Now, let’s try it again.” Frank kept his voice low and with more than a hint of steel.
“Can I help you, Detective Delaney?” Michael asked with just enough attitude to irritate Frank but not enough to call any more attention to it.
“As a matter of fact, you can. You can tell me what you’ve done today from the moment you woke up this morning to this very minute.”
“Is this some kind of a joke?” Michael asked. As Frank merely stared at him expectantly, Michael cast his gaze to the left and expelled a deep sigh. “I got out of bed around ten and then spent most of the day looking for a job. I finally ended up here a couple of hours ago to have a few beers and enjoy some pool time with my buds.”
“I’d think it would be easier to get a job if you hadn’t stolen from the previous two jobs you’ve had. You got a problem with the Marcoli sisters?”
Michael’s gaze met his briefly and then again slid to the side. “Not particularly.”
“What about Marlene? You got a problem with her or did you get it all out of your system when you were trashing her apartment?”
Michael took a step backward, his body tense, and Frank knew instinctively that the kid was responsible for the mess at Marlene’s.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Michael mumbled.
“I think you do, and you’d better hope that we don’t pull any of your prints off the broken dishes we gathered as evidence. My advice to you would be to stay as far away from the Marcoli family as possible.”
“I’ll take that advice. Are we done here?” Michael asked.
“For now,” Frank replied. He watched as the young man ambled back to his friends. Even though instinct wasn’t evidence, Frank would bet his badge that the person who had been inside Marlene’s apartment earlier had just walked away from him.
Minutes later as Frank got into his car to head home he made a mental note to himself to check further into Michael Arello’s life. He wanted to know why the kid was stealing food when Frank knew his parents were doing fine and he was certain there was always enough to eat in the household.
He glanced at his watch, surprised to discover that it was nearly eleven. It was too late to talk to the Arellos tonight, but first thing in the morning he intended to speak to Michael’s parents and see if they knew what was up with their son.
Right now it was time for him to head home. It was time to take a shower and get the scent of Marlene Marcoli out of his head, time to go to bed and probably suffer the nightmares that had plagued him since his wife’s death three years ago.
As he drove toward the small ranch house he’d bought five years before, he thought about everything that had happened over the past month.
Many lives had changed the day that Liz Marcoli had gone missing from her house. There had been no signs of foul play, but the three nieces she had raised as her own children had known something was dreadfully wrong.
As the days passed with no word from Liz, it became equally apparent to Frank and his two partners that something wasn’t right, as well. It just wasn’t normal for a sixty-five-year-old woman to walk away from her life and her loved ones without a word, and with her car in the driveway and her purse containing her wallet with all her identification and credit and bank cards left in the house.
To date her finances hadn’t been tapped and there had been absolutely no leads. It was as if she’d just gone “poof” and disappeared into the air.
Not only had Liz gone missing, but during the past four weeks Roxy, the eldest of the three Marcoli sisters, had her life threatened by, of all people, Stacy, the ex-girlfriend of Frank’s partner Steve. That particular threat had been removed when Frank had been forced to shoot Stacy to save Roxy’s life. Steve and Roxy were now a couple and Steve had been reunited with his seven-year-old son, who had been kidnapped by Stacy and had been missing for two years.
So far that was the only positive that had come out of this case. Liz was still missing and they’d only recently uncovered the cold case of another woman, Agnes Wilson, who was around the same age as Liz and had simply vanished from her home two years before.
Remembering that cold case had done two things...it had galvanized the detectives to compare the two cases and hope that they found some similarities that might lead them to Liz Marcoli, and it had discouraged them in reminding them of their failure to find out what had happened to Agnes.
Frank pulled into his driveway and from the shine of the nearby streetlamp noted that the lawn needed tending, the shutters at the windows needed painting and there was a general air of neglect about the place.
The soul weariness that always assaulted him when he arrived here hit as he got out of his car and walked to the front door. He’d get to the yard work in the next couple of days, not for himself, but rather out of respect for his neighbors.
He opened the front door to the absence of sound, the absence of scent. There hadn’t been a sense of homecoming here for a very long time.
This was just a shelter, nothing more, a place to shower and occasionally grab a meal, but home had died with Grace. They’d had only one year together as husband and wife, but Frank would spend eternity with the weight of the guilt of her death on his shoulders.
He took off his jacket and flung it over the top of a living-room chair, then removed his holster and gun and emptied his pockets on the coffee table in front of the sofa. The brown-and-beige sofa was a sleeper, but he never made the effort to pull it out. It was covered with a white sheet and a bed pillow.
For the past three years the living room had been Frank’s bedroom. He’d been unable to force himself to return to the room that he’d once shared with Grace.
If he were smart, he’d sell the house, find another place to start over and call home, but so far he hadn’t been motivated to do the work to get the place market-ready.
From the living room he headed to the bathroom, where he started the shower, stepped out of his shoes, and then stripped off his slacks and shirt, his white briefs and socks, and threw them all into a waiting laundry basket.
As he stepped beneath the hot spray, he tried to keep thoughts of Marlene out of his head, but no matter how hard he tried she intruded. There was no question that he was drawn to her physical beauty, but he suspected he was also attracted to the very characteristics that put other people off. Her coolness, her tight control over her emotions, or perhaps it was a lack of any real emotions that he found oddly appealing.
Living with Grace had been filled with drama and emotion and passion. It had been invigorating, exciting and utterly exhausting.
If he ever decided to have any kind of a relationship with a woman again, he’d pick somebody like Marlene...cool, calm and an unlikely candidate to want anything deep or meaningful.
As he dried off he thought of that moment when he’d looked into her eyes and saw the hint of secrets, of something dark and haunting. Had he only imagined it? After all, she’d just had a break-in into her private quarters. Maybe he’d mistaken fear for something more mysterious.
In any case, he knew exactly what Marlene Marcoli wanted from him and it had nothing to do with any kind of a personal relationship. She and her sisters wanted
