Something in Stacy Winters’s demeanor prepared me for a tongue-lashing. Perhaps it was the dismissive little head shake. She joined me in the Titans lobby not long after I left her another message telling her that Lucy’s white Subaru had been parked in the Titans lot apparently for days. She eased into the chair opposite me and peeled the top off a well-gummed coffee cup. The look on her face told me how awful it tasted.
“I appreciate your concern for your friend, but we’re a small force here and we are working on a murder investigation.” She said it the way people say I don’t disagree with you, which of course means that they do. She didn’t appreciate my concern one bit.
“Yeah, how’s that going?” I asked, prepared to match her barb for barb.
“We’ve narrowed it down to some woman or her husband.” Clearly Winters wasn’t going to share any information with me.
“The stolen car thing was good. Very clever.” She rubbed her forehead but it did little to smooth away the deep furrows. “Show me where the car is.” She took a catlike stretch getting up and she looked as tired as I felt. I’d read somewhere that with every day that passes, crimes, particularly murders, get more difficult to solve. Maybe she was feeling the pressure.
When we reached the rental car Winters produced a long metal strip and with one quick move the door popped open.
“Now I know how the bad guys do it.”
“This is retro. Bad guys have master keys.”
I started to lean over to go through the papers on the passenger seat and she snapped at me, “Don’t touch anything.”
She realized she’d scared me and held her hands out wide as if to calm me down. “And don’t throw up on anything. In the unlikely event that there really is a problem here, those papers may be evidence.” For the first time I was afraid that Lucy may have been in real trouble. My chest tightened, then I burst into tears.
“Pull yourself together, you’re supposed to be the tough city girl, aren’t you?” She almost sounded sympathetic. She called in for a team to check the car for any evidence or fingerprints, and she and I went back into the hotel. My phone rang and I scrambled to get it out, hoping once again that it would be Lucy. It was Caroline Sturgis and I let her go to voice mail.
“I take it that wasn’t her.” Winters flipped through her notebook. “The Russian bartender may know something about the Crawford brothers. Let’s go talk to her,” Winters said.
“She’s not here. She didn’t come in today and didn’t call. I didn’t want to say it before, but there have been times when Lucy hasn’t called… when she was chasing a story or had a deadline.” Winters seemed more interested now.
“Your friend is a journalist?”
“Yeah, sort of. Reality television, true crime, that sort of thing. Why?”
“Forget it. Do you have a picture of her?”
My eyes started welling up again, but I refused to let them spill over. I took a deep breath. I told her I had a few pictures of Lucy on the computer and I’d send them via e-mail.
“Don’t e-mail, fax. My computer is on the blink.”
Winters took off and I promised to send pictures of Lucy as soon as I could. That meant getting into Bernie Mishkin’s office to use his fax machine whether he was there or not.