Page 81 of Last Seen Alive
“Let me take another look.” Today, Mona took reading glasses from a pouch on the table next to her. She put them on and looked at the screen. “No, as I told you. Never seen her before.”
Amanda put her phone in a pocket. “Does anyone else live with you, Ms.Lawson?”
“No, but I have staff often on the premises. Ingrid you’ve met, but I also have groundskeepers.”
“Could we get their names?” Trent asked.
“I don’t see why you’d need them. Could you explain to me what is going on?” Mona asked, leveling her gaze at Amanda.
“Claire Ramsey had a taxi drop her off here on Thursday morning.”
“And that’s the woman in the photo you showed me?”
“Yes.” Mona wasn’t stupid, but she was working to portray herself that way. Amanda would bet the woman was hiding something.
Mona added, “I have no idea why she’d be here.”
“Could we speak with your staff?” Amanda remembered clearly that Ingrid said she didn’t know Claire, but she wondered if her answer would change if they got her away from Mona.
“They are all busy with their duties,” Mona peacocked.
“Their names then. We’ll reach out to them after hours.”
“Certainly.” She rang a bell that was on her table today, and Ingrid came running.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“See to their request.” Mona gestured toward Amanda, then said, “If you will both excuse me, I have an appointment.”
About a half hour later, Amanda and Trent were leaving the estate with the list of people.
“We’ll pull backgrounds on all of them,” she said. “First, I want to get over to Woodbridge Inn and see if we can find out what had Claire going there Thursday afternoon.”
“And I hate to point this out, but who knows where else Claire went in her final days? After she leaves the hotel, it’s hard to know.”
“Only thing I can think of is to check any pickup requests for the places she was dropped off.”
“There could be something to that, but something occurring to me is Claire survived off the grid for years. She knows how to cover her tracks. But she didn’t seem to work at hiding her steps in town. Which seems crazy. She knew she was being watched. Just the way she was looking over her shoulder… but I can’t swallow that she didn’t go to see Shell.”
“Maybe Claire simply ran out of time.” She hoped that brought Trent some comfort. Not that she necessarily bought it. Why wasn’t Michelle Claire’s first stop? Had the thought of dropping in on her sister after all these years been too much to handle? Or had she feared putting her sister in harm’s way? It could have been any number of things, and all Amanda had were assumptions and theories. She might as well be banging her head against the wall.
THIRTY
Amanda rang the bell on the counter. The Woodbridge Inn wasn’t as nice as where Claire had been staying, but it was considered a four-star hotel. No one was at reception when she and Trent went inside.
“Good morning.” A lean man in a black suit paired with a salmon shirt came out from an office in the back. “How can I help you?”
“We’re detectives with the PWCPD.” Amanda pulled up a picture of Claire and held it for the clerk. “Do you recognize this woman?”
He took her phone and scrutinized the photo. “She looks familiar, but I don’t think she stayed here.”
“We think she visited one of your guests last Thursday afternoon.”
A strange smile. “But you don’t know which one.”
“Do you?” Trent countered.
The clerk pressed his lips.
