Dixon and Vail shared a glance. Dixon said, “All we know is that he’s out of surgery.”
Merilynn straightened up. “Then I need to get out of here.”
“‘Get out,’” Dixon said. “What do you mean?”
“He’s going to come after us. He will.”
“Why?” Vail asked.
“We need protection,” Merilynn said. “Or we need to leave.”
“We’ll make sure you’re taken care of. Don’t worry about that. But tell us what happened. When you got kidnapped, what—”
“I think you need to leave us alone right now,” Merilynn said. She clumsily pushed herself up from the floor.
Vail and Dixon rose as well.
“Look,” Vail said, “I know this is a tough time. But we’ve got a lot of unanswered questions, and someone else’s life might depend on those answers.”
“I can’t help you. Sorry.” The dog began barking again.
“A disc,” Vail pressed. “Ray mentioned something about a disc. Do you know what he was talking about?”
Merilynn swung her head toward the yard. The barking continued. “No.” She faced Vail. “I don’t know anything about a disc.”
“But—”
“He’s going to wake the neighbors,” Merilynn said as she hurried out of the room. “Please let yourself out. And lock the door behind you.”
WALKING TOWARD THEIR CAR, Vail said, “Something’s not right. We need to come back. After the initial shock fades. Tomorrow. We have to find out what the hell’s going on. What she knows.”
“Meantime, I’ll have the Sheriff’s Department post a deputy. Until we know what the deal is. For all we know, Mayfield had an accomplice.”
Vail stopped. Her head swung hard to Dixon. “I hadn’t thought of that. I should have, but I didn’t.”
“None of us considered that possibility. We’ve been going almost 24/7 for days. Who had the time to step back and think things through?”
Vail rested her head on the Ford’s doorframe. She was exhausted emotionally and physically drained. Her life the past two months had been bordering on disaster, and she needed a vacation. Badly.
But with Robby missing, she knew a respite to recharge was not going to be coming soon.
6
After the sheriff’s deputy arrived to baby-sit the Lugo household, Dixon headed toward Highway 29, the main drag that worked its way through the various business districts of the Napa Valley. She turned to Vail, who had gone silent. “Let’s swing by the B&B, pick up your clothes, and head over to my place. We’ll get some sleep, eat something, and approach this with a fresh perspective.”
Vail leaned back against the headrest. “Yeah.”
They drove without further discussion until they pulled into the B&B’s small compacted gravel parking lot. Dixon shoved the shift into park and got out.
Vail followed and met her at the door to the room, fifteen feet away. She reached her hand into the front pocket and pulled out the key. Stood there staring at it. “What if we never find him, Roxx? What if Mayfield—”
“Stop,” Dixon said. “We need to keep an open mind; let’s try not to let the negativity creep in. Until we know, it’s all speculation—and that’s not going to find him.” She leaned forward and they embraced.
A long moment later, Vail said, “Thanks, Roxx. I needed that.”
Dixon sniffed back tears. “I needed it, too.”
MORNING CAME and Vail pried open her eyes. She and Dixon had sat on her living room couch and finished a bottle of Peju Cabernet, Dixon lamenting the loss of Eddie Agbayani and Vail . . . trying to be a good friend, listening to the stories of Dixon and Agbayani’s intense but less than smooth relationship.
And trying not to let Robby’s absence consume her. The wine helped with that.
Dixon’s white standard poodle, Margot, lay in her owner’s lap, sensing her emotional void and seeking to fill it as only a dog can do. Her black one, Quinn, stepped gently onto the couch and sidled against Vail’s body.
“They think they’re lap dogs,” Dixon had said as she stroked Margot’s curls of cotton-soft fur.
Vail swallowed a mouthful of Cabernet, set down her glass, and began rubbing Quinn. “But they’re huge.”
“Don’t tell them that. But it’s very comforting. I don’t mind.”
“Apparently they don’t, either.”
Margot remained in Dixon’s lap—Quinn had settled his front legs across Vail’s thighs—until Dixon drained the last drop from the bottle and decided they should try to catch whatever sleep either could get.
Vail lay awake until sometime in the early morning hours. And now Dixon was knocking on her door. “Yeah,” Vail said. She swung her legs off the bed. “I’m here. Sort of. I think.”
Dixon pushed open the door and the usually head-turning blonde was a disheveled mess. “Slept like shit.”
“Me, too.”
“Can you be ready in twenty? I just got a call from Matt Aaron. He’s at the B&B, and he found something.”
MATTHEW AARON’S forensic kit was splayed open. A bottle of luminol was on the bathroom vanity and a square of carpet was missing from an area partially beneath the large overstuffed bed.
Vail and Dixon stood in the doorway. Oh, shit. Her mind added it up in milliseconds: Luminol. A sample cutout. He found blood. Robby’s blood?
“You want us to put booties on?” Dixon asked.
Aaron waved a hand, welcoming them in. “Maid already cleaned it, right? So forget about it being a useful crime scene. But I vacuumed anyway, did a full workup, just in case. I’m about ready to close up shop.”
They ventured in, Vail stopping by the conspicuously defiled carpet. “You found something.”
“I did. I covered the place in luminol—the proprietor probably isn’t going to be too happy with me—but I’m glad I did. I got a hit right there.” He nodded to the area beside the bed. “So I cut away the carpet and sprayed again. When you have heavy blood loss, it seeps down into the carpet fibers—”
“And into the pad,” Vail said.
“And into the pad. It lit up like a purple battlefield. So I took the pad, too. We’ll run it for DNA and see what it shows.”
Vail’s shoulders slumped. She sat cross-legged on the floor beside the void in the carpet. “It could be from something else. It might not be Robby’s.”
“That’s what the DNA will tell us. Do you have an exemplar we can use for comparison?”
“I can get you one.” Vail’s eyes remained on the carpet. “Whatever happened here, there was substantial blood loss.”
“Not enough that someone bled out,” Dixon said. “Right?”
“Probably not. But the sooner you can get Detective Hernandez’s DNA—”
“Whoever caused that wound didn’t want anyone finding it,” Dixon said. “They cleaned it pretty good. We didn’t see anything.”
“Nothing,” Aaron said, “until the luminol.”
Vail nodded slowly. She pulled her BlackBerry and tapped out an email to Bledsoe, asking him to go over to Robby’s house and get some hair from his bathroom, as well as his toothbrush. She told him to overnight the hair to the Sheriff’s Department, and to bring the other sample to the FBI lab.
“Can you send a section of the carpet pad to the FBI?” Vail asked.
Aaron, who had begun packing his case, froze. His set jaw and narrowed eyes said all that needed to be said.
“I want a second set of eyes looking at this. No offense.”
“You know,” Aaron said, “whenever someone says, ‘No offense,’ it’s usually preceded or followed by an offensive remark. And why shouldn’t I take offense that you don’t trust my work?”