Chapter 4 #2
“I can assure you, Mr. Sullivan,” said the badge in a loud, slow voice, “we will follow up on every lead that comes in.”
Hailey cringed as her uncles exploded.
“Yeh feckin' eejit!” Johnny bellowed over everyone, his face red with rage. “You wouldn’t know a feckin' lead if it bit yeh on yer arrogant arse, ya—”
Uncle Pix clapped him on the shoulder and took over in a more civilized but equally aggressive tone. “Detective Toll,” he said, pushing his sleeves up as he moved into the man’s personal space. “We want some information is all. Who are you lookin’ at for starters?”
The detective shook his head. “Mr. Sullivan, even if we had a suspect, which we don’t, I certainly wouldn’t release a name—the last thing we need here is a band of vigilantes.”
That was definitely the wrong answer. Even Hailey knew that.
There was an audible silence followed by another explosion.
Dale yelled cuss word combinations that made her blush; Skeet shook his fist; Pix grabbed a cast iron argument ender off the stove and held it high; Johnny threatened to kill the detective with his bare hands, and Wimp sipped his coffee, but with a white-knuckled grip on his mug.
Detective Toll seemed remarkably unruffled by all this. He gently patted the air with both hands.
“We will continue to use every resource available to find Holly. When we have new information, I will tell you, and—” He stopped when he finally noticed Hailey standing against the wall, and everyone turned to look at her.
It was like a bucket of ice water had hit her uncles. They immediately straightened up and adjusted their language to “lady-friendly.” No more swearing. No more yelling. It was a whole new crowd in there.
“Hailey,” said Pix in his fatherly voice, “come and meet Detective Toll. He’s heading up the search for Holly.”
Uncle Pix turned to the detective. “Detective Toll, my niece, Hailey…Holly’s sister.”
She didn’t realize she was trembling until she reached to shake his hand.
“Hello, Hailey,” he said politely, and she swallowed hard. “If you’re feeling up to it, I’d like you to come down to the station with me and tell me about your sister…maybe look through some photos?”
“Of course,” she said, nodding. Finding Holly was the only thing on her to-do list.
“That’s my Hailey,” said Uncle Pix proudly. “She’s a right strong young lady. Smart too. She could probably tell yeh the exact time Holly stepped out the door and the exact weight of the bag she was carrying.”
Five fifty-eight pm and just under twenty pounds. She had looked at the clock over the door as Holly passed under it and had helped her stuff mostly paper into the bag with just a few scrapings from dinner and one broken plate.
Hailey followed Detective Toll outside to his car, which had a radio, a computer, a printer, a notebook, and a shotgun all mounted in the front seat.
His lunch, coffee cup, gym bag, and some papers were piled on the passenger seat.
Hailey had to slide his stuff over and be careful not to sit or step on anything when she got in.
Good thing I’m small, she thought as she closed the door.
“I’m sorry,” said Toll. He rushed to move some things out of her way. “I should’ve moved this stuff earlier.”
Grabbing up a stack of folders, he looked around for a place to put them, which he wasn’t going to find inside that car.
“Here, hold these,” he said, handing them to her.
Hailey took them without a fuss, setting them on her lap.
She didn’t really know what to say to a detective, so she just held on to his folders and looked out the window while they drove.
Over and over, she picked up her sister’s shoe in her mind, and as the scenery sped past, over and over she searched her memory for the critical clue that would lead her straight to Holly.
“Is one of these Holly’s file?” she asked, surprising herself.
“They’re… all… Holly’s files.”
Hailey looked down at them.
“All of this?”
Toll glanced at the files, pressed his lips together, and sighed without answering.
He was holding something back. And if he was going to keep secrets, she was just going to find out for herself, so she opened the folder on the top of the pile and started reading.
“You told Uncle Pix you didn’t have any information,” she said as she scanned the pages.
There was a ton of information—measurements from skid marks left in the parking lot, which they’d matched to a specific tire and wheel base. That narrowed their pool of suspect vehicles to seven possible models, three of which weren’t even registered in the tri-state area.
“I told him I didn’t have any suspects,” he clarified.
“You lied.” There were three names on a page labeled “Suspects.”
“Close that file.”
He made a quick grab for the papers and missed.
“Pay attention to the road,” she shot back.
