Deception (Southern Comfort) (21 page)

“Yep, and you better get some rubber boots and a shovel because we’re going to be up to our hips in it now.”

SAM
was really getting anxious by the time Josh got there, having finally accosted one of Karen’s neighbors – a med student who looked like he hadn’t slept in eight years – to absolutely no avail.  The guy hadn’t seen her, barely even remembered what she looked like, though he did say that he’d heard the dog barking a lot last night.  He was studying for an exam and had pounded on the wall between their apartments with a demand that she shut the dumb thing up, but he’d gotten no sort of response and so he’d gone elsewhere to find some quiet.

Thank you, Doctor Cheer.  Sam was still staring hotly at the door he’d closed in her face when she heard Josh come up behind her. 

“Hey,” he said, and she turned around.

Well wasn’t he just delicious. 

Rumpled and sexy, Josh also looked like he hadn’t seen sleep since the millennium, but on him it really worked.  And if she hadn’t been worried about Karen and he hadn’t been sure to be appalled she would probably have dragged him down onto the floor.  But this really wasn’t the time or the man for that kind of thought so she shoved her errant hormones aside.  “Thank you so much for coming.  I know you’re really busy at work, but I’m just really very worried. I didn’t know who else to turn to.”

“It’s alright,” he said, and she could tell it was.  On top of being gorgeous, he was also damn nice.  “Is this her apartment right here?”

“Yeah, the one with the dog on speed.”  Snickers’ barking was so frantic it sounded painful.  “I would have tried to peek in one of her windows or climb over her balcony or something but the last time I looked I wasn’t Spider Man.”

“Which is a pity, since you’d look smashing in that suit.”

She laughed, thinking hey, that was a compliment on my figure but the fact that he’d said smashing sort of cancelled it out.  Smashing did not equal hot.  Smashing was what men like Josh said to their grandmothers when they got their hair done.

He knocked on the door, then called Karen’s name with the same cop-voice he’d used on her the other night.  It was really kind of startling to hear such a tone of authority come out of a man with eyelashes as long as her pinky and polka dots on his tie.  

When the pounding got him about as far as it had gotten her, Josh slipped his hand inside his jacket, giving her a peek at a shoulder holster that did funny things to her blood, and pulled out some kind of radio which beeped and squawked.  He rattled off a bunch of codes and numbers that she didn’t understand, taking a moment to smile at her when he noticed her watching him.  With his other hand he reached into his pocket and extracted a small tool.  “No battering ram?” she quipped when he slipped it into the lock, which gave way with nary a battle.  She’d really have to talk to Karen about investing in a lock with at least a little muscle.  Although the heavy-weight deadbolt on Donnie’s apartment hadn’t done her the least bit of good.

“Could you do me a favor and stay out here for just a second?” Josh said politely, though by bringing his gun out it became clear that it was really an order.  “Just let me check things out first before you come in.”

“Okay.”  She twisted her fingers, suddenly nervous.  She hadn’t even given any thought to the possibility that the situation could be dangerous.  What if Karen wasn’t sick, and there was a psycho-crazed killer inside instead?  “But… shouldn’t you have backup or something?”

His lips quirked as he moved her out of the line of sight of the doorway.  “Is the dog dangerous?” he asked, his hand warm and firm and really nice against her back.

“No.  She’s pretty much a cream puff.  Unless you’re a cat or a rawhide chew toy and then you’d better watch out.”

“Then I should be okay.  If there was someone else inside, they probably would have shut the dog up as a first order of business, but I don’t want to take any chances with your safety.”  Sam tried not to go all gooey, but the combination of his hand and his smile and how unexpectedly sexy he looked when he was rumpled had messed with her common sense. 

“Alright.”  She watched him ease into the apartment.  A split second later Snickers came bounding out in all her furry glory, stubby tail wagging in triple-time as she shook with ecstasy at Sam’s feet.  “Hey girl.”  Sam bent down and scratched her fingers behind floppy ears.  Snickers vibrated some more while Sam kept her eye on the door to the apartment.  Visions of Josh finding Karen passed out in her bathroom, or worse, dead in her bed, flickered like an old B-grade movie through her brain.  Then her imagination got really active and the shower scene from Psycho started running a loop.  It was almost anticlimactic when Josh popped his head out the door. “She’s not here.”

