Page 11 of Find Me

He swore under his breath when he saw who was standing on the other side of the door. Lindsay Kelly.

He untumbled the locks and opened the door.

“Did you get the blood results back?” she asked.

He had made the mistake of telling Robin and Lindsay about advances in rapid DNA testing. Instead of waiting for days and months for an offsite lab to compare DNA from a crime scene against discarded beer cans and cigarette butts, with a rapid DNA machine police can process samples themselves, yielding results as quickly as ninety minutes. The nearly automated machines were even connected now to CODIS, the national DNA database. The sixty-three-member EastHampton Police Department didn’t have a so-called magic box of its own, but it did have access to the Suffolk County Police Department’s, which typically had a forty-eight- to seventy-two-hour turnaround for results.

Carter had cashed in a favor to access the machine, hoping to get Lindsay off both his and the Stansfields’ backs. But now, sixty-seven hours later, he had a criminal defense lawyer on his porch. And though he had in fact gotten the DNA results after forty-nine hours, he wasn’t about to share the details.

“Good morning to you, too, Ms. Kelly. Nice keychain, by the way.” He wouldn’t have pegged her for something as childlike as the purple plastic cat head dangling from her car keys. “Very cute.”

“Sorry,” she said, slipping the keys into her purse. “You were sleeping.”

She said it like it was shocking to find someone sleeping at nine on a Saturday morning. “Worked night shift.” Why was he explaining himself to her? “The blood wasn’t your friend’s,” he said.

He could see relief wash over Lindsay’s face as she let out a deep sigh. “But it was blood, though? Was it Stan’s? From that cut that Robin mentioned?”

Carter was so tempted to lie. It would be so easy. It would help settle this woman’s fears and get her off his property. But despite all Carter’s faults, dishonesty wasn’t one of them. His father had always told him that a man lost a little piece of his soul every time he looked another person in the eye and told a bald-faced lie. A man who lies, his father warned, is a man who has no bottom. He never warned Carter, though, that a man whodidn’tlie might just screw up his law enforcement career, as Carter had discovered.

“The important thing is,” he said, “it’s not your friend’s.”

“No, the important thing is that Hope is still missing. So is that rug. And now you’re being cagey about that blood. She would have defended herself. She was strong—physically and otherwise. And a survivor. That blood could be from the man who killed her. Or took her. The point is, she’s still gone.” Her voice cracked, and she swallowed before speaking again. “Do you know where that blood came from or not? Was it a man’s or a woman’s? I know the analysis would say.”

“I promised you I’d run the DNA, and I did. You don’t know me, but I am actually good at my job. You can trust me on this: I don’t know what happened to your friend, but that luminol hit’s a dead end.”

“Well, if it was a woman’s blood, but not Hope’s, you’d probably tell me on the assumption that I’d see that as better news than an unidentified man’s blood. So I’m going to assume it was the latter, and yet you’re still convinced it has nothing to do with Hope. If I have to, I’ll get a list from the Stansfields of every single man who’s been in and out of that house myself. I’ll track them down and swab them personally, if that’s what I need to do to make you take this seriously. Until you know for sure there’s an explanation, you can’t just move on.”

“Look. I can’t tell you every link in the chain I followed in my investigation, but I assure you, I’m completely confident that the trace amount of blood that luminesced is unrelated to your friend. I know this is hard to believe, but there’s stray DNA in all kinds of places, and it doesn’t mean anything sinister has happened. You’d never look at a hotel room the same again if you saw it under a black light.”

The woman was shaking her head, as if she knew something he did not. “You called the police in Hopewell, didn’t you?”

Right after you told me that bullshit story, he wanted to say. The sergeant on duty had explained that he was going to be “perfectly frank” in the hope that he could “trust” Carter to be “discreet.” According to him, the shrinks and the social workers all said that the woman’s amnesia was legit, but some of the cops initially wondered if her story didn’t “smell right” once they ran the plate on her overturned car and it came back as stolen from Indianapolis. They thought she might have gotten herself wrapped up in a bad situation with dangerous people and, after crashing her stolen car, concocted a story about amnesia to get a freebed and a fresh start. They were quickly shot down by their chief at the time, whose daughter had been the one to call in the accident. “She sort of made that girl her pet project while she was home from her hoity-toity college. You didn’t hear it from me, but there’s something weird about that friendship. Like maybe they’re a little too close, if you know what I mean.” Carter had asked for the former police chief’s name—Jimmy Kelly. It was all the confirmation he needed.

Looking at Lindsay Kelly now, Carter wondered how representative that sergeant’s opinions were. Maybe he was just a loudmouth who’d been eager to spread a little bit of gossip to a willing listener outside of his small town. “Like I said, I followed up as any investigator would have under the circumstances. I know your friend gave her boss a bogus story about hiding out from an abusive husband. And I know you played into that false impression when you came here looking for her.”

They were at a stalemate, each aware that the other may have cut some corners in the interests of doing what they thought was right.

Part of him—the mean side—wanted to add that if Lindsay hounded her friends the way she was hounding him, he totally understood Hope’s decision to lay low. Instead, he said, “I’m sorry you haven’t heard from your friend, and your loyalty to her is admirable. But we have someone with no roots here, living under an assumed identity, with a falsified bio, who borrowed cash from her boss before what appears to be moving on. You have to admit her background is... suspect.”

Behind him, Carter’s phone buzzed against the living room coffee table. He left the front door open and went to answer it. He could tell that Lindsay was considering stepping inside, but he gave her a look that kept her in place.

“Carter.”

A few seconds later, he had the excuse he needed to end the conversation. “Got a callout. A missing person report that needs a detective.” He grabbed his keys from the console table next to his television and locked the door behind him.

“Are you actually going to look for that poor person?” she called after him as he walked to his car. “Unlike you did with Hope?”

As Carter backed out of his driveway, he realized that her words had landed. Would he? It was a fair enough question. He heard the echo of his own voice, a few minutes earlier:I am actually good at my job.There was a time when he really had believed it.

10

Saturday, June 19, 8:10 p.m.

Lindsay had never been to this restaurant before, but she could tell it was the kind of fussy place where the waiters were under strict orders to refill the wineglasses before the customer needed to. She reached for the bottle of Barbaresco anyway and gave it a tip.

“What about SP?”

It had become part of their vocabulary the first time Scott stayed at her apartment while Hope was visiting for the weekend. An hour after he’d turned in for bed, he reemerged in the living room saying he had FOMO. They assured him he need not fear. He was only missing out on SNL and gummy bears. “But what about SP?” he said, looking at the bag from Dylan’s Candy Bar. It was the kind of thing that would be dorky if someone else said it, but Scott Parker had a way of making goofy seem pretty damned attractive. It helped that he was six foot three, had played college rugby, and was, let’s face it, objectively good-looking.

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