Page 10 of Find Me

8

Wednesday, June 16, 1:28 p.m.

Detective Carter Decker hit the nearest light switch as quickly as he could.

Jesus H, this was a stupid idea. He had been thinking only of the potential upsides of giving Mrs. Stansfield and her new visitor the all-clear. But now he had a glowing blue zone to deal with in the front hallway of his neighbors’ house.

Robin was moving toward the place where she’d seen the blue light. “Stop,” Lindsay yelled. “We’ve got to preserve the scene.”

Great, the neighbor’s new friend fancied herself a law enforcement expert. She probably had a degree in cable television crime shows.

“So is that...blood?” Robin whispered.

“No, we don’t know that,” Carter said. He did his best to run through a myriad of alternative explanations. “We get false positives all the time: fruit juice, cooking oil, paint, glue, cleaning liquid, horseradish. A whole lot of stuff can be mistaken for hemoglobin.”

He could feel Lindsay staring at him.Horseradish?

“They have to follow it up with a confirmatory test,” Lindsay said. “Isn’t that right, Officer Decker?”

She might be a know-it-all, but this woman totally had his number. He had been looking for a way to appease Mrs. Stansfield, but one phone call to his supervisor, and he’d be left explaining why he’d hopped over to a neighbor’s house with a bottle of luminol.

Carter was an ass. He knew that about himself. He was capable of playing the role of a happy-go-lucky eager-to-pleaser, but deep down, he felt absolutely no connection to 98 percent of other people. The day-to-day banter between most human beings was nails on the chalkboard to him.

So why did he always go out of his way to make the Stansfields happy?

Because they were the real deal—truly good people who were exactly as nice as they appeared to be. After Carter’s father died, Robin had left him casseroles twice a week for months. Stan, he suspected, was responsible for the miraculous fact that his old man’s lawn never once needed a mow until Carter started doing it himself after moving in. It had also been the Stansfields who had suggested that he could afford to keep his parents’ beloved home if he were to build a small guest house in the back for himself and rent out the main house during the summer to pay for the entire year’s expenses.

And they were always asking him over for movie nights and dinners, which, as sweet as they were, sounded to Carter like torture, because Carter was, sigh, an ass.

So in lieu of torturous dinners filled with mind-numbing chitchat, he found other ways to be nice to these extremely nice people. He remembered Stan coming to his door in tears four years earlier. Their daughter, Hannah, had come home from a date with her top ripped and a fat lip and wouldn’t tell him or her mother what had happened. Fortunately, the Stansfields’ worst fears had not come to pass, but likely only because Hannah kneed the guy in the groin and scrambled out of the car. Like so many victims in her situation, she did not want to press charges, but Carter had paid the guy a visit.

His loyalty to the Stansfields didn’t extend, however, to this new visitor, Lindsay Kelly. When he stepped out for the luminol kit, he’d made a quick call to the Hopewell, New Jersey, police department to see if the town might be small enough for someone to know Lindsay’s missing friend with the abusive ex. Turned out the whole story was bogus and that the woman who called herself Hope Miller had left town of her own volition. Starting over again in the Hamptons, she then suckered some real estate agent into giving her a $2,000 advance, as a second quick phone call—this one to the number on the Stansfields’ For Sale sign—had revealed. It was pretty clear to Carter that the woman was a grifter who’d moved on to her next mark.

But now here he was, stuck with a positive luminol test, in front of a stranger who, if he had to bet based on the way she talked and the things she knew, was a lawyer. “I’m sure there’s no reason to panic about your friend. Like I said, the spot could be anything.”

Robin snapped her fingers. “Wait! Before we left town, Stan cut himself with those damn gardening shears, trying to clear the front path for the open house. He was bleeding all over. It probably just dripped when he was running to the kitchen for a towel.”

“If it’s even blood,” Carter emphasized again.

He felt Lindsay Kelly’s eyes drilling into him. “What was the point of this whole CSI reenactment if you weren’t going to follow the results where they led? No one has seen Hope for days. Her last known location wasright here, and now there’s blood in the foyer—exactly where the rug would have been for the open house. A rug that has been missing ever since she went missing. So are you going to process whatever it is that lit up that luminol, or do I need to make a separate phone call?”

Yep, definitely a lawyer.

Robin started to apologize, but Carter signaled that it wasn’t necessary. “I’ll get someone from our CSI unit to take a closer look, just to be sure.”

“Really?” Robin said, her voice brightening. “That would be amazing. I’m sure your friend is fine, Lindsay, but at least this way, you’ll know for sure that nothing happened to her here.”

It was obvious to everyone in the room that Lindsay had lost her ally. Robin had been briefly entertained by a mystery at her door, but once she’d seen that faint blue light, she was ready to accept any explanation that could allow her to go back to feeling safe and sound in her home again.

The lawyer thanked him, but Carter could tell that he had managed to buy himself only a temporary reprieve. This woman was going to be trouble.

9

Saturday, June 19, 9:12 a.m.

Three Days Later

Carter was asleep on his sofa, the television on but muted, when the sound of knocking at his door woke him. This was the only bad part of living in his own guest house for the summer. The rent money was sweet, but people who paid top dollar during peak season expected five-star treatment. Burned-out lightbulb? Too dumb to work the TV remote control? Go find the landlord out back!

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