“Your daughter ever threaten to run away with Fred?”
Marino asked her bluntly.
“No.”
Staring again at the Jeep, she added what she wanted to believe, “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.”
“What was her mood when you Marino went on.
“We exchanged words yesterday morning before my sons and I left for the beach,” she replied in a detached, flat tone. “She was upset with me.”
“She know about the cases around here? The missing couples?” Marino asked.
“Yes, of course. We have discussed them, wondered about them. She knew.”
Gail said to Morrell, “We ought to get started.”
“Good idea.”
“One last thing.”
Gail looked at Mrs. Harvey. “You got any idea who was driving?”
“Fred, I suspect,” she answered. “When they went places together, he usually drove.”
Nodding, Gail said, “Guess I’m going to need that pocketknife and pen again.”
Collecting them from Wesley and Marino, she went around to the passenger’s side and opened the door. She sped one of the bloodhounds’ harnesses. Eagerly, he got up and moved in perfect accord with his mistress’s feet, snuffling along, muscles rippling beneath his loose, glossy coat, ears dragging heavily, as if lined with lead.
“Come on, Neptune, let’s put that magic nose of yours to work.”
We watched in silence as she directed Neptune’s nose at the bucket seat where Deborah Harvey was presumed to have been sitting yesterday. Suddenly he yelped as if he had encountered a rattlesnake, jerking back from the Jeep, practically wrenching the harness from Gail’s hand. He tucked his tail between his legs and the fur literally stood up on his back as a dull ran up my spine.
“Easy, boy. Easy!”
Whimpering and quivering all over, Neptune squatted and defecated in the grass.
2
I woke up the next morning, exhausted and dreading the Sunday paper.
The headline was bold enough to be read from a block away: DRUG CZAR’S DAUGHTER, FRIEND MISSING – POLICE FEAR FOUL PLAY Not only had reporters gotten hold of a photograph of Deborah Harvey, but there was a picture of her jeep being towed from the rest stop and a file photograph, I presumed, of Bob and Pat Harvey, hand in hand, walking a deserted beach in Spindrift. As I sipped coffee and read, I could not help but think about Fred Cheney’s family. He was not from a prominent family. He was just “Deborah’s boyfriend.”
Yet he, too, was missing; he, too, was loved.
Apparently, Fred was the son of a Southside businessman, an only child whose mother had died last year when a berry aneurysm ruptured in her brain. Fred’s father, the story read, was in Sarasota visiting relatives when the police finally hacked him down late last night. If there were a remote possibility that his son had “run off” with Deborah, the story read, it would have been very much out of character for Fred, who was described as “a good student at Carolina and a member of the varsity swim team.”
Deborah was an honor student and a gymnast gifted enough to be an Olympic hopeful Weighing no more than a hundred pounds, she had shoulder-length dark blond hair and her mother’s handsome features. Fred was broad-shouldered and lean, with wavy black hair and hazel eyes. They were a couple described as attractive and inseparable.
“Whenever you saw one, you always saw the other,” a friend was quoted as saying. “I think it had a lotto do with Fred’s mother dying. Debbie met him right about that time, and I don’t think he would have made it through without her.”
Of course, the story went on to regurgitate the details of the other four Virginia couples missing and later found dead. My name was mentioned several times. I was described as frustrated, baffled, and avoiding comment I wondered if it occurred to anyone that I continued to autopsy the victims of homicides, suicides, and accidents every week. I routinely talked to families, testified in court, and gave lectures to paramedics and Police academies. Couples or not, life and death went on.
I had gotten up from the kitchen table, was sipping Coffee and staring out at the bright morning when the phone rang.