A comment was coming at me when Slidell’s mobile buzzed at his belt. Without excusing himself, he got up and strode from the office. For the next ten minutes I could hear the cadence of his voice through the door. A pause. Then a new conversation. Perhaps act two of the previous one.
I’d moved on to paperwork when he finally returned.
“So the old lady called you.”
“Hazel Strike was sixty-one.”
Slidell gave a derisive twitch of his chin.
“She phoned several times,” I said. “Left messages requesting that I call her back.”
“When was this?”
“Last Saturday.”
“Times?”
“One was early morning. One was afternoon, the other I’m not sure.”
“Did you call her back?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was busy.” Again a pang of guilt. What had Strike wanted? Had she been afraid for her life? Whom else might she have contacted for help?
“You’ve not seen her since this little skip through the woods?”
“No.”
Slidell began ticking points off on his fingers. To my surprise the nails were, if not manicured, uncharacteristically clean and trimmed.
“Here’s how I see it. One, Cora Teague is a big girl and free to diddle whoever she wants. Two, no one’s filed an MP—”
“She was reported missing.”
“That’s not what you said.”
“Her disappearance was entered on a websleuthing site called CLUES.net.”
“Online.” Voice triple-coated with disdain.
“Yes.”
“By who?”
“Someone posting as OMG.” Though tempted, I didn’t correct his grammar.
Slidell’s brows rose ever so slightly.
“You know. Oh my God.”
Not a flicker of understanding.
“I assume OMG is cyberjargon. Like LOL. Laughing out loud. Or G2G. Got to go.”
Slidell took a deep, long-suffering breath. “So you’ve no clue who this nutbucket is.”
“No.”
Slidell’s knowledge of the Internet is limited to running data such as prints, weapons, or vehicle registrations, tasks he usually shunts off to subordinates. He doesn’t own a computer. Fully aware of the folly, I surged on.
“I tried Twitter, found no user with a handle containing just the letters OMG. That’s as far as I got before I had to move on.”
“And you’ve no clue who this Hazel Strike is. Was.”
A mental image popped. Strike sitting in the chair now occupied by Slidell, elbows on her knees, face vibrant with compassion for the forgotten dead.
“Lucky,” I said.
“What?”
“She went by Lucky. You know. Like the cigarette—”
“Yeah, yeah. Poetic.”
“Strike was investigating Cora Teague. She even spoke to the family. It can’t be coincidence. There has to be a connection between Strike’s murder—”
“Maybe murder.”
“—and Teague’s disappearance,” I continued.
“Maybe disappearance.”
“Deputy Ramsey is not too busy to exert some effort.” Glacial. Read: not too pigheaded.
“This ain’t Avery County. Here’s how it’s gonna play out here in the big city. Doc Larabee says someone offed Strike, the bastard’s going down.”
“What can I do?”
“Stay out of my hair.”
I let a few moments pass to indicate how distasteful I found his attitude. Then, “I am not an amateur.”
“You’re a squint.” TV cop lingo. Classic Slidell.
“I have been helpful in the past.”
“We’re not talking bones here. Nothing personal, but if this drops to me, I prefer to work it without interference.”
Interference? I wanted to smack his surprisingly clean-shaven face.
The landline rang, saving me from the impulse. It was Larabee.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“As I suspected.” I heard water pounding a sink in the background, a male voice I assumed to be Hawkins. Larabee said something to him I didn’t catch. “I found significant cranial, facial, and thoracic trauma, the result of at least seventeen blows with a blunt object.”
“That suggests a whole lot of rage.”
“It does.”
“Cause of death?”
“Massive intracranial bleeding.”
“Any defense wounds?”
“None.”
Slidell’s eyes were riveted on me.
“Water in the lungs?”
“No. She was dead before she went into the pond. Is Slidell still there?”
“He’s here.”
“Tell him I’m signing Strike out as a homicide.”
“I’ll send him back to see you.”
“And it’s not even my birthday.”
“Your reward for a job well done.”
I hung up and relayed what Larabee had said.
As Slidell was pushing to his feet, a synapse fired in my brain.
“I did some Internet research,” I said. “There’s a side to websleuthing I found disturbing.”
“People playing Whac-A-Mole with virtual mallets?”
The comment was inane, so I ignored it.
“For some, not all, the pursuit is ego-driven and intensely competitive.”
“Whac-A-Sleuth?”
“Are you interested in this?”
Slidell sighed and chest-crossed his arms.
“Hazel Strike engaged in a lengthy and bitter dispute with a websleuth calling himself WendellC.”
“What’s that short for?”
“The man’s name is Wendell Clyde.” I described Clyde’s role in identifying Quilt Girl. His resulting stardom. “Strike accused WendellC of taking credit for discoveries they’d made together.”
“So?”
“The exchange was beyond nasty. Much of the language was truly vicious.”
Slidell blinked, then opened his lips to blow me off.
“News reports said Clyde was living in Huntersville.”
Slidell’s belt vibrated again. This time he ignored the call.
“So you’re saying there was bad blood between Strike and Clyde?”
“The two hated each other.”
“And the guy’s living right up the road.”
“He was in 2007. That’s when the articles ran.”
“You’re suggesting Clyde whacked Strike?”
“Far be it from me to interfere.” Childish, but Slidell sparked that in me.
“Snotty don’t suit you, Doc.”
“I’m suggesting Wendell Clyde is a good place to start.”
Before leaving the MCME, I checked the schedule at my gym. Perfect. An evening yoga session at six. Stretching and breathing to help counter the stress.
Who was I kidding? The class meant one more hour away from the square mile of paper covering my dining room table.
I got to the annex around seven-thirty, relatively relaxed. A state of mind that lasted maybe ten minutes.
The phone rang as Birdie and I were sharing a Fresh Market chicken pot pie. It was Zeb Ramsey. I clicked on.
“I put the drive time to use.” Ramsey was eating something—maybe French fries. I could hear chewing punctuated by rustling. “Called in some favors on Mason Gulley, the kid the parents thought Cora ran off with.”
I waited out some wet mastication.
“He wasn’t easy to track, but my ‘associates’ ”—I could hear quote marks around the word—“managed to kick a few things loose. Gulley was born in ’94, which makes him a year younger than Teague.”
We each took a bite of our respective foodstuff.
“Gulley’s father, Francis Gulley, left home after high school to become the next gospel wonder in Nashville. His mother, Eileen Wall, came from a speck-in-the-eye town way over on the Tennessee border. Eileen dropped out her junior year to hit the footlights on Broadway. When they met, she was bagging burgers at a Wendy’s in Asheville, and he was scrounging pickup gigs as a drummer. A year after they moved in together, little Mason came along.”
“Did they marry?”
“No. And neither was enamored with the concept of parenthood. They split for California, leaving the baby with Gulley’s mother, Martha Regan Gulley.”