Rush of Blood (6 page)

Detective Jeffrey Gardner awoke thinking about Patti Lee and Amber-Marie Wilson. He lay staring at the ceiling for a few minutes,
until the urge to visit the bathroom proved too strong, then he tried to slip out of bed without waking his wife.

The clock said 05.17.

His wife asked him if everything was all right and he said ‘shush’ and told her to go back to sleep. When she threw back the
covers, he told her there was no need for her to get up as well.

‘I’m awake now anyway,’ Michelle Gardner said.

He was still thinking about Patti Lee and Amber-Marie over breakfast, while his five-year-old daughter was busy decorating
the kitchen floor with Froot Loops. While his wife cooked eggs and tried to talk to him about something they were supposed
to be doing that coming weekend. She could see that he wasn’t really listening and called him on it. He apologised, and when
he told her what was on his mind, Michelle nodded, and said, ‘I think that woman needs to go home.’

Gardner knew his wife was right. He’d heard the same thing every day for a couple of weeks now. Almost every one of his colleagues
on the Crimes Against Persons Unit thought it was crazy that the girl’s
mother was still around, but there were few volunteers to have that awkward conversation and plenty of reasons people could
think of not to bother.

‘
It’s not like she’s hurting anybody, is it?
’

‘
Her choice, right?
’

‘
What’s that place cost anyway, like fifty bucks a night …?
’

He thought about it on the way to drop his little girl off at school. Then, once he was alone in the car, he began to think
specifically about what he might say; trying certain phrases out loud as he drove south through the city towards Sarasota
Police Department Headquarters.

‘You need to be at home, Patti. You need to be around the people that care about you.’

Gardner was not convinced that Patti Lee Wilson would respond to that kind of cheesy crap, to
any
kind of crap now he thought about it, but it was the best he could come up with. He talked it through with a couple of the
other detectives during the morning. He asked what his sergeant thought, while he wrote up reports and fielded telephone calls.
The place was busier than usual, the atmosphere in the building a little more serious. The Chief of Police had been knocking
heads together the day before and the entire Criminal Investigations Department was still buzzing following the murder of
two elderly French tourists the previous week.

‘Now’s a good time, Jeff,’ the sergeant said. ‘It’s been six weeks, and with everything that’s going on around here right
now, the truth is nobody’s paying that woman’s case a whole lot of attention at the moment.’

‘We’re still treating it as a homicide though, right?’

‘For sure,’ the sergeant said. ‘We’re looking for a body now, no doubt about that.’ He waved an arm towards the dozen or so
detectives who were working flat out on the tourist murders. He lowered his voice. ‘But we
got
bodies with this one, we got two of the damn things. There’s nothing much we can do on the Wilson case until that little
girl turns up.’

‘I guess not,’ Gardner said.

The sergeant – a well-built black man, same as Gardner, but a dozen years older – reached for his coffee cup and swirled what
was left in it around, like it might help. ‘And there’s no point in that little girl’s mother being here to see us do
nothing much
, is there? You know what I mean?’

‘I know what you mean.’

As far as the Sarasota Police Department was concerned, it might well have been a good time for Patti Lee Wilson to go back
to Atlanta. It certainly made a degree of sense in terms of workloads and the allocation of manpower, but this was not the
reason Jeffrey Gardner had woken up thinking about the mother of the missing girl. He knew that going home would be the right
thing for Patti Lee Wilson. How in God’s name could sticking around in the place where she’d lost her daughter, waiting on
the only news she was ever going to get, possibly be doing her any good?

‘
Until that little girl turns up
…’

At lunchtime, Gardner sat in a delicatessen full of cops on Ringling Boulevard – a paper napkin tucked into his collar to
keep food off his shirt and tie – and tried to come up with other things to say that might convince the poor woman to leave.
Perhaps it would be better to take a more common-sense approach to this, he thought. Be practical about it. In the end, he
decided he would just start talking and see how it went, so as soon as he’d finished his turkey-breast sub, he got in his
car and went to pay Patti Lee Wilson a visit.

It had been on Good Friday, six weeks and one day earlier, that Amber-Marie Wilson had been reported missing from the Pelican
Palms Resort on Siesta Key. That initial 911 call – Patti hysterical and struggling to breathe – had come in just after four
o’clock in the afternoon, and by Easter Sunday, Gardner had known it by heart.

Every whisper and strangled sob.

‘
She just wandered off … must have … and I’ve searched and looked everywhere and … she wouldn’t go far, she would never do
that
.’

‘
Could you repeat that address?
’

‘
Jesus Christ, you have to get over here right now, OK?
’

‘
You need to try and stay calm, ma’am
.’

