Page 70 of Husband Missing

Josie was relieved to be back out in the slightly less oily air. Trinity shook her head as they trudged around to the rear of the building. “Do you think if we ordered the lobster roll, she’d just give us a burger? Like the menu is just a list of gentle suggestions but you get what you get because…Burgers?”

Despite the circumstances weighing heavily on Josie’s soul, she laughed. She’d never been so grateful for her sister’s company as she was now.

As they rounded the back of the building, an old, faded wooden picnic table came into view. Alec Slater sat on top, his booted feet resting on one of the benches. He pinched a cigarettebetween his thumb and forefinger, puffing away while using his other hand to hold a cell phone against his ear. They’d managed to find a few photos of him at the time of his sentencing. Back then, he’d been clean-shaven with fastidiously cut and styled blond hair. In every picture a neatly pressed suit hugged his slender, muscular frame. He’d looked younger than his thirty-nine years. Josie didn’t recognize the man before them at all.

A glance at Trinity told her that her sister was wondering the same thing: had they gotten the wrong Alec Slater?

A small, red paper hat sat on top of a messy, unkempt tangle of gray hair. An uneven gray beard covered his pudgy face but did nothing to hide the ruddiness in his complexion. If Josie had to guess, she’d say that Alec Slater drank a lot. Rolls of excess flesh strained against his stained white T-shirt. His stomach hung over the waist of his faded jeans.

As they drew closer, they could hear his side of the phone conversation. “You’re kidding me, right? That phone cost almost a thousand dollars. I’m not—I’m not—Jesus, just listen, would you? I don’t care about the phone, okay? Just tell me where you are.”

Silence as he listened to the person on the other end.

“Because what if you get kidnapped and I have to tell the police the last place you were! I haven’t heard from you in almost two weeks. Your mother is breathing down my neck. You know how she gets…What? What the hell are you doing down there?”

He rolled his eyes as he listened. “What kind of friends are these exactly, making you stay where? Sounds like a sex trafficking den. Just great. Uh-huh, uh-huh. How much money do you need? Okay, okay. I’ll see what I can do. Stay the hell in touch, okay?”

He hung up, muttering something under his breath. Josie caught part of it, wondering if she’d heard him correctly.

“Alec Slater?” Trinity said.

He looked over at them, blinking through the cigarette smoke that poured from his nostrils. “Fucking lawyers. Stop bothering me at my job, would you? I know you have my home address. You want to harass me? Do it there. I gotta get back to work but you know what? Since you’re already here, you can remind my bitch of an ex-wife that you can’t get blood from a stone.”

FORTY-EIGHT

Josie and Trinity looked one another over briefly. They were both dressed in jeans and sweatshirts. Josie wore her work boots while Trinity had on sneakers. Nothing about either of them screamed attorneys. Except maybe Trinity’s high-gloss hair.

“We’re not lawyers,” Josie said. “And we’ve never met your ex-wife.”

Squinting, Alec appraised them more thoroughly. He flicked his cigarette butt onto the ground where it rolled toward a large pile of its discarded brethren. “Well, I don’t recommend it. She’s got her lawyer on speed dial, and if she thinks you jaywalked in front of her, she’ll call him.”

Josie wondered if his opinion of his wife had been so low before he’d embezzled two hundred grand from a hospital charity. She kept silent though because she needed information from Alec and poking his sore spot wouldn’t go a long way to getting it.

“We’re here to talk to you about Lila Jensen.”

One of his eyebrows kinked. No recognition. “Who?”

Apparently, he hadn’t seen theDatelineepisodes which meant that if he had ever met Lila Jensen in person, he would have known her by a different name.

“She wouldn’t have been going by that name,” Josie said. “She would have used an alias.”

Trinity pulled up the side-by-side picture of Lila on her phone and turned it toward him. He stared at the photo until the screen went blank. Another cigarette appeared in his hand. Rolling it in his palm, he said, “You’re showing me two different people.”

“Nope,” said Trinity, pulling up the side-by-side comparison again. “It’s the same woman. The ugly on the inside finally caught up to the ugly on the outside.”

Sighing, Alec looked away and lit his cigarette. In the webbing of his left hand, Josie noticed some kind of mark. Too dark to be a bruise. Ash, maybe.

Ever aware of the ticking clock and Noah’s absence, she got right to the point. “This woman, whose real name was Lila Jensen, had a news article about your embezzlement conviction among her personal items when she was arrested for a very long list of crimes. She may have even had a photo of you. Knowing her as I did, that tells me that she had something to do with the embezzlement.”

His posture stiffened. Smoke flared from his nostrils. No response.

Josie kept going. “You never publicly said what you did with the funds you stole but I’m guessing by the time you were arrested, they were no longer in your possession. Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

He chuckled darkly, puffing out smoke in rapid bursts. “Yeah, it is. With the court costs, attorney fees, restitution, and my ex-wife crawling up my ass, I only have to work here until I’m a hundred and seventy-five to pay it all back. Maybe a hundred and seventy, since I do some website design on the side—do not tell her that.”

“We won’t,” Trinity promised, watching him with fascination.

“Living the fucking dream,” he added, almost to himself.

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