Chapter Thirty-Four
“You haven’t seen her?” Detective Grant stood in Daryl Stahl’s small living room, doing his best to ignore Kelly Parnell, who sat on the couch in a sweatshirt and miniskirt, a deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes and a permanent grin plastered across her face.
Daryl shook his head. “What’s all the fuss about? So I have a girlfriend? So what?”
Detective Grant sighed, then shook his head. “We’re just trying to figure out where Kara is. She’s missing.”
“Kara’s not missing. She just doesn’t want to be found. We finally came out of the closet.” He smiled at Kelly, who batted her eyes and shrugged. “She’s just embarrassed.”
“I hope you’re right, Daryl. Do you know where she might have disappeared to?” He turned his back to Kelly. “Any secret haunts?”
“Nah, Kara’s pretty much a creature of habit. The canal, maybe? Work, school? She had a fling with Dean. Have you checked with him?”
“How’d you know about that?” Kelly asked with a tinge of jealousy.
Daryl ignored her.
Kelly crossed her arms and looked away.
“We’re looking for him.” He walked toward the front door, Daryl on his heels. “You hear from her, you call me,” he said in a serious tone.
Detective Grant drove down South Commerce Street, heading for the power plant.
He might as well talk to Jackson and see if there was anything fishy going on with Kara during her shifts.
He stopped at the light at West Salisbury Street, and noticed a Chambersburg, PA police car stopped in the road and Mr. Cordon standing with his hand on the door.
Chambersburg. “What the hell do they want?” he mumbled. As he neared the car, he thought, Oh, shit. Greer. His radio broke through his worry.
“Grant.”
“Sir, the truck belongs to a Roland Marcus Greer.”
Grant pulled his car next to the Chambersburg Police car. “Help you with something, Officer?” he said through the open window. “Afternoon, Mr. Cordon.”
Mr. Cordon turned toward him, his jaw working in a scissor motion.
“Afternoon. I’m just checking something out,” the officer said.
Detective Grant nodded. “Let’s talk. You done with Mr. Cordon?”
Mr. Cordon lifted the right side of his lips into a pained smile.
“Let me help you back up those stairs.” Detective Grant pulled over and parked his car, then said to the police officer, “Hold up a sec. Lemme get him upstairs.” He walked Mr. Cordon up the steps, talking quietly to the old man. “What were you two talking about, Bill?”
Mr. Cordon looked up at him, then back down at the steps beneath his feet. He took each riser slowly, walking sideways, one arm on the railing, the other in the clutch of Detective Grant. “I didn say nothin wasn s’pose ta.”
“You sure about that?” He turned back and held his finger up, indicating he’d be back to talk with him in just a moment.
Mr. Cordon stopped two steps from the landing and looked at Detective Grant, his gray eyes sunken deep within the folds of his skin, the wrinkles around his puckered mouth more prominent with each sideways movement of his jaw. “Ain it time ta le tha girl be?” he asked.
“Mr. Cordon, what did you do?”
Mr. Cordon was a shell of the law enforcement official he used to be.
He pulled himself up the last two stairs, then settled into the chair.
Finally, he lifted his tired eyes to meet Detective Grant’s and said, “Ain said nothin he didn already know.” He chewed his gums, then said, “Saw it in his eyes.”
Grant had tracked Roland Greer to Chambersburg several years ago.
He’d known Jason Huang for almost as many years, and Jason had never mentioned any deleterious activity.
He now looked into the eyes of another man he knew kept a secret of his own.
Sergeant Mark Agnew, ridiculed by his fellow officers for failing to nail Charles Maynor.
Grant had little respect for law enforcement officials who made errors that cost others their lives.
He looked the man over as he stood beside his car.
Nice looking fellow, if you could get past the long, thin, weasel-like nose.
What the hell was he doing in Williamsport?
Grant took a deep breath, blew it out slowly, and decided to take the quickest route to figuring out if Greer was on the loose. “Huang send you here? I didn’t receive a phone call.”
Sergeant Agnew tapped the steering wheel. “Nope,” he said, candidly.
“What’s going on?”
The man looked down, then looked up with eyes wide open, no veil of dishonesty masking his words. Grant had been trained to see through lies, just as he was sure this officer had been.
“Missing resident.”
Grant lifted his chin, as if to say, Give me more.
“Greer. Roland Greer.”
Grant nodded. He had spent twenty years sheltering Mimi and her daughter, and now, he’d failed them.
After Gross, his contact in the courts, had retired, and the PFA had been lifted, he’d wondered how long it would take for Greer to seek them out.
Heck, he’d wondered if the PFA had been what kept Greer away at all.
Grant had hoped Greer’s obsessive ways had subsided.
He’d even dared to believe that Mimi’s reaction, so many years earlier, had been an overreaction.
Now, that hope deflated. The psychopath was loose, and had likely found Kara—in his small town.
His shoulders rounded and he leaned down, speaking quietly into the open window.
“What’d he do?”
Agnew shrugged. “Maybe nothing. Not sure. Just following a hunch.”
Detective Grant stood tall and let out a long sigh. A rogue sergeant following a hunch. Maybe he had misjudged him. Grant respected tenacity. He looked past the cemetery to the ominous brick and metal power plant, peering like an industrial giant over the town. “Greer, huh?”
Agnew nodded.
Grant nodded again. “Follow me.”
“Jason?” Detective Grant drove toward the station with Sergeant Agnew following close behind, the cell phone pressed to his ear.
“It’s Greer. I think he’s headed your way, Mitch,” Lieutenant Huang said.
Detective Grant pushed the gas pedal down, speeding down the residential road.
“Agnew overstepped his bounds. He broke into the guy’s place and found some pictures,” Jason continued.
“Pictures?”
“Mitch, I think they’re pics of Marissa.”
“Shit.” Detective Grant pulled into the station parking lot and slammed the car into park. “What took so friggin’ long?”
“I had to get verification first, APB on his vehicle—report just came in. Mitch, it’s been years. The guy hasn’t farted in the wrong direction. I had to be sure. His truck’s in West Virginia, right over the line.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You were next on my list, Mitch. Big guys first, get them in gear, then you. It’s FBI territory now.”
Grant rubbed the ache that had settled in his neck and let out a frustrated sigh. “FBI, my ass.”