didn’t remember where I left it, but wherever that was, it was no longer there. We drove all the way to the interstate and found nothing.”
“So someone stole it.”
“Or it got swept away by the mud slides.”
“Is that possible?”
His look was dry, his voice even drier. “Have you ever seen a few tons of mud and rock come rushing down a mountainside?”
“I’m from Dallas. We don’t have mountainsides. We don’t even have many hillsides.”
“A mud slide can uproot trees, tear down guardrails and destroy chunks of roadway. It can move a building off its foundation and carry it away, breaking it into splinters along the way. It can destroy a town, kill anyone in its way, and, yes, it can wash away a car.”
“Didn’t anyone search for the car?” It seemed a simple enough task to her: find the places where the mud had rushed over the highway, follow it down the mountainside and find the car. If it wasn’t immediately visible, search any places where the mud was deep enough to cover it. Easy.
“When you moved here, you drove into town from the interstate, didn’t you? You saw the drop-offs in some places along the highway, didn’t you?”
She nodded. In a few places, the shoulder wasn’t more than a few feet wide, and nothing more than a steel guardrail separated a car on the highway from a two-thousand-foot fall. Other drops were less dramatic, but there were plenty where a search would be difficult at best. “Do you think your car went over one of those drop-offs?”
“I don’t know.”
“So Stone took your fingerprints and checked missing persons reports and got nothing. Has he done that recently?”
“Why would he?”
“Maybe, when he checked, your family or friends or employer hadn’t yet realized that you were missing. Maybe you were on vacation and not expected back for several weeks. Maybe they filed a report a few days or weeks later.” Picking up a pen, she made a note on the pad next to the computer. Tomorrow she would be at the police department. She would talk to Stone about trying again. “Do you have any scars, tattoos or distinguishing marks?”
He mumbled his answer as if he preferred not to acknowledge their existence. “Scars.”
Her gaze followed his right hand to his left arm, where he rubbed the thickened skin. She made a note of its location and length even as she wondered what he had done to earn such an injury.
“It’s a defensive wound.”
Given a little time, she could have figured that out. The scar ran four inches along the inside of his arm, as if he had raised his arm to ward off an attacker. But who had attacked him and why? Had he been an innocent victim or an equally guilty transgressor?
She would like to believe “innocent victim,” but it was hard to cast him as either innocent or a victim. On the other hand, it was easy to see him as aggressive, strong, take-charge, bold. It was easy to imagine him meeting an attacker head-on, giving as good as he got.
Unless his attacker was someone he couldn’t defend himself against—a woman, perhaps, a friend or an authority figure. Or unless he believed he deserved the attack. Which brought her back to her original question: what had he done?
Knowing that he could offer no more information than her wild imagination, she pressed on. “You said scars. What about the others?”
“What does it matter?”
“The more identifying information we can provide, the better the chances of getting a match.”
“Assuming that there was someone who cared enough to file a missing persons report.”
“You don’t think there was?”
His fingers knotted, and his eyes turned the bleak blue of a sunless wintry day. “I don’t know.”
Under the best of circumstances, it was a vaguely dissatisfying answer. When it applied to every area of your own life, when it answered even the simplest, most basic questions—What is your name? How old are you? Where do you live?—it must be frustrating as hell.
“You weren’t wearing a wedding ring?”
“No. No tan line, either.”
“Which proves nothing. There has to be someone—a wife, a girlfriend, friends, neighbors, co-workers. You can’t have lived so isolated that no one’s noticed you’re gone.”
“I don’t know.” Rising from his chair, he paced to the other side of the table. He was restless, edgy, and he made her feel edgy. She fiddled with her pen as she watched him.
“What about the other scars?”
For a long moment, he looked at her, then answered in a rush. “I’ve been shot twice—once in the back, left side, down low, and once in the chest, upper right side. There are two entry wounds, plus two surgical scars where the bullets were removed. Based on the way scars mature, the doctor says one is a couple of years old, the other probably a couple of years older than that.”
“And the scar on your arm?”
“It’s older. I’ve had it since I was a kid.”
“The doctor told you that?”
“No. I just know….” Frustrated, he gestured toward the computer. “What can you do with that?”
She could do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. His interest, of course, was much narrower. What could she do for him? It was her turn to parrot his answer. “I don’t know. I need a name, a town, something to go on.”
“If I had a town, I’d be there, and if I had a name, I wouldn’t need—”
You. She smiled faintly. She knew that, of course. If she didn’t have something tangible to offer, he would have no interest in her. Too bad that she had nothing to offer—just lots of questions and no answers. “You said you’ve had this feeling of familiarity about the town. What about the people?”
He shook his head.
“No one seems familiar? No one brings a particular response?”
He stood at the window, back straight, very still, and stared out. The sun’s last rays shining through the partially opened blinds cast a pattern across his face, with a shadow across his mouth and another over his eyes. At last, he answered, his voice so grim that she didn’t want to see his eyes. “Olivia Stuart.”
Juliet drew her feet onto her chair seat and wrapped her arms around her knees to contain a shiver. For such a short time in town, she’d learned a lot. Olivia Stuart had been widely admired in Grand Springs, hailed as the town’s best mayor ever. Her death last June, presumably from a heart attack, had stunned everyone. The news that the heart attack had been drug-induced had sent shock waves through the town. Last October the police had arrested one of her murderers—a professional killer by the name of Joanna Jackson—and were still looking for another of those involved,
