Page 91 of Last Seen Alive
“We can’t just leave him here.” Claire’s chest was squeezing.
“Going to,” Rita said, and the three of them fled the building.
Rita went out the front, while Claire and Nick exited through the rear door.
She expected police sirens but heard none. The night was quiet except for the sound of her pounding heart.
THIRTY-THREE
“If you’re not careful, you’re going to set your keyboard on fire.” Amanda looked over the partition between their desks. He was pounding away at the keys without mercy.
“Just trying to compile a list of places Claire went in the taxis. Then I’ll send a request to all the cab companies in the area to see if they dispatched any cars to the drop-off locations Claire had gone with Benji’s Taxi.” He spoke but didn’t stop typing.
This was his way of passing time while he waited on a detective at Metro PD to send any notes they might have made on Rita.
She planned to work through the list of employees from the Lawson estate and started pulling backgrounds on everyone—men and women. While they were aware of a mystery man, there could be others they didn’t know about. She still didn’t have the employee list from Malachi at the gallery, even though he’d promised to get it over to them “immediately” when she’d chased him. Apparently, he ascribed a different definition to the word.
Amanda’s phone rang, showing Libby’s name on the screen. “Hello there,” Amanda answered.
“Mandy?” It was Zoe.
“Give me that phone you little worm.” It was Libby in the background, and she was laughing despite her words. She got on the line. “She took it right out of my hands she wanted to talk to you so badly.”
Amanda was smiling. She felt Zoe was growing up too fast and was going to forget about her, but that wasn’t happening just yet. “What’s going on?” She glanced at the clock mounted on the wall. It was just four o’clock. Zoe and Libby would have made it to the house just a few minutes prior.
“She wants to know if she can go over to Ava’s and play some video game with her. Your sister said she’d feed her dinner, and you can join too if you want.”
Amanda considered all the work that could keep her busy here. This request could save her a call she might have made in about an hour. “That’s fine. Can you put Zoe on the phone a minute?”
Some scuffling, then, “Mandy?”
“Hey, sweetie. You have a good day at school?”
“Always.”
And that would most likely change…“You can go to Ava’s.”
“Yippie!”
“But don’t rot your brain with that game. See if Ava will play in the yard with you. Get some fresh air.”
“Okay.” One word. Extreme disappointment.
“Love you. Have fun.”
“Love—” And Zoe was gone.
“They grow up too quick,” Amanda said under her breath. Not that Trent would likely have heard a word of her conversation the way he kept hammering on his keyboard.
With Zoe’s care arranged, the bulk of the evening spread before her. She started with the backgrounds. There were eleven people who worked at the Lawson estate, serving in different capacities. Next, she revisited the reports from the canvassing officers in Logan’s neighborhood. Not a single mention of a Camry hanging around, which was understandable. There were a lot of them, and they didn’t exactly stand out. By the time she’d finished, hours had passed. Somewhere in there Trent surfaced and confirmed he’d sent the request to the taxi companies and received the information from Metro PD.
“No criminal records for those employed at the Lawson estate,” she said.
“Not on the one I pulled either.”
“Didn’t know you were pulling any.”
“I had to know more about Mona Lawson. And I found out that she has a daughter. Leanne, currently twenty-one and attending university in Washington. Anyway, Leanne was just four when Mona married Martin. Austin told us Lawson sexually abused Rita. Maybe he did the same with Leanne. Could have been the trigger Rita needed to kill her father.”
