Page 39 of A Step You Shouldn't Take

“You’re still searching for your sister?”

He looked as if he’d seen a ghost. “How do you know about my sister?”

“Officer Leopold mentioned she was missing.”

Until then, Reed had always seemed larger than life, but now he shrank into the leather chair.

“I haven’t heard from her in months.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

Our earlier laughter was nothing but a memory, and an uncomfortable silence settled between us. I snatched up a fortune cookie and shoved it towards Reed in an attempt to lighten the mood.

“Here. Open this.” I tore the wrapper off my own and pulled the tiny strip of paper out. “‘All things are difficult before they are easy.’ What does yours say?”

“‘You have rice in your teeth.’”

“Seriously?”

Reed showed me the piece of paper, and I had to thank the person at the fortune cookie factory with the warped sense of humour because at least we were able to laugh again.

CHAPTER 12 - REED

“YOU’RE SURE IT’S not any of these?”

Maria shook her head, and I cursed under my breath. I’d spent the whole week tracking potential suspects and gathering names and background information, culminating in the six mugshots spread out on the table in front of us, and now it seemed I’d been wasting my time.

She pointed one French-tipped talon at picture number three, who happened to be Simeon, the asshole from the coffee place.

“This one’s got similar hair, but the face is wrong. Tim had thinner lips. At least, I think so. Maybe it was just the way he smiled. Did any of them have a bandage?”

“Not that I could see, but they were all wearing sleeves.”

Kimberly looked as disappointed as I felt, and she twisted the paper clip in her hand until the metal snapped with a quietclick.

“So we’ve gotten nowhere,” she said.

I tried to cheer her up. “Not nowhere, exactly. We’ve eliminated six suspects.”

“But now we need to start again with new ones. What happens if he takes another girl in the meantime?”

“Don’t blame yourself, hun,” Maria told her. “You’re doing more than anyone else would have done. More than the police. Mr. Tough Guy here will just find us more possibles, and quickly. Right?”

She stared at me with laser eyes, and I resisted the urge to flinch.

“Right. I’ll head back to DC tonight.”

The management people from the embassy tended to drink in two bars plus a private members’ club. The bars were easy. I’d spent the past week hanging out in one or the other, apart from Tuesday evening when I went on a date with a blonde chick from the HR department and narrowly avoided her swallowing my tonsils. She wanted to see me again, while I wanted to run a hundred miles in the opposite direction, but I couldn’t turn her down outright in case I needed to use her in the future. Welcome to the awkward world of stringing a girl along by text. I might have felt guiltier if I hadn’t gotten a look at her phone while she visited the bathroom and found messages from the other two guys she was involved with.

The private members’ club was more of a challenge. Even if I could have convinced Kimberly to put the joining fee on expenses, the waiting list was over a year long. Getting inside would require ingenuity, and I was all out of that this week.

Tonight, I’d go back to bar number one, The Penalty Box Bar & Grill, because as well as being a font of information, the place served great nachos and I really needed a beer.

***

Thursday morning, I started off with a run. Not because I needed the exercise, but because I was so damn cold. My trip to The Penalty Box the night before hadn’t yielded anything new, and after I got back to the car, temperatures had dropped below freezing and I’d woken up to a layer of ice on every window.

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