gaze. “Not really.”
“So this appointment could be as old as this organizer.” He taps the Filofax.
I put my palms on the table, leaning in. “This is a new lead. You have to investigate.”
Detective Lewis sighs. “Sit down, Miss Monroe.”
I reluctantly take my seat as he studies the piece of paper, the organizer, the piece of paper again. His jaw tics a few times, lips moving as if he’s biting the inside of his mouth.
My heart does a happy little gallop in my chest when he picks up the phone and dials Remington’s number.
“It’s been disconnected,” I tell him, and he gives me that same ‘I’m so over this’ look as he waits for the call to connect. He sets down the receiver a few seconds later, and I shrug when he narrows his eyes at me again.
I made Detective Lewis’s life a living hell during the investigation. But he kept treating this like a runaway, and nothing I did or said changed his mind.
He swivels in his chair, wiggling his computer mouse until the screen comes on, clearing his throat a few times as he waits.
“I looked up the address on street view. It’s a real estate company. I think she was going to sell the house.”
He logs in with slow, methodical keystrokes that make me want to pull out my hair, silent.
“I tried calling, but I guess they’re closed today.”
Lewis ignores me. I crane over the desk, but being so short, and with his screen angled away, I can’t see anything. He clicks a few times, and then turns back to me, his chest expanding as he takes a calming breath.
“Explain to me how you think this is a lead, Miss Monroe.”
I stare at him, speechless for a moment. “Isn’t it obvious?”
He sits back, elbow propped on the arm of his chair, head cradled in the crook of his index finger and thumb, waiting.
“Humor me.”
“She was going to see this real estate company about selling the house.” Heat rushes to my voice when I realize how that sounds, but I hold out a hand, hoping to stall him if his train of thought is headed in that same direction. “Obviously whatever deal she made never went through. Because she missed the appointment. Because she’s been kidnapped…”
I trail off when Detective Lewis’s lips thin out.
“It’s a lead,” I mumble. “You have to look into it.” Then I add a grudging, “Please.”
He glances away, sits forward, and slowly closes the Filofax, the note still nestled inside. Opening his drawer, he takes out a throat lozenge and pops it into his mouth before speaking.
“Your mother took out three mortgages on her property. Did you know that?”
I slump in my chair. This conversation is taking a whole different direction than the one I expected.
The only thing I’ve ever wanted was a family. My dream life—one I used to think about all the time before Mom disappeared—was finding the perfect man to marry, moving into the perfect house, having the perfect amount of kids, and being the perfect mother.
But I never had time to find love, because I started working straight out of high school.
“What she owed on her loans well exceeded what she could sell the house for,” Detective Lewis explains, and to his credit, barely sounds condescending at all. “Any realtor would have told her that.”
“It’s still a lead though, right?” I bite the inside of my lip.
“Yes,” he sighs begrudgingly. “I’ll call the realtors tomorrow morning once they’re open, ask around, see if I can track down whoever she was supposed to meet that night.”
“Remington.”
He dips his head, but it’s not really a nod. There’s a moment’s silence before he asks, “How are you holding up, Cassidy?”
I shrug. “Fine, I guess.”
“Have you met with your mother’s lawyer yet?”
I run my hands over my hair, grimace. I pulled it into a quick ponytail when I left my apartment this morning. For the first time since I unfolded that note and realized what I was holding, I do a mental inventory of myself.
Greasy hair.
Disheveled clothes I’ve worn over five times.
Smudged make up that I didn’t have the energy to wash off last night and hadn’t bothered to clean up this morning either.
Shit. I look like a train wreck.
“We spoke.” I pluck at the sleeve of my wrinkled cardigan. Is that a coffee stain on the wrist? I twist my arm inward to hide the mark, though I’m pretty sure the detective’s already seen it. “He said he’ll file a claim, but it’s going to take at least five years before they—” My voice hitches, and I stop talking.
“There’s always a chance she’ll turn up,” he says.
Of course he’d say that. He’s still trying to convince me that Rebecca Monroe had grown bored with her pedestrian life, and had simply run away.
I’d love to believe that.
The alternative is that she’s already dead.