Page 28 of Find Me

“Well, first of all, thank you for not saying ‘something fishy.’ But perfect timing, because I was actually about to call you. This definitely wasn’t an accidental drowning.”

“I got a call about a weight found in Fort Pond Bay. Maybe—”

“It’s a GSW.”

“What? I saw the body.” Granted, Carter had been phoning it in lately, but he’d notice a freaking gunshot wound. Or would he? Howmuch attention had he really paid? Even though something about the case had bothered him that morning, he’d done nothing to follow up on his instincts. Instead, he had passed on a flyer from Lindsay Kelly to a few high school students and tried to tell himself he’d done his job for the day.

“Don’t blame yourself. He’s got very thick hair, and it was plastered to his scalp with water. It’s one shot at the base of his skull. Twenty-two caliber. Didn’t go through and through, so no damage to his face or the rest of his skull. It wasn’t until I really started examining him closely that I saw it. He’s got two small gashes above his left temple as well, but they were also covered by his hair.”

“Do you have a sense of when he was killed?”

“The water makes it tricky. Submersion slows decomposition, and that varies with temperature, and as you know, our water temperatures vary greatly depending on location and depth. My guess is he was in the water about a week, but there’s a big margin for error.”

Carter turned up the volume on the baseball game after the call, but his mind remained elsewhere. He should have listened to his gut that morning, but he’d convinced himself that the odds of a murder in the Hamptons were far lower than the odds of a drowning.

Why? he thought. Why had the case bothered him as he was leaving Star Island? The reason he was the detective assigned to the callout: he had been the one to take a missing person report from Lopez’s girlfriend. He had a sudden image of Lindsay Kelly standing in front of his house three mornings before. He’d told her why he had to leave.

Are you actually going to look for that poor person?she had asked.Unlike you did with Hope?She saw through his superficial charm and had no reluctance to call him out. It was why he had driven to the beach today to help out with her missing person flyers. He used to be a good cop—the one who believed his father when he said a man who lies is a man who has no bottom. But then Carter saw three fellow cops “teach a lesson” to a suspect who “made us chase him,” and had committed the cultural crime of telling the truth during the investigation that ensued.The knuckleheads who had abused the power of their badges paid not a single penalty thanks to the police union that defended them, but it quickly became clear that Carter had reached the end of the road when it came to the department.

Two missing person reports in a week, and he’d blown off both of them. Was it possible?

He scrolled through his email trash until he found what he was looking for, jotted down a number, and then made another call to Dr. Mason. “Hey, Doc, this is weird, but I submitted a DNA sample for databank hits on June sixteenth.” He recited the sample number from the blood collected from the Stansfields’ foyer. “Can you compare that profile against Alex Lopez?”

“Easy-peasy, but what’s the connection?”

One missing woman and one murdered man, where the local paper’s usual crime blotter fare might be a DUI or a house alarm set off by possums. “Probably nothing.”

“Can’t be nothing, or you wouldn’t be asking. I’ll run it now. Usually takes a couple hours.”

That night, the Applied Biosystems RapidHIT ID System was especially rapid. Mason called Carter precisely ninety-two minutes later. The blood he had located at Hope Miller’s last known location belonged to Alex Lopez. One missing woman, one murdered man, now connected.

He found himself wanting to call Lindsay Kelly. He wanted to prove to her that he was doing the job, that he wasn’t the complete sack of shit she assumed him to be. The blood from the Stansfield home did indeed suggest that something terribly wrong had occurred after her friend staged that open house. But criminal defense lawyer Lindsay Kelly was now the last person with whom he’d be sharing information regarding either Alex Lopez or Hope Miller. If he owed an apology to anyone, it was Jocelyn Hodge, who had reported her boyfriend missing.

One murdered man. One missing murder suspect with a two-week head start.

19

Tuesday, June 22, 10:22 a.m.

Jocelyn Hodge pressed the two ziplock ice bags against her eyes. Oof. Bitter, burning cold. She tried a washcloth as a buffer, but lost the chilling effect altogether.

She took another quick look in the bathroom mirror. She looked rough. Her face was bee-stung. Not like glamorous, sexy swollen lips. Her entire face, like the elephant man. She could not take appointments looking like this, especially in the summer. Seasonal clients expected her to look Insta-ready, or how could she possibly do the same for them? Her Yelp rating would be toast if she reported to work looking like ass.

She pulled two tissues from the box on the vanity and placed them between her eyes and the ice packs. Almost there. Then she added a tiny bit of water to the ziplocks and... bliss.

What do they say about the mind-body connection? It’s the link between a person’s thoughts and emotions, on the one hand, and their behaviors and physical condition, on the other. She usually believed it was a big load of mumbo-jumbo bullshit. Her lower back pain, for example, had nothing to do with negative thoughts and everything to do with ten hours a day on her feet, cutting, dyeing, processing, blowing,and curling other women’s hair. But today? Yes, there was a connection. Her face looked like a lumpy autumn gourd because she had been crying all night.

Crying about Alex.

Knowing it was futile, she tried his cell phone again. Straight to voice mail. As she disconnected, her phone buzzed with an incoming call. She didn’t recognize the number, but it was a 631 area code. She answered, just in case. Just in case it was him, despite the truth she was still trying to process.

“Is this Jocelyn Hodges?” the man asked. It definitely wasn’t Alex. Alex had an accent. Not the one everyone expected him to have. It wasn’t identifiable, or even really an accent, as he had noted repeatedly. Jocelyn thought of it as an accent because she was so used to hearingactualaccents—Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk Counties, slightly different), Staten Island, Brooklyn, Jersey, Boston, and of course the accents of those who, unlike Alex, spoke English as a second language. Alex’s accent sounded like an accent—at least to her, born and bred on the East End—because it was utterly neutral. Like he was a TV anchor or something.

“This is she,” Jocelyn said. She had dated a writer two summers back, one who wrote one huge best seller that got adapted into a movie, and three other books that maybe no one read. He was the one who told Jocelyn that it was incorrect to say “This is her.” He then took another seven minutes to explain why that was the rule, given the difference between subjects and objects and whatever. She had pretended to be interested and then stopped answering his phone calls. “But it’s Hodge,” she now corrected her current caller. “Not Hodges.”

The caller identified himself as Carter Decker from the East Hampton Police Department. “We spoke Saturday about Alex’s missing person report.”

This motherfucker. Like she needed a reminder. Since then, she had heard about the unidentified man pulled from the water off Star Island.On the East End, in the circles that really truly mattered, year-round at least, Jocelyn was an insider. She was one of the original families, the fishers and the farmers. This cop didn’t think she already knew after an entire day? Please. Jocelyn had been crying since she got the call in the middle of the Brazilian blowout she was processing the previous afternoon.

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