of the seat. “I feel like I need to be out looking for Kelly.”
He’d check Lambert’s financials just to verify Fisher’s statement. If Lambert needed money and had an insurance policy on his daughter, that would provide motive. Although, the man appeared visibly distraught.
If he had money and had nothing to do with her disappearance, and this case wasn’t related to the serial kidnapper, Lambert might receive a ransom call.
Fisher unscrewed the lid of the water bottle and swallowed a huge gulp.
“What about arguments between the two of you?”
A slight hesitation. “We disagreed over seating my uncle Jim next to her cousin Monique ’cause Monique will talk your head off. But that was small stuff. Nothing she’d leave me over.”
“How about exes?”
His lips tightened, and he glanced to the doorway. “Her old boyfriend, Terry, called her a couple of weeks ago. Said he heard she was getting married and wanted to talk to her before we tied the knot.”
“Talk to her about what?” Justin asked.
Fisher shrugged, dropped the water bottle cap, then bent over and picked it up.
“She didn’t tell you?” Justin pushed.
“No,” Fisher said. “I asked her if she still had feelings for him, but she laughed it off.”
“Did he still have feelings for her?”
Fisher toyed with the bottle cap, rolling it between his fingers. “She said he didn’t.”
“But?”
Fisher scowled. “But I saw a text he sent her and it sure as hell sounded like he did.”
The anger in the man’s tone raised Justin’s suspicions. “Did she agree to see him?”
Fisher squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them and took another sip of water. “I don’t know. When she didn’t come last night, I thought...maybe she’d met up with him.”
Justin pushed a pad in front of Fisher. “I’ll need his name and any information you have on him.”
“I don’t know his number, but his name is Terry Sumter.”
“When was the last time you saw or spoke with Kelly?” Justin asked.
Kelly’s fiancé dropped his head into his hands with a pained sigh. “Yesterday morning for breakfast,” Fisher said. “We had waffles, then she said she had a million things to do—a dress fitting, shopping for bridesmaids’ gifts.... The list went on and on.” Regret flickered in his eyes. “I was only half listening. I had no idea it might be the last time I ever saw her.”
Justin gritted his teeth. The man’s fear sounded sincere. So did his guilt.
But were his guilt and fear real because he was afraid of getting caught?
“She was supposed to come home last night?”
He nodded, rubbing at his eyes. “I called and called and finally I received a text saying she was going to spend the night with one of her girlfriends.”
“Which one?”
“Betty Jacobs,” he said. “But when I called Kelly this morning and she didn’t answer, I tried Betty and she said Kelly hadn’t been there.”
Justin would pull everything he could find on the ex-boyfriend as well as Kelly’s phone records and Fisher’s.
Three different scenarios skittered through his head.
Kelly could have met with the old boyfriend, decided she’d made a mistake in agreeing to marry Fisher and run off with him.
Or Sumter could have tried to convince her to leave with him and either kidnapped or killed her when she’d refused.
Or Fisher could have discovered Kelly had feelings for her ex, and fought with her about it and killed her...either accidentally or in a fit of rage.
* * *
THE PHOTOGRAPH OF Kelly Lambert went up on the wall beside the other girls’.
All such pretty young women with their glossy hair, perfect lips and orthodontist-enhanced smiles.
All girls who were ugly on the inside and deserved to die.
One by one they would leave this world.
And everyone at Canyon High would know the reason why.
Chapter Three
Amanda knew dividing Lambert from Fisher was the best police approach. If one of them was lying or hiding something, separating them was the best way to get the truth. But she didn’t intend to let the Texas Ranger run her investigation or tell her what to do.
Lambert glanced back at the door, a nervous twitch to his eye. “What’s that Ranger talking to Raymond about?”
“Just asking routine questions, finding out background information,” Amanda said. “It helps us to get a full picture of Kelly. He’ll want to know who her girlfriends are, when Raymond last saw her, anything that might help us figure out what happened to her.”
“We have to find her,” Lambert said. “I lost my wife... I can’t lose Kelly. She’s everything to me.”
Sympathy for the man made Amanda squeeze his shoulder. “I promise you, Mr. Lambert, that Sergeant Thorpe and I will do everything we can to find Kelly and bring her back home to you.”
He glanced down and studied his knuckles. Amanda narrowed her eyes. He had scrapes on his left hand. A gash on his right.
She casually poured them both coffee, an image of Kelly at eighteen, when she’d won an award for most congenial, flitting through her head. “What happened to your hands?” she asked, sliding a cup of coffee in front of him.
He twisted his fingers in front of him, his expression odd as if he didn’t remember. “I...was nervous when Kelly didn’t call me back. Went outside and cut some wood. Guess I scraped my knuckles.”
His explanation was feasible. Still...his daughter was missing.
“We’ll need a current photograph of Kelly for the media and to spread around to other law enforcement agencies.”
Lambert reached inside his back pocket, removed his wallet and pulled out a picture of her. Amanda’s heart tugged. Kelly had always been pretty and had grown more so. She was dressed in a print dress, her long hair sweeping her shoulders.
“That was a couple of months ago,” Lambert said. “I took her to the club to discuss the wedding plans.”
Amanda studied the photo, thinking of her own father and how special their father/daughter dates had been.
Worry
