Page 35 of The Whisper Place
“Do you think he did something to her?” Charlie asked, pulling me out of my mental case file. He stood in the middle of his ugly kitchen wearing a stained T-shirt and shorts, arms hanging useless at his sides. His hair was a mess and even his beard seemed weirdly matted. Everything about him screamed lazy stoner, except for his eyes. His eyes belonged to a man five times his age. They were sunken and lined, teeming with a thousand emotions threatening to overpower him.
I faced him head on, which was the only way to deliver bad news.
“It’s possible. We’re going to need to keep digging.”
He nodded, looking down at the floor.
“It’s not too late to file a missing person case with the police. They have resources we don’t. With enough evidence, they might be able to get a warrant to search Hepworth’s property.”
“Would they have enough evidence?”
I sighed. “It’s mostly circumstantial right now. We’ll go back over the route again and see if we can find any physical traces she could’ve left behind. Maybe there’ll be something on or near his property. That could help with a warrant.”
Charlie heaved out a long breath. “It’s not about the grow operation. I know you think that.”
I held my hands up and lied. “I don’t think anything about it.”
“She didn’t want anything to do with the police. Ever.”
“And you never pressed her on that?”
“No. It’s not like I’m Blue Lives Matter.” He winced and shook his head. “Sorry if you are.”
“No. That’s partly why I left the force.”
“Cool.” Charlie pulled a crescent wrench out of one of the cupboards and started loosening the hardware on his sink. It was such a random move all I could do was sit at the table and watch. Maybe I’d overestimated his mental state? As he made a pile out of the faucet and water handles, and just as I was starting to wish Jonah was here, he pulled the entire stainless-steel basin out of the countertop and flipped it upside down.
Taped to the underside of the sink were bricks of ziplocked cash, same as the ones he’d brought to the office at our first appointment. The bricks covered the entire basin like barnacles on a boat. Charlie opened the cupboard beneath the sink, showing me another, slightly larger basin that was still attached to the plumbing.
“Smart.” I nodded. “Do you have a false tub, too?”
“Too much work.” Charlie pulled a brick off the sink and handed it to me. “Here’s for this week and next. You said five thousand a week, right?”
Holding the cash pushed a dull weight against my gut, a nagging, gnawing feeling I tried to shrug off. “Plus expenses, but we haven’t had much besides mileage so don’t worry about that.”
“Bill me for them. I told you, the money’s not important. I just need to know what happened to her.”
It was a subtle and significant shift. When Charlie first walked into our office with a backpack full of kitchen sink cash, he wanted to find Kate and make sure she was okay. Now, he wanted to know what happened to her. The slip into past tense, the slow chokehold of resignation over hope, was a milestone in a lot of our cases. I hated it every time.
I stood up, holding the brick of cash. “I’ll send an invoice for expenses when I get back to the office.”
Charlie walked me to the door. “Even though you’re not a cop anymore, you probably still don’t approve of what I’m doing. How I make a living, I mean. There’s a lot of people like Silas out here, who lump me in with drug lords and the mafia.”
“I’ve met some of those people. You’re not them.”
“But I’m sure it’s still hard for you. Not reporting me. So, thanks,” he waffled, glancing at the upside-down sink, “for not doing that.”
Charlie shifted from foot to foot. His face had flushed and he avoided any eye contact. The weight in my gut got heavier.
I wanted to tell him his line of work didn’t have any bearing on the case, but if Silas was involved in Kate’s disappearance, that might not be entirely true. In the end, I settled on, “Yeah, no problem.”
He nodded and tried to smile. Even the attempt looked painful. “You’re still going to keep looking, right? Even if I’m . . .” He trailed off.
I clapped him on the shoulder and left my hand there until he looked up.
“We’re not giving up on her.”
Jonah was still at the office when I got back.
