The Girls She Left Behind (14 page)

Back in the city they'd had brainstorming sessions like this often. “I've missed those times,” he said.

She missed them, too, and she especially missed what came after, the night paling to dawn through the windows of her bedroom overlooking the Charles, his arm flung out across the pillow with the day's first gray light brightening behind it.

Remembering, she took a doughnut and bit into it, then had to wash it down with a gulp of lukewarm soda to get it past the lump in her throat. The swirly red script on the Coke bottle's label blurred suddenly through her tears.

She cleared her throat. “What're you doing?”

He shrugged. On his iPad's screen the familiar Facebook page layout had appeared. “Probably nothing. But I dropped in on Aaron DeWilde's folks earlier tonight. Any particular reason no one's been hunting very hard for him?”

Damn, she thought; Peg Wylie's games and then Jane Crimmins's antics yesterday had knocked Lizzie's own planned visit to the DeWildes off her to-do list, and then with the fires going on, too, she'd forgotten about the missing boy's family.

“Well, for one thing, he's got no violent history with Tara or anyone else, nothing to suggest he'd harm her,” she replied. “And he's an adult, at least legally. Although the DeWildes have been pestering Peg Wylie,” she added, “accusing Tara of leading their innocent little boy astray.”

Dylan made a face that echoed her own opinion. First of all, the DeWilde boy's age made a charge of statutory rape possible, a fact his parents didn't seem to have thought of. And anyway, no kid was as blameless as the DeWildes made theirs out to be.

“But they haven't even filed a missing persons report on him yet,” she finished.

Which was actually kind of odd, now that she thought about it. “Why, did they say something that made you think they really don't want cops looking too hard at him?”

“Not in so many words. They're too far into denial for that.” Dylan did something on the iPad, cursed, and backtracked. “They just kept saying how the Wylie girl was a bad influence on him, that whatever he might be into—not that he is, but if he were—it's all her fault.”

He went on navigating his way around the screen. “Kid's no angel, though, I'll bet, and if he ends up in a jackpot his folks wanted me to know she must have put him there. Okay, here's his Facebook page.”

Just as in the photo in Tara's room, in this one Aaron was a big, good-looking kid, but here he held a shotgun. Correctly, too: muzzle up, open action, finger well away from the trigger.

In other words, for a Bearkill kid he looked perfectly normal. But: “Huh. No recent activity.”

She scanned the screen. A dozen messages showed, all of the
hey, bro, where r u?
variety. But there were no answers, not for the past two days. “Is part of it set to private?”

Dylan shook his head. “Nope. Looks like everything's here. Kid's got no secrets, supposedly. Or if he has, he's smart enough not to put them online.”

He scrolled up and down once more, then closed the Facebook icon and snapped the iPad's cover shut. “His folks both said he's usually on here every few hours or so. But now…”

He got his phone out and punched in a call. “Yeah, Bruno, you know the kid we're thinking that the missing Bearkill girl went off with, that Aaron DeWilde?”

Dylan got up, his long stride carrying him to one end of the living room and back. “Right, that's the one. Listen, I know he's already on our interview list but can we maybe—”

Dylan was about to ask his colleague to move the search for the kid nearer to the front burner. But as he listened again Dylan's face changed.

“Really. Yeah. Motorcycle still with him, you say. And money still in his pocket.”

These things ruled out robbery. And if you couldn't ask the victim about them, it meant nothing good had happened to him.

Dylan put his phone away. “Patrol cops just now found Aaron DeWilde's body. Mall security phoned it in, it was lying behind a dumpster around the back of the Sears store in Bangor.”

He was pulling on his coat. “ID's not a hundred percent yet. They'll want his folks to do a visual identification in Bangor tomorrow, before the body gets sent to Augusta. But it's him, the description fits.”

He paused at the door. “Do me a favor and call them, let them know I'm coming? I need to notify them in person.”

“Sure.” She didn't envy him his errand, telling a teenage boy's parents his body had been found. “Good luck,” she added.

He laughed without humor. “Thanks. But I'm pretty sure that train has left the station for tonight.”

