Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
"I have it all here," he told me, reaching into his jacket pocket, pulling out the keys along with a small stack of folded papers. "I figured it would save you from doing the legwork to get the basics. This way, you can focus on the computers or clues at her house or something. Make some headway."
"Okay," I agreed, reaching into my bottom drawer to pull out one of the laptops I kept there, sides and screen still wrapped in plastic.
It would be useless to me after this case was over.
I never kept old laptops around. They were too full of valuable—and incriminating—information.
I fried the parts I needed to, then usually donated the rest to the local high school that taught kids how to rebuild them.
"Can I ask you something?" I asked as I fired it up.
"Why I came to you instead of your brother," Collings guessed.
"Yeah."
"Don't know you too well, but I've heard things.
Mostly that you're like a dog chasing a bitch in heat.
Relentless," he clarified. "Almost like you take it personally.
I figure you do the legwork, and if you don't know whether you can handle some dangerous situation, I would trust you'd call in your brother. "
He wasn't exactly... wrong.
As much as my pride hated to admit it, he was right; I knew fights or—if it came to that—extraction jobs were not my forte.
They were, however, Sawyer's. If I needed him, I would call him.
Or, if my ego wouldn't allow him, I could reach out to Brock if he could be reached from beneath whatever woman he was lying under this week.
"They'd be my first call," I agreed, taking the pieces of paper, unfolding them as I connected the Wi-Fi, brought up a browser, opened up Facebook.
"Clarke?" I asked, raising a brow.
"We thought it was a boy until she came out. Had the name Clark picked out, after my grandfather. Turned out to be a little girl, so my ex, she decided that we would add an ‘E’ on it, and it would still be a good fit."
Clarke Elizabeth Collings.
"This? This is your daughter?" I asked, not recognizing the almost accusatory tone in my voice until he let out an uncomfortable little cough.
It wasn't that Collings was ugly. I imagined that, in his prime, he'd been decent enough looking in a somewhat guy-next-door way.
But Clarke Collings was, well, beautiful, with her golden-brown eyes, round, delicate face, blonde hair, and the kind of perfectly straight, white teeth that spoke of a couple of years in braces in her teens and a solid whitening routine.
"She looks like her mother," he told me. "Short like her too. Can't tell there, but she's maybe five-two, five-three. Strong, too. Her mom wanted her in dance, but I insisted on martial arts when she was five. She's kept up with it."
For the most part, her Facebook pictures were full of oversized sweaters and jeans, but there was one picture of her in a bathing suit—showing a body that was neither thin nor heavy, but average with maybe a hint of more definition in her thighs and arms than most women had.
Likely from the training he'd mentioned.
Another minute or two of digging suggested she was neither active nor inactive.
She got tagged in pictures by two women who, by all accounts, seemed like her only close friends.
However, the tagging stopped a few months ago as well.
Neither of the girls had any worrying posts about their MIA friend.
Clarke kept her profile pretty bare-boned, sharing a few videos here or there—showing a fondness for dog videos or clever memes.
She didn't list employment, didn't check in at any places, but did 'like' a bunch of TV shows and movies, all leaning heavily toward police procedurals or other fictional shows featuring some sorts of cases.
Something she liked because of her father, perhaps?
"Did she go to college?" I asked, not finding any education connections either.
"Two years community, then finished up her bachelor’s after that at Rutgers."
"Majoring in?"
"Business."
"What does she do for a living?" I asked, figuring it would be easier to get this all out of the way, so I didn't have to waste time tracking it down.
"At an office. Cubicle job," he said, shrugging. "Made good money, though. Better than I did all the years on the force."
"Alright. Well, I will get started on this. If you leave me a number, I will send text or email updates."
He scribbled his name on the top sheet of papers he had given me, moving to stand. "I want updates whenever you find something. Even if it is something you don't want me to hear," he told me, turning and making his way to the door, giving Diego a long glance before disappearing.
He'd missed his shower.
It was the first time I had fallen off Diego's schedule since I started watching him half the time for Luce and Evan.
He was already settled on a branch, one leg pulled up, feathers puffed, head tucked into his back. So he didn't seem overly bothered by the skipped bathing. And if he wasn't, I decided I wouldn't be either.
Which would normally be easier said than done; I would usually stare at my ceiling all night obsessing over it, but tonight I had a new case.
Missing persons were one of my favorites to work on. Sure, mostly the 'find out if my husband is cheating' cases paid the bills, but after a while, those became rote and unfulfilling. He was always cheating. There was no mystery to it, no sense of real accomplishment in finding him out.
But missing people?
Those were always interesting.
Whether they were missing by choice—teenagers walking away from their oppressive parents—or holed up somewhere deep in the pits of a drug addiction, or missing for more nefarious reasons, it was always interesting and, complicated.
I thrived on complicated—cases that would keep me up for days on end trying to figure them out.
The girl who was, yet maybe wasn't, missing. That sounded complicated.
It would all start with the basics.
Namely, who, exactly, was Clarke Elizabeth Collings? What did she do with her days? Was she seeing anyone she maybe didn't tell her father about? Had she simply taken off with him for a few days because they were so infatuated with each other?
People did that, apparently.
I couldn't claim I understood it.
Infatuation with cases?
Yes.
With people?
Not so much.
Closing the laptop, I tucked it into a bag, grabbed the paperwork and keys, checked to make sure Diego's food and water bowls were full enough to hold him over until morning, then headed out, knowing I wouldn't be able to sleep until I checked out her place.
