“Just trying to help,” I muttered as I moved toward the stairs, avoiding the forensics team who were now going over the Lexus with swabs and little vacuums.
“Well, stop it,” Lissy said, getting the last word for the night.
I didn’t spend too much time over the weekend dwelling on the car. Vitaly and I met to practice on both Saturday and Sunday and then spent two hours practicing Monday morning. I began to have a faint hope that we might not utterly disgrace ourselves at the Capitol Festival, which started Friday. The rest of the morning dissolved in back-to-back private sessions with two other students who were competing with me in the pro-am divisions. One was an older gentleman who had no illusions about his ability but loved to dance and had the money to pay for private lessons, coaching, and trips to competitions. The other was a thirty-something Department of Energy employee who danced, I thought privately, to inject some glamour and excitement into his cubicle-bound life. The Capitol Festival was his first competition. He’d either love it, or find the hours of waiting in a chilly ballroom interspersed by ten minutes on the dance floor a grind and give it up. Vitaly observed the sessions and offered some useful comments, managing to critique the other men without offending or embarrassing them. He was going to be an asset, I decided happily, going downstairs at noon to shower and change.
Before hopping into the shower, I made the phone call I’d been putting off: Sherry Indrebo. This time, her aide put me through immediately. “Tell me you found it,” Sherry said, again skipping the small talk. I wondered how much time we could all save on a daily basis if we eliminated the how-are-yous and have-a-nice-days from our conversations.
“It’s not there.”
“What? Of course it’s there,” she said impatiently. “You didn’t look hard enough.”
“We searched the place from top to bottom.”
“We?”
“Rafe’s half brother. He helped me look.”
“You told someone else?” Anger and disbelief jangled her voice. “What kind of moron are you?”
The kind that didn’t appreciate being called a moron. “The police probably have it,” I said with some satisfaction. “They took his laptop, too.”
“I guess I’m going to have to handle this myself.” She banged the phone down. I debated calling her back to tell her Tav was staying in Rafe’s condo, but decided against it. It might do her good to come face-to-face with a man wielding a knife.
As I finished dressing, the doorbell rang and I jumped. The police again? Fighting off the cowardly urge to pretend I wasn’t there, I walked to the door. The fuzzed outline of a man showed through the wavy glass insets beside the door. I opened it a cautious half inch to find Leon Hall on the stoop. His thick brown hair was mussed and anger or anxiety contorted his face. Before I could guess his intention, he stiff-armed the door and it bounced back, hitting the side of my face, my chest, and my knee. With an exclamation of pain, I stumbled back and he pushed into the hallway.
“Where is she?” He looked around. “She wasn’t upstairs.”
Hall’s habit of charging in to look for people was getting wearisome. Did my place look like the local outlet of Hiding Places ‘R’ Us? My brow and knee hurt where the door had conked them and it made me cranky. “Get. Out. I’m calling the police.” I marched toward the phone in the kitchen. A choking sound halted me and I turned to see Hall standing where I’d left him, hands at his sides, blinking rapidly. Holding back tears? I hesitated.
“Are you looking for Taryn?” I finally asked, compassion getting the upper hand over good judgment.
His jaw worked. “She didn’t come home last night.” I bit my lower lip. Not good. “What makes you think she’s here?”
“She said.”
“What?”
“She called at dinnertime last night and told me she was rehearsing here, getting ready for that competition, and not to expect her until late. She never came home at all. When I went to wake her this morning, her bed hadn’t been slept in.”
His eyes shifted from side to side and I could tell he still thought Taryn might be here. Maybe he didn’t so much think she was here as hope she was here. The alternatives were worse. It felt awkward standing here in the foyer and I invited him back to the kitchen, watched him lower himself heavily into a chair, and brought him a glass of water. “I was out last evening,” I told him once he’d taken a swallow. I leaned back against the counter, ready to get a running start if he went on the attack again. “As far as I know, Taryn wasn’t here.”
“But she might have been?” He was reaching for straws, his bloodshot eyes searching mine. “With another instructor maybe?”
I had to shake my head. “Have you tried her cell phone?”
“You think I’m stupid? It goes straight to voice mail.”
I thought of how I’d last seen her, sliding into the front seat of Sawyer’s car. “Have you checked with Sawyer Iverson?”
He growled. “Taryn knows she’s not supposed to see that poofter outside of dance practice. He’s not good for her. His family has too much money. He doesn’t know how to work.” Hall pounded one anvil of a fist on the table, making it shudder.
I didn’t feel the need to argue with him about Sawyer’s work ethic, and his anger made me hesitate to tell him I’d seen Taryn go off with Sawyer Friday morning… and they certainly hadn’t been planning to practice their cha-cha. After a moment’s thought-he was Taryn’s father and she was only sixteen-I told him about visiting the house and seeing Taryn drive off with Sawyer.
He didn’t react the way I thought he might. “What were you doing at my house?” he asked suspiciously. He seemed to have a limited emotional range: suspicion and anger. Living with him must be exhausting.
“I wanted to talk to Taryn.”
“What couldn’t wait until her next lesson?”
I sighed, wondering how I painted myself into corners like this. Mentioning the pregnancy was going to make him go ballistic. “I didn’t think Rafe got her pregnant and I wanted to ask her about it.”
“You’re saying Taryn’s a liar?” Hall looked outraged and pushed his chair away from the table with a scraping sound.
I didn’t think it would appease him if I told him that all teenage girls were liars. It came with the territory. I’d lied to my folks about completing homework so I could dance, to my friends about who was my BFF at any given moment to avoid hurting feelings, to Danielle about borrowing her favorite green sweater. I wasn’t proud of the lies, but, looking back, I thought they were pretty much par for the course.
“Taryn’s under a lot of pressure.”
“Don’t tell me about my own daughter!” He rose, glaring. “My daughter is not a liar.” He swiveled his jaw from side to side. “I’m going to talk to the Iverson kid. If I find out he’s done anything to hurt Taryn-”
“Have you called the police? Told them Taryn’s missing?” I asked as he surged past me, intent on rending Sawyer Iverson limb from limb.
“They were useless,” he said, continuing toward the door. “Said it’s too soon to consider her a missing person, asked me if she had a history of running away, if I’d checked with all her friends. They don’t give a damn that my baby’s out there somewhere and she’s only sixteen.” Wrenching the door open, he tromped outside and slammed it so hard it bounced open again. I stood at the threshold watching him make his way to the street. The very set of his shoulders betrayed his anger and I saw people give him a wide berth as he bulled down the sidewalk.
Was it possible that Tuesday’s scene with me and Solange was staged, that he knew damned well Rafe wasn’t at the studio because he’d killed Rafe? But how would he have known about my gun? Taryn and Sawyer had been present when Rafe brought my gun up that night… but was it likely that Taryn had mentioned it to her father? Or that he’d broken into my house to steal it? It seemed too convoluted to me, which was too bad because I didn’t much like Mr. Leon Hall and I’d’ve been happy to elect him Rafe’s killer. The thought of Phineas Drake and his implied willingness to set up someone came to mind, but I virtuously put it aside, locked the front door, and headed up the interior staircase to the studio.