Page 46 of Torment

13

Mason

“Thanks for comingin to chat, Mr. Ashwood.”

I smiled pleasantly at Detective Beck. “No problem. Sorry it took me so long to come in and make my statement. I’ve been extremely busy with work.”

She nodded and straightened the paperwork from the statement I’d made to one of her colleagues after being called in to the station for the third time. I figured I had to do it now or else they’d start to wonder why I was dodging their calls and evading the interview times they offered.

“I would’ve taken the statement myself, but unfortunately I got caught up with some other things.” Beck returned my smile, but it didn’t meet her eyes. From that look alone, I could tell this discussion wasn’t going to be easy.

I took a deep breath. Everything was fine. I had it under control. “What did you want to talk about?” I asked. “Did you find Jolie?”

“Not yet, no.” She lowered her gaze to the first page of my statement. “There’s a few things I want to discuss with you, so please bear with me.”

“Of course. Anything I can do to help.”

“First, let me just go over your statement to make sure I haven’t missed anything. You say that somewhere around the same time that Jolie went missing, you received a note in your mailbox from a person claiming to be a neighbor of hers from the apartment building. They were supposed to feed her fish while she went away, and they asked you to do it instead as they could no longer handle it.”

“That’s right.”

“There was no name attached to the note?”

I shook my head. “Just the request to feed the fish.”

She turned the page. “You say here that you think the handwriting was masculine.”

“Yes. Obviously I’m no expert, but it certainly seemed as if a man wrote it. Large, blockish kind of lettering.”

“And you didn’t keep the note?”

I shrugged. “No. It didn’t seem necessary at the time. I threw it out almost immediately.”

“I see.” She was silent for a moment, as if collecting her thoughts. “I’ve spoken with all of Jolie’s neighbors again, and none of them were asked to feed her fish at any point. None of them admitted to writing a note and leaving it in your mailbox, either. In fact, none of them even knew that you own the house across the road. When I mentioned your name, a few of them recognized it from advertisements for your business, but the others had never heard of you. They certainly weren’t aware of your presence in the neighborhood.”

I cocked my head to the side, playing dumb. “I don’t understand. Where did the note come from, then?”

“I have no idea, Mr. Ashwood. But I think we can safely assume that Jolie wasn’t planning a trip anywhere, and she never asked anyone to feed her pet.”

I nodded slowly. “I hate to say it, but what if someone took her and felt bad for leaving her fish to starve, so they wrote the note pretending to be a neighbor? That would explain why they didn’t leave a name on it.”

“I thought of that. But then I wondered: what sort of person takes a woman hostage and then generously decides to keep her pet fed? Not only that, how would this alleged kidnapper know Jolie was friends with you? And how would they know you live across the road from her?”

For fuck’s sake. This woman was like a dog with a bone. When I made up the whole note excuse to her a while ago, I thought she would drop it right away. Instead she was carrying it as far as she could, chewing over every little aspect of it.

I kept a straight face. “I don’t know, Ms. Beck. But I do know that a lot of kidnapping victims are taken by people they know. So whoever it was… maybe they did feel bad about the fish. Stranger things have happened, I’m sure.”

“True.” She smiled thinly. “So that’s what you think happened? Someone who knows Jolie abducted her and left you a note asking you to feed her pet?”

“I have no idea. Anything I think is just speculation, really. I certainly hope she wasn’t kidnapped by anyone. I hope this is all some sort of misunderstanding and she simply ran off somewhere like we initially assumed.”

Beck rubbed her neck. “That would be nice.” She paused and looked down at a notepad on the desk. “Regarding the issue of a kidnapper possibly knowing that you and Jolie were friends… I actually checked up on that.”

I gritted my teeth. “Did you?”

“Yes. I spoke to Lauren Pedretti, one of Jolie’s best friends. She was at New Eden with her.”

“I remember Lauren.”

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