Tomlinson had already figured it out. “Because she couldn’t risk holding the phone to her ear. You’re right, probably a 7-Eleven. Someplace he could keep an eye on her through a window. So she hid the phone in her lap and texted. That would have been safer. And there’s less chance of him checking for texts, then checking recent calls. Tula’s very smart, I already told you.”
“Do you know what kind of truck he drives?” I was leafing through my private phone book, many of the names written in my own form of code. As I picked up the phone to dial a police detective friend of mine, Emily appeared from behind the curtain, combing her auburn hair with a brush, wearing one of my baseball jerseys buttoned down to her thighs.
“We meet again,” she smiled, looking at Tomlinson. “I was just getting acquainted with your best friend. Your timing could be better, you know. But… it also could have been a lot worse.”
Tomlinson stopped chewing at his hair long enough to say, “It looks to me like someone just finished touching all the bases.”
The woman had a nice smile, ironic and tolerant. “A baseball metaphor,” she laughed, tugging at my jersey. “It works, but not entirely accurate. I was counting on extra innings.”
As Emily said it, she moved past me, trailing an index finger along my shoulder. I saw the way Tomlinson’s eyes followed her, focusing first on the abrupt angle between breasts and abdomen created by the baggy baseball jersey, then on her long hiker’s legs, calf muscles flexing.
Clearing my throat, I burned my pal with a look that read Don’t even think about it.
Emily noticed, which caused her to grin, charmed apparently by our adolescent sparring. Then she rewarded me with a look that read You’ve got nothing to worry about.
That thoracic glow again. It was in my chest.
On the telephone, a detective acquaintance, Leroy Melinski, was telling me, “I’ve got the report up on the screen right now. Thirteen-year-old Tulo Choimha, an undocumented Guatemalan national. He, uh… he was reported missing last night, but it didn’t get official until a couple of hours ago when a full AMBER Alert went out. So maybe your beach-bum pal’s pestering did some good. Is he still the strung-out cop hater I remember?”
Looking at Tomlinson as he came through the door with two quart bottles of beer-I’d remembered there was beer stowed on my flats skiff-I said to Melinski, “If anything, he’s worse. I think the man’s personality evaporates as he ages. It’s causing his weirdness to condense right before my very eyes.”
“Personally,” Melinski replied, “I don’t think cop haters are funny. I’d slap the shit out of that hippie prick if he gave me a reason.”
The bitterness in that caused me to raise my eyebrows, and I said, “As entertaining as that sounds, I called to talk about the missing child.”
“The kid,” Melinski said. “I know, I know. But there’s another piece of news first I think you’ll find interesting. Our guys finished dragging that lake this afternoon. Where you shot the alligator?”
As I listened, I signaled Tomlinson to pay attention. “You found more bones?” I asked.
“No, they found a different body. A fresh one. Another female. Latin, probably mid-twenties, but both of her hands were right where they belonged. The only thing missing was the girl’s life. Someone put her in a garbage sack, then used wire and concrete blocks to sink her. Dead two or three days at the most, according to the guys on the scene. Which is a guess, of course, but they’ve seen enough floaters to come close. No obvious injuries, so no telling how she died. We’re still waiting on the medical examiner’s report.”
To Tomlinson and Emily I said, “It’s official, there’s an AMBER Alert out on Tula. And they found another dead girl-unrelated to the bones we found in the gator. They finished dragging this afternoon.”
Tomlinson threw his head back, fists against his temples-a silent scream-while Emily shook her head, smile gone.
To Melinski I said, “That hand belonged to someone. They found nothing else down there that was human?”
“I was told they did a pretty thorough search, but maybe they’ll try again tomorrow. One of the medical examiner’s guys told me the bones you found might be a month old or a year old. Maybe more. But it definitely wasn’t a fresh kill-assuming the victim died. And they’re not sure it’s female, despite the wedding ring. They’re trying to narrow it down. That’s a job for the forensic lab.”
I said, “Which means it’s even more important to find that missing kid. The killer-that’s the guy we think abducted her, Leroy. He’s a steroid freak. With a real nasty temper.”
I had already given him Squires’s name, his number and told him about the text Tomlinson had received. The detective had passed the number along to his staff, and we were awaiting confirmation that the cell phone belonged to Squires.
“You don’t need to convince me about hurrying,” Melinski said. “When a kid goes missing, there’s a forty-eight-hour window. I don’t have to tell you what usually happens if the search goes longer than two days. Problem is, this morning the family the kid lives with told officers that he wandered off by himself all the time but he’d show up. He always did. So it wasn’t considered a priority until this afternoon. No father, no mother to push for a search, which I’d like to say hasn’t happened before. But it has.”
I corrected him. “You must have misheard, Lee, this is a girl we’re looking for. Tula, not Tulo. She’s been pretending to be a boy since she left Guatemala because she’s smart. You know how dangerous that border crossing is. The family she lives with knows the truth. And probably a few others but not many. I’d consider it a personal favor if you called out the cavalry on this one. Like I said, the guy she’s with is a chemistry freak. He goes from cold to hot real fast.”
I could picture the detective reading through the computer files as he replied, “If that’s true, then this whole damn report’s wrong. If the family knew it was a girl, why didn’t they say something? He
… she was reported as a suspected abductee late this afternoon. The AMBER Alert went out at twenty hundred hours. All the missing-child protocols are in effect, but our people have been looking for a damn teenage boy, not a girl.”
“Last time I saw her,” I told him, “she was wearing jeans and a baggy blue T-shirt, so most people couldn’t tell the difference.” Then I gave the man the best physical description I could, pausing to pass along details that Tomlinson provided as he paced back and forth.
I could hear Melinski’s fingers tapping at a keyboard as he said, “That’s something to go on, at least. The problem is-and this is a good example-people in these kinds of places, the immigrant trailer parks, they’re scared to death of our guys. So some of the state agencies, the Immigrant Advocacy people, will be sending people around asking questions. Maybe they’re on it now. Christ, I hope so. We have almost no information on the kid.”
I could hear his frustration as he added, “For more than an hour, we’ve been looking for a boy. Who knows, maybe some cop stopped them, then turned her loose, not knowing.”
I said, “But at least you can narrow down the search area. Maybe they’re in Immokalee by now. Or somewhere close.”
Melinski said, “You said she didn’t type out the whole word. She wrote: I-M.”
I replied, “What else could it be? Did anything come up on Squires?”
I listened to Melinski typing as I watched Emily busy herself in my little ship’s galley of a kitchen. She was listening, eyes moving from the teakettle to me, the concern showing on her good-looking face, that jaw and nose, autumn-colored hair swinging loose.