‘
Listen, you need to know that she has some problems, you know? She has some … mental difficulties. Oh God … she’d trust anyone.
Do you understand what I’m saying? Anyone
…’

He drove five and some miles east on Fruitville Road, then turned south just shy of I75. He was soon moving through an area
of town dominated by industrial parks and warehouses. He could hear the sand and grit striking the side of the car as he drove.
He passed lumber yards, repair shops and plumber’s merchants, then slowed as he approached a budget motel next door to a low-rent
strip mall.

Where she had been living this past month and a half.

By sundown on that first night, the smart money was on Amber-Marie having been taken. Every shop and bar had been checked,
every inch of beach and, as soon as the Marine Patrol had been brought in, as much of the water as could be usefully searched
before the light had gone.

Siesta Village was hardly a hot spot as far as crime was concerned and apart from a couple that had been put up privately
by security-conscious bar owners, there were precisely two CCTV cameras on the main stretch of the Beach Road. Amber-Marie
could be seen walking out of the Pelican Palms on the single camera at the resort’s main entrance/exit, but there was no sign
of her on any other camera anywhere in the village.

In whichever direction she had walked, Amber-Marie had simply wandered on to the street and disappeared within a few minutes
of leaving the side of the pool at the Pelican Palms. Nobody questioned in those first few days had any useful information.
Nobody remembered seeing her and, despite repeated appeals, not a single witness came forward to say that they had seen anything
suspicious.

‘She’d trust anyone.’ Patti said that to Jeff Gardner the first time she saw him, and she kept right on saying it.

She was not going to argue with the smart money.

Gardner understood that those first, ‘golden’ twenty-four hours probably seemed an eternity to Patti, but for him and the
other detectives brought in from the Crimes Against Persons Unit, they went by in a flash. They became forty-eight hours quickly
enough too, and long before that first week was out, the case had slipped off the front page of the
Herald-Tribune
, and was no longer a lead item on the local TV news.

Careful to make sure that the girl’s mother was nowhere within earshot, most detectives began to talk about Amber-Marie Wilson
in the past tense.

A homicide case, in everything but name.

Not for Gardner though, not completely. How could he not have at least a shred of hope? How could he see the unconditional
love on the face of his own little girl and write off Patti Lee Wilson’s daughter? He could not bring himself to give up on
her, whatever common sense told him. He had to keep faith, especially with a girl who was … damaged.

‘Makes her special though,’ Patti had told him that one night. Beer on her breath in a parking lot near the beach, shivering
a little as the temperature fell. ‘Amber-Marie doesn’t see the same things other kids see, you understand? She doesn’t see
the bad things.’

Gardner had wrapped her jacket around her and put her into the back of a cab. He had thought, not until now.

He slowed and turned into the front lot of the Brigadoon Suites, parked up next to a faded orange Subaru with a battered front
wing. Climbing out of the car, he glanced across at some of the brightly lit signs in the strip mall next door. Not for the
first time, he thought how handy it was for any guests at the Brigadoon Suites who needed twenty-four-hour dog grooming or
refurbished computer components.

He walked towards a two-storey block of rooms, a wooden stairway at each end.

Almost every inch of the place was the colour of an old ballet shoe, dusty pink or rose or whatever they called it on the
side of the tin.
Gardner had seen plenty of similar colour schemes at places like this. Wall-to-wall purples, greens and gunmetal greys. The
owners had clearly seen little need to splash out and had opted to save money on paint by bulk-buying colours that were –
quite rightly – unpopular elsewhere.

He saw the door of the manager’s office open and watched an old woman walk out. She looked at him, but he just raised a hand.
He did not need telling the way.

Climbing the pink stairs, his hand on the flaking pink banister rail, he tried to get at least a few words clear in his mind.
He did not want this to take all day. It was after lunch, and he wondered if she would have started drinking yet.

He walked to the door of Room 1224 and knocked. Stepped back and waited. Knocked again.

‘You looking for the mother?’ He turned to see the old woman from the manager’s office. She had followed him and was already
halfway up the stairs. ‘The mother of that girl who disappeared?’ The woman was leaning on the handrail, panting, a hand pressed
to her narrow chest. ‘Well, she’s not here, so …’

Gardner said, ‘Thanks,’ and walked away from the door, swearing under his breath. Why had he wasted his time driving all the
way out here, when he’d known all along where she would be?

‘I’m happy to drive back, you know,’ Marina said.

‘It’s fine.’

‘I just thought you might want a drink.’

‘
A
drink, singular, maybe,’ Dave said. ‘When have you ever seen me drunk, though? When have you ever known me to
want
to get drunk?’

‘I was just saying, because you always drive, that’s all.’

‘I want to drive.’

‘Fine then.’

‘Why aren’t we
moving
…?’