Or it had for the DeWilde family anyway. She watched from the doorway as Dylan went away down the front walk and his car backed out of the driveway, pulling off down the silent street. Then at a sound from behind her she turned to find Rascal in the act of gobbling a doughnut, the box overturned and his grin white-ringed with powdered sugar.

Not until much later, after she'd called the DeWildes, straightened the living room, showered, and made her way at last to bed, did her eyes snap open suddenly in the darkness.

A soft, faintly musical note had just sounded from somewhere outside the house. Or…had it been from inside?

Probably not. Rascal lay sprawled at the foot of her bed, and he always sprang up if she so much as dropped a tissue. So maybe the alarm was from her own raw nerve endings still twitching with the urgency of so many unanswered questions.

But whatever it was, there'd be no more sleep tonight. In the kitchen she snapped on the coffeemaker, let the dog out, then blearily spied her own open laptop's screen saver looping and relooping on the kitchen table.

Then she recalled the soft
ping!
of her email program. The new-mail alert sound was what had yanked her awake.

New info, please call,
read the email's header. It was from Peg Wylie; Lizzie grimaced tiredly at it.

Peg had already sent alarm flares up too many times. Besides, letting people think you were at their beck and call day or night was how you got a life with nothing in it but work, a situation she'd known only too well back in Boston.

It was just past 4
A.M.
The dog ducked back in through his door. “What d'you say, Rascal? Should I at least get dressed first, and maybe eat some breakfast?”

At the word
eat,
he made a beeline for the kitchen, and by the time she'd fed him and herself and put on clothes and done her hair and her makeup, it was nearly five. She gave herself a last look—black jeans, white silk shirt, leather belt, and boots, a lower-heeled pair this time in deference to the early hour and her uneasy sense of how this day might go. She checked her bag for her badge and duty weapon on her way out.

The sky was still dark, the smoke-tinged air silent and the temperature strangely mild, like spring instead of midwinter. In the Blazer she swiped her phone's screen to the mail function and found Peg's message again just as another came in, this time from an unfamiliar sender.
Call me. Urgent.

Sure, Lizzie thought tiredly, everyone's messages were always urgent when they wanted something. But then it hit her who
EEKTARIMD
was: Emily Ektari. And if Emily said it was urgent, then—

Pulling over, Lizzie punched in the number Emily's message supplied. “Hey. You're up early.”

Emily laughed without humor. “Yeah. Listen, remember I drew blood on Jane Crimmins yesterday? I got her blood type.”

Lizzie hit
SPEAKER,
then pulled back onto the pavement. “No, I don't think I did know that.”

She needed to check on Jane soon, too, she reminded herself, in the motel room. “But how come you drew blood on her at all?”

“Long story,” said Emily. “I'd have drawn a tox screen on her anyway, as agitated as she was. Which, by the way, I was right about. She had stimulants on board. Not an overdose per se, but plenty.”

“And by stimulants you mean…”

“Amphetamines. But you can see positives if the patient's on prescribed Ritalin, the attention deficit disorder drug, too. So take that for what it's worth.”

“Got it. And the second part of your story?”

“Okay.” Emily took a breath. “The blood-type part. See, I got a guy in my ER once, had a rash. I gave him Benadryl and steroid cream and sent him home.”

Lizzie turned onto Main Street. “Sounds reasonable enough to me.”

“Textbook,” Emily agreed. “But two hours later he's back and now he's vomiting bright-red blood. Large amounts of blood.”

Lizzie pulled to the curb. It was way too early for Missy Brantwell to be at work, but that was her yellow Jeep, and behind that was parked Peg Wylie's crummy little Honda sedan.

“Real shocker of a bleed,” Emily continued. “The kind nobody ever gets used to, just a remarkable volume of…”

“Yeah, okay.” Lizzie parked.

“Turned out the rash was part of a weird hemorrhagic syndrome and if I'd just typed his blood the first time around, I might've bought him enough leeway to save his life. As it was…”

“Huh.” Lizzie got out of the Blazer. “Emily, listen, I don't want to be rude, here, but—”

“Okay.” Emily cut to the chase. “So on Jane Crimmins, I got her blood type because I always do, nowadays. And then a little while after you'd left, her old records came in.”

