Page 78 of Just Another Missing Person

The strong gloved hand, the voice. Julia didn’t recognize anything about him. Not Lewis. Not Matthew.

She tries Price again and, this time, he answers. She talks quietly to him for over ten minutes and, afterward, sits back against the cold leather of her car seat, thinking. Thinking about what she’s just learned. How it might change everything.

Just as she’s deciding what to do, her other phone vibrates in her hand and she picks it up, assuming it’s Price again, even though it’s the other phone. “Hello?” she says.

“DCI Day.” It’s Lewis. He sounds just like she does: too much adrenaline, not enough sleep, his words laced with a kind of rushed quality, like somebody one glass of wine in, but no more.

“At your beck and call,” Julia says, not intending to sound sarcastic.

“I have some information. I think. I think I know something.”

“Shoot,” Julia says, and she notices she says it without thinking.Find Sadie. She stares out of the car window and into the night. This is who Julia is: no matter the danger toherself, the personal sacrifices, the marital breakdowns, the costs she pays. She isn’t sick of it. She isn’t tired of it. She might be in more danger than ever, but Julia pays these costs happily, like a tax, because, in return, she gets this: this feeling. This feeling she is addicted to, that all police are addicted to.

“Go on,” she prompts Lewis.

“I know who Prudence Jones is. I went into the office... I looked.”

“I’m listening,” she says immediately, in a low voice.

Three Hundred and Seventy-Fourth Day Missing

36

Lewis

It’s the cold light of morning and Yolanda still knows nothing. I’m sitting in my car, with DCI call-me-Julia in the passenger seat. We are both deep in thought—at least I am. Thinking about you, and what might have happened to you now we know what we know.

Prudence Jones is dead. Her passport came in last spring through the Tell Us Once initiative. A relative sends the passport in along with the death certificate, and we confirm it and cancel the passport. She’d been seventeen—unusual name for a young woman—and it had saidCause of death: car accident. I shuddered at it, imagined it was you—of course.

This is what I told Julia. To which she—sharp as a pin—said, “Did Prudence Jones live anywhere near Andrew?”

“Local-ish,” I said. “Couple of miles from him.” Julia had nodded, evidently thinking, trying to connect Andrew to these missing women.

Julia indicates my workplace now. She’s brought me here, wants more information. The morning glow of sunlight gilds her hand. “All right,” she says. She holds a palm up.

My body fizzes with the knowledge that we’re about to discover something. What happened to you.

“I want to know what happened right after her passport was sent in?” Julia asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “What usually happens is we then cancel it.”

“Can you trace it?”

“Not officially. But I can pull some strings.”

“Lewis. Information is king here.”

I reach for the handle to get out. The moon is still up outside, the sky around it eggshell blue. Our breath puffs visibly in the car. “Julia?” I ask.

She looks at me wordlessly. “Thank you for doing this,” she says. “You don’t need to do this.”

“I don’t care,” I say honestly. Her eyes are on me. “Do you think—if you had to say... in percentage terms...” I ask it in precisely the way I did the first time, all those months ago, when we were adversaries, or felt like it.

“I don’t think she’s alive, Lewis,” Julia says. She holds my gaze as she says it, and I appreciate the honesty. Nobody ever regrets knowing something, no matter how tough. The worst thing in life is to be bullshitted.

“But we might find out who killed her. And if it’s Andrew,” she says simply. Her hand moves to her hair. “But, first, we need to know what happened after Prudence’s passport was sent in. Who it was that said she was dead.”

“Do you think she wasn’t dead?”

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