Having studied the map earlier that day, Dave had decided that they would probably be better off heading south towards the
M23 via Crystal Palace and Croydon as opposed to the series of back roads that were an alternative during busier periods.
He didn’t think there would be too much traffic through south London early on a Saturday evening. Within ten minutes of leaving
the house, they were held up, Dave tapping his fingers impatiently on the wheel. ‘Should have gone with my first instinct,’
he said. ‘A23’s
always
a nightmare …’

‘It’s fine,’ Marina said. She looked at him, a half-smile. ‘We’ve left plenty of time.’

They had left the house in Forest Hill at six-thirty, for a journey that should have taken no more than an hour. Dave had
been waiting at the door in his jacket, the car keys in his hand, shaking his head as Marina hurried down the stairs, her
make-up only half done. ‘I just think it’s rude to be late,’ he said.

‘We won’t be late.’ She flipped down the sun visor and checked her make-up in the small vanity mirror. ‘We’re not supposed
to be there until eight. If we hadn’t hit a bit of traffic, we’d have been early.’

‘We don’t want to be the last ones there, do we?’

‘Don’t we?’

‘Well, you miss out on … conversation, whatever.’

‘You think they’ll talk about us if we’re not there?’

Dave glanced over at her.

‘Good,’ she said, flipping the visor back into place.

The tapping of fingers on the wheel had now become the smacking of palms. ‘See, where we are, as far as getting to the motorway
is concerned, we’re just that bit too far away.’

‘One more reason to move,’ Marina said.

Dave barked out a laugh. ‘Doesn’t matter how many reasons we’ve got if we can’t afford it.’

She turned in her seat, adjusted the seatbelt. ‘Is this about me going to the hairdresser’s?’

‘What?’ He shot her a look, panicky. ‘No …’

‘I
said
it was just a thought.’

‘I know—’

‘I
told
you it would be ridiculously expensive, that I wasn’t bothered one way or the other and you were the one who told me to go
ahead and get it done.’

‘Yes, and I was right, because it looks great,’ he said. ‘
You
look great.’

‘You sure?’ She opened the visor again.

‘Possibly a bit
too
great.’ The traffic had begun to move and for the first time in ten minutes Dave managed to get the Fiat 500 into top gear.
He grinned. ‘Ed starts paying too much attention, I might have to smack him one.’

Marina laughed, closed the visor. ‘Yeah, right.’

‘Did you bring your stories, by the way?’

‘No …’

‘What?’

‘I didn’t think it was such a good idea.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake … I
told
you.’

‘It just feels a bit pushy,’ she said. ‘Like I’m desperate, or something.’

‘That’s stupid.’ Dave’s eyes flicked to his wing-mirror. ‘They’re great stories and now we’ve met somebody who might be able
to help.’

‘Look, I’m sure we’ll have to invite them round to us at some point, so why don’t I just wait and do it then?’ She leaned
back and turned her head towards the passenger window. ‘Then, you know … I can just nip upstairs and get them because we’re
at home, rather than looking like I’ve brought them specially.’

Dave said he supposed that would be all right, that he was only thinking of her, then leaned over to switch the radio on.
They listened to the last few minutes of
Loose Ends
, then he retuned to a music station. He put his foot down on a clear stretch of dual carriageway between Thornton Heath and
Croydon.

‘Do you really not think I’d step up?’ he asked. ‘If Ed was out of order?’

Marina appeared not to have heard the question, and said, ‘Why don’t you ever get drunk?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I mean, everyone should get pissed once in a while.’

‘Why?’

‘It doesn’t do any harm, does it?’

‘So, everyone should lose control, once in a while? Everyone should do things they’re ashamed of or embarrassed about, or
that they can’t even remember?’

Marina said nothing and shifted in her seat. They drove another mile or so without saying any more.

‘I was at college with this bloke,’ Dave said. ‘He was a mate, I thought I knew him, but the first time he got really smashed
I could see
that he was somebody else entirely. He was ugly and aggressive. He was pathetic, you know?’ He looked across at Marina and
smiled. ‘I just don’t get it, I never have. This desire to be off your face, to lose it completely. I mean I’m not trying
to stop anyone enjoying themselves, but you know …’

‘What about on holiday?’

‘What about it?’

‘Weren’t you a
bit
drunk on the last night?’

Dave shook his head, as though he had no idea what she was talking about.

‘Come on … when we were in that flashy restaurant, the Bonefish or whatever it was. When we were all talking about that girl
and what had happened. The business with the police.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You seemed to be drinking a lot.’

‘Maybe because it was the last night.’

‘Well, there we go then.’

‘I drank no more than anybody else,’ he said. His voice was good and even and his hands were tight on the wheel. ‘And I was
certainly not drunk. Not even a bit.’

‘All right, it doesn’t matter.’

Dave turned the radio up and after a while he began singing along with a song that Marina did not recognise. During the instrumental
he turned to her and smiled. He said, ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to start an argument for anyway. We’re supposed to
be going out to have a nice time …’