She pressed herself against the window, reading as fast as she could as they pulled into the station.
There were also some flecks of paint recovered from a smashed utility box at the corner of the parking lot exit. Hailey scanned the lab report, which included a list of manufacturers that used that specific paint.
She deduced that the police should be looking for a white Ford Explorer with damage to the passenger side.
Detective Toll put the car in park and ripped the pages out of her hand.
“Don’t go getting the wrong idea about the stuff you just read,” he chastised. “It’s all preliminary. You shouldn’t have read that.”
“You handed them right to me.”
“I didn’t tell you to read them,” he said, getting out of the car.
Detective Toll hugged the folders to his chest with one hand and opened the door to the station with the other, motioning Hailey to lead the way.
As soon as they crossed the threshold, Toll dropped his folders and vaulted over a tall desk to assist an officer who was on the floor, wrestling with the biggest man Hailey had ever seen.
A pair of handcuffs swung from the man’s wrist as he landed punch after punch. He was on top of the officer with one hand squeezing the officer’s neck and the other tugging on his service pistol, which, thankfully, was stuck in the holster, when Detective Toll pulled him off.
Hailey watched them wrangle the giant’s hands back into a set of cuffs. Then she stared at the folders on the floor.
This is too easy.
She fell to her knees, scanning each page, committing them to memory. There were interview notes and lists of names and locations as well as photos from the pub and a few of Holly’s shoe (foot and all), which Hailey quickly covered.
One folder was particularly interesting.
It was darker brown than the others and stamped CONFIDENTIAL in big red letters.
Most of the pages inside had several lines of fat black marker running across them, obliterating a lot of the text.
A visible word here and there indicated the pages had something to do with the fire that had killed her parents.
She knew she’d guessed right when she uncovered some pictures of her childhood home. She puzzled over them.
One photo showed the house before the fire and one after—both from the same vantage point.
That’s weird, she thought. Why would they take a picture of her house before it burned down?
Holding one of the papers up to the light, she discerned the outline of an acronym through the magic marker:
D.O.P.P.L.E.R.
Footsteps. Someone was coming. Hailey gathered the folders, put her butt in a chair, and folded her hands.
When Detective Toll came back out—not over the desk, but through a magnetically locked door—he carried a binder and found Hailey sitting in the lobby like an angel with the papers straightened and submissively tucked inside their folders.
He eyeballed her suspiciously, and Hailey looked innocently back at him.
“Bit of excitement,” he said holding his hands out.
“Is everyone alright?”
“Mostly.”
She handed him the folders, and he actually counted them. Right in front of her. Did he really think she would take one, she wondered, half offended and half amused that he’d underestimated her speed-reading skills.
“Hailey, I have to make a quick call, and it’s a mess in there,” he said apologetically. “Can you look through these mugshots out here for a few minutes? Make a note of anyone that looks familiar, okay?”
She nodded obediently as he waved a card in front of an invisible sensor. The door clicked open, and he disappeared inside.
As Hailey opened the binder, a television mounted to the ceiling in the corner of the lobby blared the morning news, which began with the channel logo flipping around on the screen with some bonging drums and a few dramatic notes from a shrieking horn.
Enter the perfectly coiffed and annoyingly chipper morning news anchor.
Her voice was hard to ignore, and Hailey winced when she introduced their top story.
“Good morning. First up, a gruesome discovery in the parking lot of a local business last night has residents on edge, and just in this morning—a second local woman missing in as many days. Melissa has more.”
Hailey leaned forward, breathless.
“That’s right, Megan, you’ll recall that workers at the Hullachan Irish Pub, a favorite watering hole for many in this area, found the bloody shoe of one of their waitresses in the pub’s parking lot last night.
Since then, no one has seen or heard from the owner of that shoe—Holly Hartley.
And this morning, another 19- year-old girl—vanished.
The search for both South Side women continues. Take a listen.”
The video cut to an interview with a woman wearing a suit and a badge, which hung from a lanyard around her neck.
“At this point, we have no reason to believe the two incidents are related—”
“That statement from the Pittsburgh Police only adds to the intrigue surrounding these vanishings.”
Hailey was nauseous.
She felt like a four-year-old, plugging her ears with her fingers in the middle of a police department, but she couldn’t bear to hear anymore.
Another girl missing?