Gone (30 page)

“You all right?” he asked.

Clare nodded.

“Let’s get out of here.” He placed his hand at the small of her back and urged her to the elevators that would take them back down to the lobby and the exit.

Once in Jake’s vehicle, he started the engine, then pulled out of the parking lot. She felt the weight of his stare.

“You’re quiet,” he said. “Sure you’re okay?”

“She wasn’t what I was expecting.”

“Who? Amedes?”

Clare nodded.

“Sounds like that isn’t a bad thing.”

Clare didn’t reply.

“You want to talk about it?” Jake asked, as he pulled into the late afternoon traffic.

Clare shook her head.

He didn’t push. “Okay. Back to Farley.”

His statement drew Clare’s attention away from Amedes. “I’d like to make one more stop while we’re here in Columbia. I want to see where Sara’s cell phone was found.”

Chapter Sixteen
 

As Jake placed a call to his office, Clare glanced out the passenger window. Late afternoon traffic was building. They drove past the interstate. Vehicles on the exit ramp leading out of the city were bumper-to-bumper. It was Friday, and it appeared that many had left work a little early, anxious to begin the weekend.

Jake was now speaking into his phone. “Jonathan, can you look up where Sara McCowan’s cell phone was found?”

Clare turned to him.

He fell silent, waiting, then took a scratch pad and pen from the storage compartment between the bench seats and jotted down an address in a bold scrawl. Jake ended the call.

When he didn’t enter the address into the vehicle’s GPS for directions, Clare asked, “Know the place?”

“Yeah. It’s a rough district.”

Jake drove on, leaving behind the office buildings and condos, university campus, and the Five Points shopping neighborhood. Their surroundings changed drastically. The streets now were made up of public housing, and run-down store fronts. Crabgrass near to the size of bushes thrived in the cracked asphalt and cement walkways. The crabgrass and the weeds were the only sign of vegetation or plant life. There wasn’t a tree or flower to be seen.

Jake drove at a crawl, then pulled in at the curb in front of the Doubles Bar.

“The boys who found the purse said it was laying on the sidewalk near the bar,” he said.

There was an arcade across the street from the Doubles. It appeared to be a popular hangout for kids. As Clare watched, a group of adolescent boys charged through the twin doors. The laughter and conversation coming from them, even with the air conditioning on, penetrated the SUV.

“If someone wanted Sara’s purse found they picked a good place to leave it,” Clare said. “Someone wanting to throw the investigation off the scent of Farley, and turn it elsewhere—like Columbia—could have easily dumped the purse here. Authorities would work on the assumption that Sara’s last known location was Columbia, and that she’d lost her purse when she was abducted. The fact that kids found the phone inside the purse and used it made it look like Sara wasn’t missing. The cell phone use delayed authorities from obtaining the phone records, delaying the search and buying time for whoever abducted her.”

She was thinking out loud, but it all made sense. Clare believed authorities had been searching for Sara in the wrong place all along.

“It’s also possible that Sara decided to come out to one of these dives and lost her purse here during a struggle with her abductor,” Jake said.

“Yeah, but the deeper we dig, the less likely that seems to me,” Clare said.

* * * * *

Back at Jake’s house, the light on his answering machine was blinking. The message indicator showed thirty-three messages.

Though status reports from law enforcement agencies would go to the field office, Clare felt a frisson of excitement. Jake knew personally state police and federal agents and one or more of them, knowing his personal interest in this case, may decide to call him at home directly with information.

Jake played the messages.

“Agent Marshall, this is Janet Rawlings from the
Columbia Examiner
. I’d like to speak with you about the search for your sister. I’d like to do a human interest piece—daughters of executed murderer separated—”

Jake hit delete. The next message began.

“Yeah, this is Tyler Brockman,
Columbia Post
. I understand Clare Marshall can be reached at this number. I’d like to ask her some questions about how her mother’s recent execution prompted her to start looking for her sister—”

Jake ended the message.

“Lauren Duval calling from
Rise and Shine Columbia
. I’m calling to speak with Agent Clare Marshall. We’d like to do a segment on her search for her sister ending with an appeal for help. Call me at—”

Jake pressed stop, cutting Duval off in mid-sentence. “I’ll listen to the rest of them alone later.”

