Chapter 4 #2
I ran Bella through the standard missing persons questions between sips of coffee.
She answered all of them without any of the calibration I got from the brothers.
No self-checking, no sideways glances, no small hesitations before the words came out.
She’d known Frank for only a little while.
Hadn’t noticed anything particular. She was helpful, and I believed she wasn’t hiding anything.
“Thanks, Bella. You’ve been very helpful. I really appreciate it.”
“Oh, okay then. Well, if you need anything more, just call me. I’ll be right down the hall.” She gave Declan a small nod and headed back toward the kitchen.
Declan ate his muffin in two bites and grabbed another.
I was about to circle back to Mitch when the back door banged open, and Cassidy Branson blew into the room. She wore full riding gear: cowboy hat, boots, dust on her jeans.
She stopped dead when she saw me, though, and looked me over from boots to badge. “Ah, shit. What’s wrong now?”
I stood and offered my hand. “You must be Cassidy.”
“I am.” She shook my hand, and I let her dominate the grip, which she did damn well. “And you didn’t answer my question.”
“Cassidy …” Mitch’s voice carried a warning.
“Oh, relax.” She crossed to the end of the table and poured herself a coffee without topping anyone else up. Then she dropped into the chair beside Mitch like she’d been sitting in that exact spot since birth and fixed me with a look that told me exactly how sharp she was.
“You gonna tell me what you’re here for? Or is everyone going to make me guess?” She broke a muffin in half and took a bite.
“If you had to guess, what would it be?” I smiled at her like we were old friends.
“Sapphire is here to find Frank,” Mitch said.
Cassidy huffed. “Yeah, well, good luck with that. We’ve looked everywhere.”
I ran her through the same questions I’d asked the brothers. Her answers were near replicas of theirs—smooth, consistent, nothing out of place. However, she watched me with a level of attention that went well beyond what my questions warranted. She was hiding something. I’d have bet my badge on it.
Then another man walked in, and I knew exactly who he was before he opened his mouth.
I clicked my fingers and pointed at him. “You must be Xavier Hawthorne, Cassidy’s co-conspirator in the Bruce Henderson wrecked truck fiasco.”
Xavier’s mouth curved into a quick grin. “Guilty as charged.” He offered his hand across the table. “Xavier Hawthorne. And for the record, that truck was wrecked because of Bruce’s own doing.”
“Xavier.” Cassidy’s voice had an edge to it.
“What? I’m sure the officer already knows.” He pulled out the chair beside Cassidy and sat down like he had all the time in the world.
Cassidy pointed a finger at me. “Whatever Bruce Henderson told the police—”
“Bruce told us quite a lot, actually.” I kept my smile pleasant. “Though I should mention he told us from the floor of the police station while I pushed his face into the linoleum, so some of it was hard to make out.”
Xavier laughed and nudged Cassidy. “See. Told you she knew.”
Cassidy stared at me for a beat, then something shifted in her expression. Not quite a smile, but close.
“So, are you two together?” I waggled my finger between them.
“That’s none of your business,” Cassidy said, with a smile that could kill.
“Fair enough.” I looked back down at my notebook. “Now, where were we?”
A woman stepped into the room with a sunburn across her nose and her hair tied into two braids over her shoulders. She stopped when she saw the table full of people. Her gaze landed on me, then dropped to the badge on my chest. “Oh. Hello.”
“Hi, I’m Senior Constable Delaney, but please, call me Sapphire.” I smiled at her. “And you are?”
She swept the canvas hat from her head and glanced at Mitch, blinking like she was hoping for a heads-up. “I’m Charlie Macintyre.”
A memory tugged at the back of my mind. A phone call from weeks ago and a request that Bob had shut down almost the moment it had been made.
“Charlie Macintyre?” I repeated.
“Yes.” She didn’t look particularly happy that I’d said her name aloud.
What the hell was going on with these people? Every single one of them looked as suspicious as hell.
The details of that call snapped into focus. “Now I remember where I’ve heard your name,” I said, clicking my fingers.
“You do?” Charlie slipped around the others and sat beside Mitch. The way they looked at each other confirmed they were together.
All happy couples.
I flipped back through my notebook. “You’re the paleontologist.” I left it there and waited to see who’d fill the silence.
Nobody did, so I lifted my gaze from my notepad, choosing Declan to look at. “It seems people go missing out here rather a lot.”
“What?” He blinked.
“What are you implying?” Mitch said, and the way his arm shifted beneath the table, I pictured him putting his hand on Charlie’s knee.
“Professor Doug Walker.” I looked at Charlie. “Your supervisor. Am I correct?”
She cleared her throat. “Yes. Well, he was. But he had an accident.”
“Hmm, that’s right. He fell into floodwaters.
” As I tapped my pen against my notepad, I remembered the call that had come into the station weeks ago from a detective at Rosebud Police Station on the North Queensland coast. Detective Jaxson Callahan had wanted to bring his K-9 out to Koolaroo to assist in searching for Doug Walker, Charlie Macintyre’s supervisor.
Bob had laughed when he’d told me about it after he’d ended the call. Big city cops think we’ve got nothing better to do than go fossicking around on Koolaroo Ranch for some professor who’s probably dingo meat by now.
Callahan had called back two days later and got me instead.
He was thorough and detail-oriented, asking questions about Doug Walker and our apparent investigation that I had no idea was even happening.
Then Bob appeared at my desk and dropped a note in front of me.
Give me the call. He’d taken it in his office with the door shut and told me afterward that he’d handled it.
I hated that I hadn’t pushed back harder on that.
“Was his body ever recovered?” I asked.
“What was left of him, yeah,” Mitch said.
I gasped, pretending to be shocked. “What did you find?”
Mitch glanced at Charlie. “One of Doug’s boots and a shirt. The animals took the rest of him.”
“Hmm. Poor man.” I shook my head.
Mitch’s lip twitched. “Yeah. Poor man.”
“Charlie, when did you report Doug’s disappearance?”
Charlie blinked and swallowed hard. “The same day we found his things.” She glanced at Mitch. “The university contacted police immediately. I was told local police would be in touch, and that it was all being handled.”
Being handled. That’s the same term Bob had used. I kept my pen moving. “And where is the boot and clothing now?”
“Where we found them.” Mitch’s jaw tightened. “Bob told us not to touch anything. Said he’d send someone out to collect them.”
He had? “When was that?”
Mitch and Charlie exchanged a look, and I couldn’t help but think they were holding back some critical information. “Weeks ago,” Mitch said finally.
I wrote that down and kept my face perfectly neutral. Weeks ago? Bob had known about physical evidence left exposed to the elements for weeks and had done absolutely nothing about it.
What the hell?
I looked around the table. Measured Mitch. Nervous Declan. Sharp Cassidy. Wide-eyed Charlie. And Xavier, who I was still trying to figure out.
A dining table full of people who all knew more than they were giving me and had made a collective decision about how much that was going to be.
I clicked my fingers. “There was also your mother. She went missing, too.”
They all went still.
“That was a long time ago,” Mitch said. He’d appointed himself spokesperson.
Noted.