Page 26 of Cougar Point

That’s interesting. Maybe the champagne was a ploy to get Victoria to open her door to a stranger. There was no sign of a fight or a struggle so whoever took Victoria convinced her to come peacefully, or they knocked her out. There was no sign of blood on anything, but Ronnie said she smelled disinfectant. Maybe it was from Connie’s cleaning. Whatever happened, it happened quickly. That leaves the question of the two bottles of champagne. Did her abductor bring a bottle? And then there’s the drunk couple near the exit door. In my mind I can imagine Victoria opening the door to someone pretending to be a waiter. She’s knocked silly and helped along to go to the stairs. A second person may have staged the room to look like Victoria had gotten drunk. Maybe I’m wrong on each count. I’m frustrated. This is going around in circles.

“We need to look at the surveillance camera footage. There must be cameras in a place this big.”

Rebecca says, “I checked on Friday before I went home. The system was down Thursday night until 3:17 Friday morning. The last thing on Thursday night is before we went to Mom’s room.”

“I’m going to call Tony,” I say. “Ronnie, ask Roger to get the times the camera was turned off and back on. And tell him not to erase anything.”

Ronnie and Rebecca leave, and I go out onto the deck for privacy. When Tony answers it sounds like he’s speakingwith his cheeks stuffed like a chipmunk. “Wait one.” I hear a paper bag being crumpled and imagine the office smells like Moe’s famous cheeseburgers. The sound of someone sucking the bottom out of a paper cup ends. “Okay. Go.”

“Hi, Sheriff. Can you check records for Missy or Melissa Milligan, Melissa with one ‘L’?” I don’t feel bad about interrupting his munchies. His wife will thank me. His heart will thank me too. I hear keys clacking and Tony comes back on the line.

“Melissa Sue Milligan. Lives in Bellingham. I’m sending you her personal information. Looks like she’s single. Next of kin is her mother, also in Bellingham. She has a DUI and a couple of other misdemeanors in another state, plus one arrest last year for aiding and abetting a fugitive.”

“Can you send me the information for that arrest?”

“Do you need it now?”

“No hurry. Anytime in the next ten minutes will work.”

I hear him chuckle. “What’s up with her?”

“I just wanted to know why she said she’s the mother of your child.” I can hear him almost choke and sputter. “I’m just kidding, Sheriff.” I hang up before it gets nasty.

TWENTY

FEBRUARY 2023

Whatcom County

Lucas’s phone buzzed with an email notification as he got into the passenger seat of Longbow’s car. As promised, Cooney had sent through the missing person’s report for the Ohio woman. Lucas stretched the screen to zoom in on the photo at the top and whistled. The picture looked as though it had been taken in a restaurant. It showed a woman smiling, sitting at a table in front of a candle. Her shining green eyes and blonde hair reflected the candlelight. She was a dead ringer for the woman in the creek.

“Looking good?” Longbow asked as he steered the car out of the lot.

Lucas waited for him to check both directions and pull out onto the road before he showed him—he didn’t fancy being T-boned by a truck because his boss was distracted.

“Looking real good,” he said, holding the phone up so Longbow could look at the image.

A glance was all Longbow needed. He took it in and looked back at the road.

“That’s her, isn’t it?”

Lucas nodded. The blonde hair, the blue eyes, the cheekbones, even the hair style, was all a match for the woman they had pulled out of the creek this morning and watched the coroner cut up this afternoon.

“Name’s Olivia Greenwood,” Lucas said. “She’s an interior design consultant from Cincinnati.”

Longbow raised an eyebrow. “Interior design consultant.What’s her husband do?”

Lucas smiled. He had had the same thought. Hobby job for the trophy wife. “Investment banker. He was the one who reported her missing…and then unreported her missing.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s get back to the station and we’ll take a proper look at it. I hate squinting at a phone screen.”

It didn’t make a whole lot more sense back at the station, with the missing person’s report and associated documents up on the big screen in the briefing room.

Olivia Greenwood was either their victim or her identical twin, and according to the record, she was an only child. She was a thirty-seven-year-old housewife who lived in a tiny suburb of Cincinnati; almost two and a half thousand miles east of Whatcom County. She had checked into a luxury hotel just over a week ago but didn’t show up when her husband showed up to pick her up at the appointed time. She wasn’t answering her phone, and the hotel staff hadn’t seen her since the previous evening.

The husband, a sixty-two-year-old investment banker whose DMV photo made him look like the Republican senatorial candidate for Stepford, had called their mutual friends first.Then he had called other local hotels of a standard acceptable to Mrs. Greenwood. Then, with slowly mounting panic, he had called the local emergency rooms. Finally, he had called the Cincinnati Police Department to say he thought his wife was missing.

---