Fiona returned from her dinner with Walt and marched straight to the phone through a haze caused by constant flirting, two glasses of wine, and her unspoken concern for Kira. Her first instinct was to call Katherine, to try to find out if the anxiety she felt could be a result of her memory lapse, but she didn’t want to be overanalyzed and she didn’t need someone to question a decision she’d already made. So she Googled the name of the company on the sheet in the garage and asked how to go about tracking down a missing vehicle.
Angel rubbed warmly against her calf. Fiona reached down and cradled her in her lap and wondered if Angel and Beatrice would get along and whether or not it would ever come to that.
The man on the other end of the call spoke in a heavily accented Indian English that she found hard to understand. She repeated herself often, briefly losing track of her purpose, and finally determined that the company distinguished a missing vehicle from a stolen vehicle, and only offered their service for stolen vehicles.
The request to trace a stolen vehicle had to come from a police department. She was advised to report the vehicle as stolen and to tell the police department to make the request with their company as soon as possible. Vehicles reported within the first three hours of theft were statistically proven to suffer the least amount of damage and vandalism.
She hung up. Tried Kira’s cell phone for the umpteenth time in the past two days and listened as it went directly to voice mail, disconnecting without leaving a tenth message only to have it never returned.
She considered calling Kira’s parents, but knew of the strained relationship there and didn’t want to get the girl in trouble over nothing. But was it nothing? Was it a coincidence that Kira had been missing since Fiona had awakened from her comatose nightmare? Had she not tripped? Had Kira pushed her? Had Kira panicked and fled without calling an ambulance? What kind of argument could have preceded such an act? And why had Katherine said that the apology revealed by her hypnotism had come from a man and not a woman, if Kira had been the one apologizing? And why would Kira possibly have to apologize?
They both avoided driving the Engletons’ vehicles because of insurance coverage. Fiona had a hard time believing Kira would take one of the cars; if she had, then it spoke volumes about Kira’s mindset at the time. Finding the truck was more important than ever.
She felt a twinge of guilt. Why had she intentionally avoided telling Walt the missing vehicle was a pickup truck?
She locked the door to the cottage, grabbed up her camera and reconnected it to the laptop, quickly working through the shots of the Gale crime scene, her finger finally hovering over the mouse as a series of shots appeared on-screen: muddy tire impressions.
Walt had made it clear a pickup truck had left the tire impressions at the crime scene.
The missing pickup truck? she wondered.
She double-clicked the first of the four images and it opened in its own window. She leaned in to take a closer look.