Page 22 of The Whisper Place
Max sat backwards on a folding chair, drinking a beer as he stared at the board. “Okay, I agree, but why?”
“She took nothing with her. Her overnight bag is still at Charlie’s house. She left everything in her apartment, including her suitcase and her toothbrush. If she did disappear on her own, at the very least, it wasn’t planned.” I tapped the photos of her abandoned stuff and tossed the ball back to Max.
“Don’t forget the dough cutter.” Max snorted.
I walked over to it and picked it up like a hot coal. We’d googled the thing already and watched how it sliced balls of dough into smaller balls of dough, scraped surfaces, and smoothed cakes. None of those functions prepared me for the shot of heat and emotion singing off the metal when I first handled it.
“It’s important.” I closed my eyes and tried to feel through the tangle of impressions. Deep breaths. Yoga breaths. “It’s the most personal thing she owns. A piece of her past. There’s a lot here. Trauma. Reclamation. Severance. Love.” Max’s skepticism wove through the energy of the dough cutter. “Yeah, all of that. Fuck you.”
“How?” He stared at the tool, which I put as far away from my chair as it would go. “How can something so random have that much emotion associated with it? What does it mean?”
He threw the ball back at me. I took it to the board and started writing. “She knows how to bake. She learned that somewhere. The dough cutter might’ve come from a kitchen she used to work at. It could symbolize anything or anyone from that time and place—a mentor or boss. Maybe something that happened to her there.”
“We could call bakeries around the Midwest, see if anyone matching her description used to work there.”
“Let’s start with independent ones. Mom-and-pop places. I don’t get the feeling she’d be making cakes at Hy-Vee.”
Max nodded as I added an arrow and action item to the board.
“I wonder if you could slit a throat with that thing.” He took another swig of beer.
“Jesus.”
“What? You said trauma and severance. Maybe she severed an artery with it.”
“And uses her murder weapon at work every day?”
“Blake said she seemed protective of it. Kept it close to her.” Max got up and tossed his beer can in the recycling, stretching and grunting as he cracked his back like gunshots. There was no stutter in the energy, no jolt of nerve pain shooting through him. After almost three years, his shoulder had finally healed. Max turned and caught me staring. “What?”
I shook my head and turned back to the board.
“I wish you would’ve been at the bakery and gotten a read on Charlie’s sister.”
“You think she’s hiding something?”
“I can’t tell. Everything she said about Kate seemed so . . .”
“Generic.” I picked the word out of his head.
“Yeah.” Max shrugged on his coat. “Kate liked movies, walking, and fresh air. Mind-blowing. Oh, and she liked Charlie, too.”
“Don’t forget the dough cutter.”
“Christ, I need a drink.”
“You just had one.”
Max paused at the door. “You coming over for dinner?”
Having dinner at Max’s house with his wife and kid wasn’t something that happened much before the pandemic. Shelley and I had never gotten along, and I didn’t blame her for keeping her husband’s unhinged friend at arm’s length. When Max went off the rails on his last case as an ICPD investigator, though, Shelley and I had found common ground as two people who loved this dipshit, in spite of his thick skull and savior complex. I had dinner with them now almost more than I ate alone.
“I can’t. I’m cooking for Earl tonight.”
“And Eve?” Max grinned.
“No, she’s having dinner with some colleagues and her new PhD student.” Chris. They were going to be discussing his “brilliant” research from Australia.
Max pulled out his keys and opened the back door. “Already jealous, huh?”
