Hard Cold Winter (12 page)

I
HAD SENT TWO MESSAGES
and left a voice mail for Barrett, trying to get more information on Trudy Dobbs. At around nine o’clock I got a reply.

Meet me at Haunt. I’m here for the night

I looked up Haunt online. It was a nightclub south of the stadiums, in an area that I used to associate with body shops and recycling centers.

It didn’t take me long to decide. I wanted to talk to Barrett about Trudy, in person. The more time that passed, the more uneasy I felt about Trudy’s sudden vacation. I’d checked her profile online again. There were still no posts from her since the first one announcing her arrival in some unnamed place with palm trees.

I texted Barrett that I was on my way and threw on a black button-down while walking to the truck.

An answer came twenty minutes later, just as I was handing the truck keys to the valet.

3rd
floor stage Hurry!

There was a line outside, swaying with the electronic music that reverberated through the walls, as a bouncer checked IDs. He was big and
black and dressed better than anyone waiting to get in, in a dark blue two-piece and white necktie. He did a double take as I passed, headed for the end of the line.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Shaw.”

He nodded and motioned me in, past the grumbling couples at the front. Barrett must have told him to look for me. To look for the scars. Of course she had an in with the guy at the velvet rope.

Inside, the blend of music was so close and loud as to be almost white noise, felt more than heard. The entryway broadened into one wide blue room, every wall a mosaic of cobalt tile and shards of mirror. It wasn’t packed, but crowded in clumps that shifted like seaweed floating between heavy piers on each side. Drifting more than dancing. Through the flashing silver lights I could see more rooms in back, and stairs leading to other floors.

Third-floor stage, she’d said. I shouldered through the crowd to the stairs. Most of the men wore tees. Most of the women were sheathed in spandex microdresses. A defined range of ethnicities, each in their circles. Asian, Southeast Asian, Anglo. No Latinos, and no black faces now that I was past the guy guarding the door.

The stairs ended on the third-floor landing, at closed double doors with
THEATRE
painted on them, large and ornate in glittered silver.

The room inside was blue as well, but darker and made up to look like a library, with navy-colored columns and the outlines of shelves and book shapes stenciled in copper. Everyone inside was grouped at the far end, by the stage. The music was still electronic, but lower and softer, almost dreamy.

Up on the stage was a girl in a pink pageboy wig and candy-cane lingerie. She sat on a stool in front of a vanity table and its oval mirror. Very slowly, she took a rolled-up stocking off the table, extended one lean leg in a ballet point, and rolled the white stocking up to her thigh, careful to smooth out any wrinkles with long strokes.

A reverse striptease. Apparently I’d missed the grand commencement, if she had started out naked. I should’ve driven faster.

The slow-motion girl had garters in place by the time I got near the stage. I hadn’t spotted Barrett yet. Her petite frame was lost somewhere in the throng. I spared a glance—not my first—at the dancer, and was surprised when she winked one leisurely red eyelash at me.

It was Barrett.

She held my eye as she stood up languorously from the vanity table. She’d either had dance training or a lot of natural ability. Her figure, which had looked so angular in the black clothes from the night before, was delicately but very distinctly rounded, in all of the desirable places. She started shimmying robotically into a dress that looked like cotton candy, and held the crowd’s attention all through her exit, coiling herself in a feathered boa. They whooped approval as she vanished, and the tide immediately surged toward the bar.

Damn. The cold, polished sapphire that was Barrett Yorke had a few hidden facets.

One person didn’t move with the crowd. Parson. He walked toward me, parting the waves of people without effort as he went. With the performance over, the music synced with the lower floors and swelled in volume and intensity.

“What are you doing here?” he shouted over it, a little louder than required.

I’d already had one scuffle today. A second round wasn’t appealing.

“Barrett invited me.”

He glowered at the stage, then back at me. I hadn’t figured out if Parson was actually slow of mind, or if he was just socially awkward.

“She’s got a boyfriend,” he said.

“Nobody here saying otherwise, Parson. You want a beer?”

“No. I told you to stay away.”

