Page 23 of Silent Ridge

“You check the closet. I’ll look under the mattress here.” The address book is on the shelf in the closet. She finds it right away and flips through it.

“I’ve got an address book.”

“Good work,” I say, and she hands the book to me. “We should be able to contact some of her friends and see what she was up to.”

“Where to now?”

“I’ll drive while you start calling people in the address book. Start with the ones in the advocacy group.”

“What if they ask why I’m calling?”

“Tell them Monique is dead. We suspect foul play. Don’t tell them what really happened, but you’ll need to ask what she was doing in Port Townsend and if anyone wanted to hurt her. So you’ll have to tell them she’s dead.”

“That sucks,” Ronnie says.

“It’s going to be on the news in a little bit anyway,” I say.

We get in the car and Ronnie gets on her phone. “You’re right.” She shows me the screen. Monique’s name is already on the news stations.

My phone rings.

It’s Mindy.

I can barely hear her over the clamor of demanding voices. The reporters have smelled fresh roadkill and they’ll pick the carcass clean for days, given the nature of the murder.

“The car has been towed already. I was cruising around and a deputy stopped me. I told him what I was looking for and he said he towed the car away from the marina lot yesterday. It was parked almost in the water.”

“The phone?”

“I found the phone under the mattress. One of the crime scene guys fingerprinted it for me and I have it with me. It’s covered in black powder but it doesn’t look broken.”

“We’re coming back to the office. Can you meet us there?”

“Hang on a minute,” she says to me. Then I hear her say to someone: “If you want a story, you need to go to The Tides and talk to Deputy Jackson. He found an important piece of evidence and a witness.” I can hear the clamoring increase in volume and Mindy repeating herself until the background noise stops.

“You didn’t,” I say.

“Yes, I did.”

“We don’t have a deputy named Jackson,” I say.

“By the time they find out there’s no deputy or witness there, I’ll be back at the office.”

“Slick. See you there.” I hang up.

Ronnie looks concerned. “Mindy won’t get fired, will she? I mean if the reporters complain to Sheriff Gray.”

“Mindy isn’t a deputy. She’s a contract worker. Sheriff Gray will tell them he will talk to her and that’ll be the end of that.”

“Cool.”

“Ronnie, you should never do that. You could be fired.”

“Okay. I promise.”

I look over and she’s got her fingers crossed. “Start calling those people,” I say, and we pull out into traffic. I hope we get lucky with one of them.

Twenty-One

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