“New Jersey cheesecake, Martha?” Quinlan asked as he kissed her cheek.
“It’s better than any cheesecake from New York,” she said and gave Sally a brief hug. “You folks just get on with your business. I’ll be right back.”
“How’s Thelma doing, Martha?” Sally asked. “She’s primping right now. Not for you, Sally, but for Mr. Quinlan. She even had me go out and buy her some pumpkin peach lipstick, if you can imagine.” Martha tsked and left the large parlor.
“I’d like to get to work here,” Thomas Shredder said with just enough impatience in his voice to make Quinlan want to loll back, lock his arms behind his head, and take a snooze, just to aggravate him.
Shredder was about thirty, tall and lanky, and very intense, one of those men Quinlan tried to avoid like the plague. They made him nervous simply because they never laughed, wouldn’t know a joke if it bit them, usually saw the forest but never the individual trees.
As for the woman, Special Agent Corey Harper, she hadn’t said anything yet. She was tall, with light hair and very pretty blue-gray eyes. She also looked eager, sitting on the edge of the sofa, her notebook on her knee, her ballpoint pen poised above an open page. She looked as if she hadn’t been out of Quantico for very long. He’d bet the Portland office was her first assignment.
“Corey told me all the excitement you had back in Washington,” David Mountebank said, ignoring Thomas Shredder. “Jesus, that was something. You okay, Sally?”
“Yes, fine now. They still haven’t caught my father, but James promises me they will. It’s just a matter of time.”
Quinlan thought that Thomas Shredder was going to explode. He smiled at the man and said, “I came here looking for Sally. I was a private investigator-that was my cover-hired to locate two old people who disappeared over three years ago in this area. And that was true. These folk did disappear in this area. Funny thing was that when I started asking questions, bad things started happening. Sally, tell them about the woman’s screams.”
She did, leaving out the fact that Amabel hadn’t believed it was really a woman screaming.
“We came across a woman’s body the following morning when we were walking down the cliffs,” Quinlan said. “She’d been murdered and thrown off the cliffs. Not a very nice thing to do. It’s difficult not to believe that this was the same woman Sally heard screaming on two different nights. She must have been held prisoner somewhere close to Sally’s aunt’s cottage. Why was she being held prisoner? We have no idea. Now, I’m willing to wager the farm that the murders are tied directly to these missing folks.”
“Yes, yes, we know all this,” Shredder said, and he actually swatted at Quinlan as if he were a fly to be removed from the bread.
“We also know your opinion about this so-called tie-in. However, as yet we don’t have any real proof that there is a tie-in. What we’ve got is two murders, one a longtime local in Doc Spiver and the other a woman from the subdivision, not at all local in the same sense. What we need is a tie-in between the two of them, not between them and the disappearance of these old folk over three years ago.”
“Well, then,” Quinlan said, “David, why don’t you bring me up-to-date. What have you done since I flew home last week?”
Shredder interrupted, his voice fast and sharp, “Sheriff Mountebank didn’t do much of anything. Ms. Harper and I have been here since Monday, not long enough to solve the crimes yet, but we’re getting close, very close.”
Corey Harper cleared her throat. “Actually, David had collected interviews from just about everyone in town. They’re very thorough, but no one could tell him much of anything. Everyone is shocked and very depressed about the deaths, particularly Doc Spiver’s.”
“We’ve already started to repeat the interviews,” Thomas Shredder said. “Someone must have seen something. We’ll get it out of them. Old people have difficulty remembering unless they’re prodded just right. It takes special training to learn just how to do it.”