I’d known a bouncer in Georgia built like Parson. If someone gave him a problem, he’d just lean on the guy. Being mashed against a wall by four hundred pounds took the fight out of anybody real damn quick.

“We want the same thing, Parson,” I said over the pounding beat. “To protect our friends.”

“You told us you hadn’t seen Elana since you were kids. You didn’t even know Kend.”

“I know he liked to gamble.”

Parson stared. He started to say something, and then closed his mouth with a snap I could almost hear over the music.

“You probably knew that, too, right? You guys were tight. How much trouble was he in?”

Parson looked away.

“Enough to get him hurt?” I said.

“You made it,” Barrett said. She was at the point of a clump of girls. One of them handed her a red plastic cup with a mixed drink. The sapphire stud in her upper ear had been replaced with a tiny, bright ruby. Parson gave me one last sullen stare and walked away. He wasn’t going to tell me anything, not right now. But I was convinced that the huge lump had something on his slow mind.

“Can we go somewhere?” I said to Barrett.

“Oooo, he’s ready,” the girl closest to Barrett laughed, “after that show.”

“Wait here,” Barrett said, and downed the last of whatever was in her plastic cup, and left it on the edge of the stage. She squeezed past me, angled toward the tech platform where the light board and sound equipment was run by club staff. She had changed into a dark purple dress, cut low in front and lower in the back.

“How do you know B?” one of the girls shouted. I read her lips more than I heard her.

“I’m her choreographer,” I said. The girls nodded but cast doubtful glances at my faded black jeans and hiking boots.

Barrett came back and tugged at my arm. “Come on.” We wove our way off the floor. Her purple dress wasn’t form-fitting like most of the outfits on display, but shaped to her waist on top, and the skirt swirled around her thighs as she moved lithely through the crowd. If there was a way for underwear to be involved, I couldn’t see it.

I followed her down what looked like an exit hallway. She stopped at a side door and opened it with a key. “The sound guy lets me use this.”

The room inside was small, about fifteen square. A spare dress
ing room for performers, with recycled school lockers and faux velvet couches and mirrors on the wall.

“I’m worried about Trudy,” I said.

“I am, too. She doesn’t answer her phone, which is more than strange for her. And look. This is from Trudy’s boss.”

She showed me her phone. Barrett had exchanged messages with someone named Zelle. Trudy had sent Zelle a text saying she had to take emergency leave and would be back in a week. Zelle said that Trudy hadn’t replied to urgent follow-up questions. That was on Saturday, the same day Trudy had posted about her tropical vacation.

“So she lied to her boss about taking a last-minute holiday?” I said.

“Trudy loves her job,” said Barrett. “She’s a graphic designer, and she’s really good. She wouldn’t leave them in the crunch like this. Unless something was wrong.”

“Where does Trudy live?” I said. I could go check it out tonight.

She thought about it. “I’ll come with you.”

“Better if I check it on my own.”

“Don’t be stupid. I know where it is and I have the codes to get in.”

I couldn’t very well explain to Barrett that her friend’s security system wouldn’t slow me down for very long.

“We’ll take my car,” she said.

TRUDY DOBBS’S HOUSE WAS
almost directly across the city, on the shore of Lake Washington. Barrett parked on the opposite side of the street, against the flow of traffic. I suppose she could afford a ticket. Her Lexus was new enough that it hadn’t hit its first oil change.

We sat and looked up at Trudy’s home. It was very vertical. Three stories, not counting the garage. Each squareish chunk of the house was offset from the others like carelessly stacked child’s blocks. It would have a hell of a view of the lake, in the daytime.

“Maybe she’s here,” Barrett said. “There’s lights on upstairs.”

“She lives alone?” I asked. The house had to be three thousand square feet.

“Since her dad died two years ago.” She leaned to peer around the side of the house. This close, I could smell her shampoo over the car leather.

I opened my door and got out. “Let’s see if anyone’s at home.”

We walked up a long flight of concrete stairs to reach the first deck and what seemed to be the front door. The stairs were painted white, the house in a sedate neutral that reminded me of modeling clay.

