Page 9 of Find Me

Carter turned out to be a cop named Carter Decker who lived in the guest house at the property next door to the Stansfields’. Lindsay could tell from the way he cut through the backyard and headed straight for his neighbors’ back door that he was used to being called over.

Lindsay guessed he was about her age. Slim, with a long face, spiky brown hair, and three or so days of stubble. He wore a pair of faded jeans and a David Bowie T-shirt. Off duty.

Robin greeted him with a friendly hug.

“I thought you and Stan were off training for the PGA,” he said.

“Let me introduce you to my new friend, Lindsay Kelly.”

Carter looked at her and nodded once with a dry smile. She guessed that Carter was also used to being introduced by the Stansfields to women around his age.

“Were you around over the weekend?” Robin asked.

“In and out.”

“Did you see our realtor, by any chance?” Robin asked. “Evan Hunter—a little bald, about mid-fifties? A little...fat?” She whispered the last word as if it were contagious.

“No,” Carter whispered back. “Did he eat part of your house or something?”

Lindsay was aware of the passing minutes. “He has an assistant who staged the house. According to him, she definitely arrived to do the job on Saturday night, but then never came back on Sunday as expected, and no one has seen her since. She’s been missing now for four days.” She pulled up a photograph on her phone. It was an “ussie,” as Hope called a selfie with another person, from their trip to East Hampton in April. They were each holding up an ice cream cone from Scoop du Jour.

“I’m so sorry,” Carter asked. “Are you family?”

“No. Just a friend.” Lindsay felt a tug at the back of her throat.

“I didn’t want to believe it had anything to do with our house,” Robin said, “but then I remembered the chill I felt when Stan and I first came home. I was justcertainsomething was wrong. The house felt... off. Broken somehow. Stan accused me of acting like a woo-woo, but when Lindsay showed up today looking for her friend, I had to wonder.”

Carter nodded, and Lindsay could tell he gave absolutely zero credence to Robin’s intuitions.

“Her friend just moved here from Hopewell, New Jersey. Oh, listen to that: Hope from Hopewell!” Robin lowered her voice again to a whisper. “She was on the run from an abusive ex.”

“Maybe she decided to go back home?” Carter suggested. “Unfortunately, women in that position often change their minds.”

“No,” Lindsay said. “It’s a small town, and I already checked with people there.” She mentally crossed her fingers that Carter would not make a call to Hopewell to verify the false backstory that Robin had just repeated to him. Would this officer worry if a domestic violence victim hiding from an abusive ex-husband suddenly disappeared? Maybe, maybe not. But he certainly wasn’t going to drop everything on his day off for a woman who had only moved to town a month earlier after living fifteen years under an assumed identity and a claim of amnesia. The part about the cash advance from Evan would be the icing on the cops-won’t-care cake.

“Tell you what. I’ve got a bag of tricks in my truck from an in-service training last week. Let me take a look and make sure we’re not missing something with the naked eye. How about that?”

He was obviously humoring them, but Lindsay would take whatever help she could get at this point. “That would be great.”

“Just give me a few minutes.”

Well more than a few minutes later, the shades in the Stansfield house were all drawn, and Carter was spraying liquid from a pump bottle onto the floor beneath the sliding kitchen door, explaining that it was a highly sensitive compound that would emit light when oxidized.

Lindsay wasn’t a cop, but she was raised by one. She also considered herself a pretty talented cross-examiner when it came to challenging the processing of a crime scene. Carter had skipped every initial step—identifying and securing a perimeter, a thorough visual inspection with photographs and notes, perhaps a secondary sweep enhanced by ultraviolet light. She could have a field day with a single officer, off duty, jumping directly to what she suspected to be luminol. Because the compound had the potential to destroy certain types of evidence at a crime scene, police tended to use it sparingly and only after exploring other options.

But because Carter was humoring them, he probably didn’t care about any of that. And because Lindsay was desperate for help, she said nothing.

“What is that stuff?” Robin asked. “I don’t see it doing anything.”

“It’s luminol,” Carter said. He followed up with an oversimplified explanation of the way that the liquid reacted to iron found in hemoglobin. He avoided the use of the wordblood, but the implication wasclear. “And it’s not doing anything because there’s nothing here that’s an oxidizing agent. This way, you’ll know for certain.”

Lindsay could see that Carter didn’t have enough of the liquid to spray every surface of the house, even if he was inclined to. An image of Hope’s dead body on Evan Hunter’s area rug flashed again in her mind.

“Would you mind if we checked the front hallway?” she asked.

Without even bothering to ask for her reasons, he skipped right over all the intervening square footage and began applying the liquid to the hardwood floor in the foyer. The space was halfway covered with spray when Lindsay spotted the glow of pale-blue luminescence, exactly where the missing rug should have been for the open house.

Robin Stansfield actually screamed.

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