Page 25 of Another Girl Lost

“How are you going to prove anything after all this time?”

“Time can help shake things loose in a cold case.” He removed a card from his pocket. When she didn’t open the door, he tucked it into the grate of the security door. “Contact me if you remember any new detail.”

“Call me if you find anything.”

“You’ll be the first.” When he looked back at the house, the solid door was closed, and his card remained stuck in the grate.

He drove to Mike’s Diner and seated himself at a booth. The 1950s retro vibe, including dull chrome, red vinyl seats, and booth jukeboxes, hadn’t changed in the last decade. The only difference he could see was that the laminated menus had been replaced by a QR code.

He scanned the code and was reading the lunch selections when a waitress came up. She was midforties, slender, and wore her dark hair pulled back in a tight bun. Her name badge readTonja.

“What can I get you?” Tonja asked.

He pulled out his badge. “A soda and answers to a few questions about an old case.”

“This connected to Tiffany?”

“Why do you ask?”

She shrugged. “No one who works here doesn’t know about Tiffany’s drama. She sure talked about it a lot. Always looking for an angle to make money off the incident.”

“Remember Sandra Taylor?”

“Another example of pure foolishness.”

He closed out the menu app. “What can you tell me about Sandra?”

“Sweet kid. Kind of naive. Flighty. Mike let her work for cash a few nights a week.”

“Did she ever interact with Tanner here?”

“Sure. Everyone liked him. He was a regular. He drove Sandra home once after a shift. I happened to be walking out and stopped to say hi to Tanner. Great tipper.”

“When was this?”

“I think it was late March. It was right after spring break.”

No one had shared this with him in 2014. “Tanner remained a regular customer at the diner, right?”

“He came in a few times a week. He met his girlfriend here.”

Dawson checked his notes. “Lynn Yeats.”

“They met for breakfast right up until that last day.”

While Scarlett, and possibly Sandra, had been trapped in Tanner’s basement, Tanner was here, eating eggs and toast and shooting the shit.

“Did you ever see Tanner with any other woman here?”

“Not on my shift.”

Dawson showed her Scarlett’s original sketch of Della. “How about her?”

She studied the image. “Not really his type.”

Killers could be creatures of habit. They chose the same kind of victim, hunted in the same places, and dumped bodies in familiar locations.

“Were you here the day Scarlett lured Tiffany to the alley?”

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