“What?”  How could that be?

Josh shrugged and motioned her over, sliding his gun back into the holster.  “I checked everywhere,” he told her.  “There’s no sign that she’s been here.”

Sam followed him in, sensing the emptiness of the apartment, and immediately caught a whiff of even more proof that Karen was gone.  Snickers slunk in beside her, black head bowed in shame, and Sam noted with grave misgiving the puddle on the white Berber carpet.  “Karen hasn’t been here in quite a while,” Sam surmised.  “Snickers never has accidents.”

Josh looked at the puddle then glanced at the dog, lips rolling into a frown.  “There was no evidence of sickness in the bathroom or the bedroom.  Kitchen looks clean, too.  A coffee cup in the sink but no half-empty glasses of ginger ale or soda crackers anywhere.”

“This isn’t right, Josh.  She wouldn’t just up and leave.”

“When was the last time you saw her?” he asked, walking over to inspect the slider.  It was latched, a broom handle stuck in the track.  

“Umm… dinnertime, or thereabouts, two nights ago.  She was leaving the hospital as I was coming in.”  Snickers brushed against Sam’s leg, whimpering slightly, and Sam realized that if Karen hadn’t been home in even half that time the dog was probably starving.  She walked into the kitchen and found the stainless steel bowls empty, so she scooped one up and filled it with water from the faucet.  Setting it down carefully so as not to splash it onto the floor, Sam moved toward the pantry to see if she could locate some of Snickers’ kibble.  “She was supposed to be working nights but there’d been some shift changes due to this virus.  So she’d worked a double shift that day and, I think, wasn’t due back till last night.  But she didn’t show.”

“Maybe she started feeling sick and went to stay with a friend.  Does she have anyone close to her in the area?”

Sam pulled open a bag of Iams.  “I don’t think so.  Most of her family is somewhere in Georgia.  But the fact remains, Josh, she wouldn’t leave Snickers alone.”  Hearing her name and anticipating eating, the little fuzzball started to bark.  Sam bent down and filled the bowl, scratching the dog’s ears again.

“Do you know what kind of car she drives?”

Sam thought about it a moment, recalling a light colored SUV.  “It’s a… what do you call it – a Rodeo.  Silver, I think.  Maybe beige.”

“Okay.”  Josh moved away from where he’d been inspecting the windows.  “Stay here a minute, try not to touch more than you have to, and I’ll go down to the parking lot to see if her car’s there.”

“Oh.  Uh-oh.”  Sam looked guiltily at the faucet. 

“Don’t worry.  I’m sure there was nothing there for you to mess up.”

“Right.”

Josh squeezed her arm before leaving the apartment.  

Sam watched him go, her heart in her throat, the sense of unease she’d been feeling since she couldn’t raise Karen morphing into full-fledged dread.  If Josh didn’t want her touching anything, that meant he thought this could be a crime scene.  If this was a crime scene, that meant… nothing good for Karen.

“Oh, God.”  She bent down and patted Snickers, trying not to think about something terrible happening to the dog’s owner.  Karen was one of the nicest people Sam knew. Who would want to hurt her?

But then, she knew better than anyone that being nice didn’t preclude you from becoming a target.  Some people simply enjoyed other people’s pain.

She stood when she heard Josh at the door.  “Nothing,” he told her, looking exhausted and disappointed.  “I called in and requested a unit to do a drive-by over at the hospital to see if her vehicle might be there.  Where were you, exactly, when you saw her the other night?”

“Uh… just getting onto the elevator.  Well, I was getting on and she was getting off and we sort of crashed into one another.  We talked for a couple minutes and then Karen left and I went to see Donnie.”

“So you didn’t see her get into her car?”

“No, I –”

JOSH
watched a series of emotions flutter across Sam’s face as her memory began to kick in.  “Sam?”