“You mean her medical records? But how did you get—”

“The federally funded rural health initiative in northern Maine has us on their network,” Emily replied. “Links people's medical records from anywhere in the world. I can get your medical history, any medications you're on, lab results, all right off the computer.”

Inside the office, Peg looked ghastly, her blunt-cut blond hair unkempt and her fireplug-shaped body clad in a rumpled shirt and baggy jeans.

“…so I put her name into the system, along with her Social Security number. Card was right there in her wallet,” Emily said.

A new thought struck Lizzie. “Wait a minute. If you can get lab results from the computer, why'd you bother testing her blood? I mean, wouldn't the computer tell you what her blood type is?”

“Aha,” said Emily. “That's just my point. You see…”

Lizzie, phone in hand, locked up the vehicle, and strode toward her office.

“…you see,” Emily went on, “it turns out that the blood type on the computer and the type that the patient really had…”

“Hi,” Peg Wylie uttered dully as Lizzie came in.

“…they didn't match,” said Emily.

“What?” Lizzie threw her jacket and bag at the coat tree and nodded to Missy, gesturing for Peg to sit.

“The blood types,” Emily said. “The medical records say Jane Crimmins is B-negative. But the blood that I drew here, that got tested right here in our lab, is O-positive.”

Missy had made coffee. Lizzie poured a cup gratefully.

“I guess there could be a computer mistake,” said Emily, “but it's not likely, and a lab error here is out of the question. We rechecked twice.”

Peg's skin looked claylike, her eyes sunken with fatigue. She bit a thumbnail nervously, waiting for Lizzie.

“So you're telling me the woman you saw in the emergency room is not Jane Crimmins.”

“That's what it looks like. And before you ask who she really is, I'd love to tell you but the computers aren't that good yet.”

The TV in the office was on, and the weather guy was saying something ominous. “Listen, if you find out anything else—”

“You got it,” the ER doc agreed, hanging up.

Lizzie turned to Missy Brantwell. The background check she'd asked Missy to do on Jane had come back clean: no wants, warrants, or priors. “Call the motel in Houlton, will you, and get Jane Crimmins on the phone?”

She paused, searching her memory for yet another name that the locals had all probably known since infancy. “What's it called again, not one of those motels right out on the highway but the other one, off on the side road…”

She struggled for the name but all she remembered about the place she had chosen for Jane Crimmins was that the hodgepodge of buildings around the big gravel parking lot had sported a fraying banner:
EAT SLEEP AND SWIM IN OUR POOL!

“Treetops,” Missy pronounced at once, then dialed the phone on her desk and spoke briefly into it. But a moment later she looked up puzzledly.

“Jane Crimmins isn't there. Or at least no one answers in her room.”

“What does that mean?” Peg put in nervously, looking from Lizzie to Missy and back again.

“She isn't, huh? Well, isn't that just special.” Lizzie frowned down at her two hands and very carefully did not punch or strangle anyone with them.

“You go on outside and wait for me in the Blazer,” she told Peg, who looked mutinous. But she went. Peg's email had mentioned
new info.
Lizzie supposed she'd better find out what it was.

Besides, something about Peg just wasn't hitting Lizzie right. A little time alone with her in the Blazer might help uncover the reason for that, too. “You okay?” Lizzie asked Missy when Peg was gone. “Your mom okay, everything all right with the baby?”

“So far.” Missy smiled tiredly. “Fires are still far enough from our place so I'm not too worried. Mom's never really asleep these days. People with her condition tend to wander at night, but I had the sitter come out overnight to keep an eye on her.”

She sighed resignedly. “Turned out that I couldn't sleep much, either, so finally I figured I'd just come on in here.”

With a confused mother and a lovely but demanding toddler son, the office was about the only place Missy could get any rest at all, lately.

Not that she'd be getting much today. “Okay, I'm on my cell. If you need to head home, just go, and call me when you can.”