“Looks like I started a feeding frenzy when I reported Beth missing,” Clare said with a scowl.

Jake’s cell phone rang. When he got off the phone he said to Clare, “That was Jonathan. Ryder okayed a search of his vehicle.”

Clare drew back in surprise. “How did that come about?”

“All Jonathan knows is that Ryder told Petty we can go ahead and search. Jonathan is having the car taken to our lab.”

“I don’t trust Ryder’s sudden decision to cooperate,” Clare said. “Is that because he’s already removed anything that would incriminate or implicate him in his wife’s disappearance? He is a cop after all, and an accomplished one by the commendations he’s received. He’d know how to cover up and destroy evidence.” Clare sneered. “Maybe he had a change of heart and thought it would reflect well with the OPR if it appeared that he was cooperating with the investigation despite being harassed by an agent.”

“I don’t trust Ryder’s motive, either.” Jake drummed his knuckles on the table. “I asked Jonathan to put a rush on the search. We’ll know something shortly.”

Clare gazed at the case files on Sara McCowan’s disappearance that were spread across Jake’s dining room table. How had Brownley phrased it? The case was as cold as his mother-in-law’s smile. As far as Brownley and Stokes were concerned, Sara’s trail was dead and the detectives felt there was nothing new in evidence to go digging through the ashes.

Clare disagreed. The location of the cell phone had her convinced that the phone had been dumped there as a means to throw authorities off the scent. Clare believed that Sara had disappeared in Farley.

“I want to talk with the local witnesses again,” Clare said.

“Who do we have?” Jake asked.

Clare had committed the names and addresses to memory. “Clement Potter. Joan Bass. Earl Lowney.”

“Four years is a long time to remember a conversation,” Jake said. “Given the circumstances, though, Sara McCowan would be hard for people around here to forget.” Jake glanced at his watch. “Let’s go now.”

* * * * *

Earl Lowney was arranging a display in the window of the surplus store. Fatigue background set the stage for a pair of night vision goggles and a replica of a World War II German helmet.

Clare exchanged a glance with Lowney while she was on the sidewalk, about to enter his store, and he was in the window, preparing the display. She hadn’t spoken with him since the fire and expected he wouldn’t be cordial to her now—even though the fire wasn’t her doing.

“Hello, Mr. Lowney,” Clare said as she preceded Jake into the store.

“Agents,” he said.

Lowney stepped down from the window and slapped his hands against each other. Dust swirled in the bright sunlight streaming in through the glass.

“I’m glad to see you’re up and around Agent Marshall,” Lowney said.

His welcome was a pleasant surprise. “Thank you.”

Lowney nodded. “The insurance adjustor handling my claim on the house wants to talk to you about the fire. I gave him your cell phone number.”

“I’ll expect a call.”

“Of course, under the circumstances, I won’t be returning your security deposit,” Lowney said.

“Of course,” Clare said dryly.

Lowney huffed out a satisfied breath. “Now, what can I do for y’all?”

Clare put the matter of her lost deposit out of her mind and returned to the reason for the visit. “We’d like to speak with you about the disappearance of Sara McCowan.”

“Sara McCowan?”

Clare showed Lowney a head and shoulders photo of Sara.

“Remember her, Earl?” Jake asked.

“The girl that went missing.
That’s going back a ways.” Lowney glanced up from the picture to Jake. “What do you want to know?”

“In the statement you gave following her disappearance, you said that she’d been in your store.”

“That’s right.”

“What did you talk about while she was in here?” Jake asked.

Lowney removed his wire-rimmed glasses and held them up to the ceiling, toward the dim light. He went to the glass display counter, then returned with a cloth to where Jake and Clare stood and began to polish them.

“As I recall,” Lowney said. “I was setting out some new stuff I just got from an estate sale. She—Sara McCowan—I found out her name later when the police came in asking about her—anyway, she came in. I asked her if she needed any help, like I do with all my customers. Seems to me I recall that she said she was looking for a present for her younger brother, and thought I might have something he’d get a kick out of.”