“What?  Oh, it’s probably nothing.”

“A lot of times it’s that ‘nothing’ that ends up giving us the lead that breaks the case.  People don’t trust their instincts enough.  It’s one of the biggest problems I face when I try to talk someone through a composite.  Don’t worry about the logic of it; just tell me what you recall.”

“It was just…” Sam rubbed her fingers across her eyes.  “God, it sounds stupid.  But I had that feeling again, like someone was watching me, when I got out of my car in the parking lot.  But this was the day after someone broke into my apartment, remember, and I was pretty paranoid all day.  So like I said, it was probably nothing.”

Maybe nothing, maybe not.  Sam had pretty good instincts.  And the coincidence factor, given what had been happening with Sam, wasn’t something he could ignore.  He pulled a small pad out of his pocket and started jotting down some notes.  “Did you see anyone in the parking lot?  Anyone at all?”  He wouldn’t lead her down the wrong path by asking if she saw anything out of the ordinary, because sometimes it was the ordinary they were looking for, especially in this kind of case.  If rapists and murderers sported horns and forked tails, people could more easily avoid them.  But when they looked like the mailman or the pizza delivery guy, they were such an expected part of the everyday landscape that they didn’t draw much attention.  And smart criminals knew how to blend in to maintain their anonymity. 

“Some hospital personnel, smoking,” she told him, looking skyward as she probed her memory.  Her hair was pulled back in a stubby little ponytail that should have looked sloppy but only made her more adorable.  Fresh-faced, clad in a bulky sweatshirt she looked about twelve years old.  Then his eyes dropped to the way the sweatshirt draped across her breasts and he mentally tacked on about ten years. 

Swallowing, realizing this was not the time or the woman for lascivious thoughts, Josh snapped his eyes back to Sam’s face to find her looking worried.  He felt like a total ass and corralled his wayward libido back into its pen.  “No one in the parking lot?”

“Not that I saw.  But it was just about time for a shift change, so I imagine the lot would have been getting busy.  You might have to ask around at the hospital.  I’m sure someone saw Karen leave.”

Josh’s radio squawked on his hip.  He clicked it on, checked in with the unit who’d done a drive through the hospital lot.  “No sign of her vehicle,” he told Sam. 

“So what do we do now?”

He sighed, not liking the answer.  “Now we file a missing persons report, and I turn it over to them to handle.  I wish I could do more, personally, to help, but this is technically not my department.  And there’s this… situation which is about to blow up right now, so I couldn’t give it the attention it deserves.”  God, he felt like a heel. And aside from that, he was worried.  He knew better than to jump to any conclusions – there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for her friend’s disappearance that had nothing whatsoever to do with Sam.  But he didn’t like the timing, and the fact that she’d felt threatened at the hospital.  He wished he had nothing on his plate so that he could devote himself to investigating. As much as it grated, he would have to turn this all over to another cop and pray he was simply overreacting. 

But in the meantime, he was going to have a long talk with Sam about safety.  “I’m going to call in and have them send somebody over here, to make sure there’s nothing I missed. They’ll probably want to take your statement down at the station.  Just tell them everything that you told me.” 

Sam looked down toward the dog – Snickers – who was making short work out of her food, then she glanced at Josh with trepidation.  “What do I do with her?”

Well shit.  He guessed the pound was out of the question.  Josh wasn’t real big on
little yappy dogs, but when he looked into the worried eyes of the woman he loved he guessed he could deal for a while.  “Bring it with you.  We can dog-sit until they locate your friend.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IF
he’d had to choose, Josh mused, between continuing to be slobbered on by a ball of hair and delivering his composite to the lieutenant, Snickers would have won hands down.  But alas, Sam had taken charge of the dog and he’d gone and started World War Three.  After agreeing that the facial reconstruction of Jane Doe’s skull looked too much like Allie Beaumont to ignore, Lieutenant Cunningham himself had placed the call to the mayor.  All hell had broken loose as Charles Beaumont the Fourth then stormed the station like a Confederate general at Gettysburg.