I knocked, with the echo from inside the only answer. The place felt empty. I cupped a hand to peer into the darkness through the door. I could see part of a kitchen counter, and a table. No coffee cups or dishes on the counter. All the chairs pushed in flush against the table.

“Nobody home,” said Barrett. “Maybe Trudy
is
on vacation.”

“Does she have a cleaning lady?” My eyes had made out a small neat stack of mail in the kitchen.

“I guess. Why wouldn’t she?” Barrett dug for a key in her purse. “I’ve still got it from feeding her old cat last year. Hang on.”

She unlocked the door and immediately a soft chirp sounded from the kitchen. Barrett walked over to punch in the alarm code.

I took a deep inhale. No stink of death in the air. That was something, at least.

The front half of the house was an open floor plan, with the kitchen and dining room and living areas all visible from one another. Every room had large paintings hung on the walls, and most of the paintings looked to be by the same artist. Trudy’s own work, I guessed. The images were abstract, but evocative. There were similar canvases propped up here and there.

“All ours,” Barrett said. “What are we looking for?”

“Purse. Phone. Anything that’s here that she would have normally taken on vacation with her. Or if she did leave, anything that tells us where she went.”

“Gotcha. I’ll take the upstairs.” Barrett ran up, dress swinging. She was a hell of a lot livelier tonight than yesterday. Enjoying the mystery, with the dead friends momentarily just an abstract concept.

I couldn’t blame her. There had been times, after I’d lost men, lost
friends, that the missions were almost fun. Jubilant, in a dark way. The action helping to keep grief at bay, and give me purpose. It never lasted.

Trudy had posted online, and texted her boss. Then she had dropped off entirely. Was it intentional? Did she not want to be traced?

In the neat stack of mail was an Amex statement. I opened it. It had been printed too many days ago to tell me if her purchases had included any last-minute plane tickets to Jamaica. But it gave me an idea.

I found a large office room off the kitchen, with an angled drafting table and light boxes and about a thousand books on art. More of Trudy’s big paintings on the walls. She was industrious. There were stumpy file cabinets on one wall, and I searched until I found the file with her credit statements. On a Post-it at the back of the file were four digits. Her PIN code.

It amazes me, how easy it is to find the random codes that banks assign. The randomness is the problem. Everyone writes them down. Everyone puts them by the computer, or in the files. It would be embarrassingly easy to be an identity thief.

I picked up the wall phone and called the service number on the statement. I entered Trudy’s card number and PIN and had the system read me a list of the last ten purchases.

The first eight charges were small random debits at Starbucks and bookstores and a deli.

The last two entries were different. Both on the same day. Saturday. The day Trudy had supposedly left on vacation, or had her family emergency, or whatever it was. Two hundred thirty bucks in groceries at a Safeway in Ballard. And a cash advance of four hundred dollars.

If I still gave any credence to the tropical vacation story, the groceries erased it. Who buys half a carload of food before getting on a plane? And four hundred dollars felt like a maximum daily amount for a cash advance.

So Trudy had grabbed food. As much money as she could get. And there had been no more purchases on the card after that.

She’d gone on the run, or she’d holed up somewhere. If she was on the run, I had no way of knowing where or how. If she had holed up,
then it was probably a place she already knew. Somewhere she could go, and stay, at a minute’s notice. She’d already been there four days.

I walked upstairs, checking out the rooms as I went. A second bedroom, and a third, both large and lonely. Two bathrooms and a sitting room. The top floor was taken up by the master suite, where I found Barrett nodding with satisfaction.

“Okay,” she said, pointing to each area. “No purse. No phone or charger. There are clothes laid out on the bed. Her laptop is gone and so is one of her pieces of luggage.” She folded her arms triumphantly. “On vacation, clearly.”

“Clearly,” I said. “What’s that?”

A shoe box was open on the dresser. It was the cloth lying next to it that had caught my eye when I walked through the door. Yellow silicone. A gun cleaning cloth. In the box were a squeeze can of oil and an empty box of .25-caliber Hornady brand ammunition.

“That’s Trudy’s dad’s gun,” Barrett said, inaccurately, since the pistol wasn’t here. “Why would she want that?”