With that in mind, I went down the street, finding the more-rust-than-metal car that had been mine since I was a teenager and it was all I could afford.
I always found myself a little too attached to some things to let them go.
Brushing the adverts from my PO Box off the bench front seat, the light gray material stained brown in places from the coffee cup that often wobbled in the unsteady cupholder, I climbed in.
Clarke didn't live directly in Navesink Bank but rather in Port Milford, the wet side of the area known for flooding even just in small rainstorms, closing roads and bridges for days on end, making water flood into the bottom levels of low-lying buildings.
Like the one Clarke apparently lived above, the business that had once been there long boarded up, waiting for up-and-comers to start turning the area into a more niche, young-adult-friendly place.
A door was situated to the side of the boarded storefront's bay window, nearly butting up to the one next door.
I grabbed the keys Collings supplied, chose the right one on the first try, and let myself into a small vestibule with a staircase leading up to the second-floor apartment.
The space was mostly empty save for a giant blue recycling bin, loaded down with paper adverts, cardboard, and bottles boasting a Vitamin Water addiction—XXX and Power-C flavors only.
Bypassing the paper recycling, figuring as the daughter of a detective, she would know the importance of shredding sensitive material, I made my way up the narrow stairs, cringing a bit at the loud crunching they made under my feet.
At least she would know if anyone was trying to break into her apartment.
Letting myself in, I walked into a somewhat massive open space dominated forward by a living space with a partially overhanging loft.
To the right was a small kitchen. Across from that, a bedroom that looked to be mostly storage and partially a home office as well as her laundry and wardrobe spot.
The stairs beside that led up to where she chose to have her actual bedroom—a queen bed, unmade, the mismatching sheets and pillows strewn around, the yellow and blue floral comforter kicked mostly to the foot of the bed butted up against the wall, looking up at the skylight above.
Moving toward the nightstand, loaded down with girl clutter.
Nail polish, a book without a dust jacket, a reusable ceramic travel coffee mug, and a glass of water, a bottle of Midol, four mismatched earrings, and some other silver half-circle ring that I figured for some sort of body jewelry, though I had no idea what.
Her pictures hadn't shown any piercings outside of her ears.
Her nightstand was reminiscent of the rest of her place: not dirty, but a little messy, unkempt, a bit scattered.
Shoes were piled up beside the front door, blankets, sweaters, and a dressing gown were on the couch and chairs in the living room, the container of sugar from—presumably—her morning coffee was still on the counter instead of back in the cabinet where it clearly belonged.
I found myself oddly comfortable in the clutter, never having been the type to make my bed or put my shoes in the closet. I didn't mind a little chaos so long as I knew where everything was.
Finding nothing useful in the bed or great room, I made my way into the storage and office area, powering up her computer, sitting there, staring at the lock screen for a long couple of minutes, running through everything I had seen in her apartment, trying to figure out what she might string together to use to protect her files.
People liked to think their passwords were inventive, unique, hard to guess.
People were almost always wrong.
Just a little digging always gave you the answer you were looking for: pet names with number combinations were the most common, along with kids’ names and sports teams.
No one actually tried to give it any thought.
Clarke had no pets, no obvious signs of any sports appreciation, nothing fan-girly lying around.
Swiveling in her chair, my eyes scanned over the room, finding a bright blue shirt with one arm tucked inside still, a bright yellow logo on the front.
I turned back, tapping at the keys.
ClarkKent. ClarkeKent. ClarkeKentIsSuperman.
And there it was.
Access.
I spent the next few hours sifting through files that the somewhat scattered Clarke Collings never seemed inclined to go through, finding endless screenshots of social media posts, pictures with her friends going back at least three years, some old coursework from college she must have been particularly proud of to have kept, a reading list she had meticulously been ticking off, getting close to completing all the 100 Great American Reads list, folders tucked inside folders nestled inside other folders of mp3s that spanned all different genres from Muddy Waters to Britney Spears.
She had a stack of unused CDs sitting on the desk, making me wonder if she was the type to still make mixed tapes, something I found oddly endearing.
Finding nothing suspicious in her files, I set my sights on her browsing history, finding it a little odd that while she clearly didn't do her laundry for weeks at a time, she didn't keep any tabs open in her browser.
Weirder still, she had Tor installed—a deep web browser.
Not unusual for people like me or people in the criminal underbelly, or even doomsday conspiracy theorists, but it seemed out of place for someone who supposedly worked a desk job at a soul-sucking nine-to-five.
I hated things being out of place.
And her browser history was wiped clean.
Whoever Clarke Collings was, she was not who her father thought she was.
And now, well, I was starting to wonder if maybe Collings had been right to be worried about her, to think she wouldn't normally miss her calls with him, that maybe she had gotten herself involved in something she shouldn't have.
Curiouser by the minute, I reached for my phone, shooting off a text to both Luce and Evan, asking them to pick up Diego in the morning even though it was three days early for their usual pick up, that I had a case that might take me out of town.
With that, I charged up her dead phone, messing around with the trace code for an hour until I finally got in, again feeling my curiosity pique.
It hadn't been a simple six or seven dots. She had one that would take most cops weeks to figure out, like that drug dealer’s phone that—years later—they never did get unlocked because his code was so intense.
Normal people didn't guard their phones so hard.
Whatever was inside seemed like it might lead me to her.
As it turned out, I wasn't wrong.