Simple (25 page)

“They sure used their phones,” Christie muttered as he gathered up pages.

“Well, it's partly that and it's partly that I got us the deluxe service—we get the IDs of everybody along with the phone numbers. Good, huh?”

“Supergood. Poor Eric was all ready to do reverse phone lookup. He's going to be disappointed.” He gestured toward his family to indicate they should leave the computer and follow him and Artie to the conference room. When they were in, he said, “Spread them out, Cal's first. Let's have a look.”

Dolan flipped the pages down one at a time around the table as if prepping for a big board meeting. He had a listing of calls for the last four months. The whole group got in line and went around the table, studying. Christie could see Dolan was getting antsy, but the kids were entertained by this work.

“Elinor Hathaway called him a lot,” Eric told his father.

“His mum.”

“Boring.”

“Hey.”

“I thought maybe some hot chick.”

“Hey. I might have to boot you off this job.”

Eric cackled, then got serious. “He called a lot of numbers that start with 681 and 621. What's that?”

“Oakland.”

Dolan said, “The names look pretty familiar. We'll have to check them all, but it looks like people he worked for. It'll probably check out as work related. I don't see any number called a lot. Where's Cassie's number?”

“There,” Julie said.

“Ah, I see,” Christie said, though he had seen it moments before she did. “Let's list how many calls and when. Somebody do the blackboard.”

“Not me,” Julie said. “I want to look.”

“To detect.”

“Fine. I will,” Marina said. She stood at the board and wrote down what Christie dictated:
Hathaway to Price: June 7, June 15, July 12, July 22, August 10.

“Not August 13,” Dolan said. “Let's do the reverse.”

Christie dictated, “Price to Hathaway: June 7, June 14, July 11, July 22, August 10, August 11. “That's it. Do you see any more?”

Julie kept looking.

“Nuh-uh,” Eric said.

“So what does it mean? What should we conclude?”

“I'd hire him,” Marina said. “He returns calls! And pretty much right away.”

“Don't most people?” Eric asked her.

“No. They pile up jobs and keep everybody on hold.”

“Maybe he didn't have enough work,” Eric said.

“There's that,” she conceded.

Dolan had already begun gathering the pages into an ordered pile. The rest of them waited patiently while he put them aside. Then he did the same with Cassie Price's phone records. “We know when she called Cal. What else are we going to see?”

They began their study.

“She calls some number in Blanchard, Pennsylvania, with the name Price,” Eric observed.

“Family.”

“Oh.”

“No, wait, this is confusing,” Julie said. But Christie, standing just behind her and leaning over the pages, saw what she saw at about the same time. “I thought this section was
to
her, but it's also
from
her. It doesn't make sense.”

Everybody stopped and came to the place in line where Julie pointed, saying, “Like she called herself.”

“This is good. Real good,” Dolan said. “I like this. Now we have to go back to Verizon and find out
where
the other Cassie was when she called the Verizon Cassie.” He raised his eyebrows.

“Poor thing,” Marina whispered.

Julie pulled out one of the chairs at the table and collapsed into it. She rapped her head. “I wish I understood.”

“Easy,” Eric told her. “She gave her other phone to somebody, and they called
her
. Kids do it all the time.”

“But why would she need two?”

“Different strokes for different folks,” Eric said.

Christie and Dolan looked at each other and tried not to laugh.

Eric said, “Some kids have different phones for different friends.”

“What about dates—let's record the dates.”

Julie got up again, energized. “There are pretty many of them.”

“Let's record other Cassie to Verizon Cassie.”

They looked at their father and then got to work. “May 17, May 22, May 30. Then June 4—”

“Night or day?” Christie asked, even though he was hovering, looking, too.

“Night. Night.”

“Evening,” he amended. “Evening.”

“June 4 and June 5,” Eric recited. “It's almost always the other one to Verizon.”

“Okay.”

“Then June 18 and 19.”

“Okay.”

“June 26. On that day, Verizon calls the other number once at seven fifteen.”

“Interesting,” says Christie. “Getting bolder. Tell me just the Thursdays and Fridays—can you do the math?”

Marina kept the chalk poised, ready to write.

Since the children did not show any interest in doing the math, Dolan, who always had a calendar in his head, answered, “That's going to be July 2 and 3—”

“There's a July 2,” Eric offered. He and Julie checked listings further on, and Eric reported, “Not July 9 and 10. But I see one, like July 7 and one July 12.”

“Okay. Okay. Now go back to just Thursdays and Fridays.”

The kids moved down the table. “Not until July 16 and 17.” Christie checked the pages. They were right. He suspected a vacation with the Connolly family had interrupted the pattern.

“And then July 24. July 30 and 31. August 6 and 7. And now there are more calls going from Verizon to the new number. Lots more.”

“Did anybody call her August 13?” Christie asked, but he was looking, too, and he answered himself. “Yes. Someone called. The notation says a pay phone in East Liberty. A pay phone. Eight
P.M.
” He looked at Dolan.

“I still want to know what it means,” Julie complained. “After all this work we did. Does this tell us what got the woman killed?”

“When I know for sure what it means, I will tell you, honestly I will. I won't pull any punches. But for now I'd say she was doing something sneaky, something she didn't make public, and that is not a good thing. If anybody ever wants to … to date you and they don't want you to talk about it to anybody else, I want you to run as fast as you can in the other direction. I'm very serious.”

He didn't miss Marina's amused look. A sharp memory hit him of his first couple of weeks with her when he thought he would lose his mind with guilt and longing.

“We'd better get some lunch. Let's go. You coming with us, Artie?”

“Fine with me.”

The others walked down the hall ahead of them.

Artie said, “I'm pretty sure the
Sp
means it's a Sprint phone. Who paid for that Sprint phone? It's not on her charges.”

“Right.”

“Plus: Where is it?”

*   *   *

FREDDIE HAD CALLED
him—he looked at her number, surprised. She never called. She was not a needy type. He also felt a hot anger he knew was supposedly wrong—he only liked to make the calls, not receive them. Rita had it right, well, right in his book, which he understood was a wrong and bad book, but he liked the fact that she never initiated.

It was Saturday, and he was on his way to Harrisburg. He'd been on the road for an hour. His counterpart, the state party organizer, the person who had put him onto the problem of Cassie Price, wanted to see him. He was messing with his cell phone by opening it and closing it, when he dropped it accidentally in the slit between the seat and the center console. The Saab wiggled as he fished for the phone unsuccessfully, getting his hand jammed. The phone began to ring. He couldn't reach it. It stopped abruptly after four rings, so he was pretty sure it hadn't gone to a message. Who was it? He wanted to know. He pulled off onto an emergency platform and saw that he was shaking.

For one thing, roadside stops had always frightened him—ever since he heard about a young woman who pulled over to safety only to have a confused driver assume it was another lane and plow into her, killing her. He looked behind him, got his hand out of the jam, and put the emergency blinkers on before, fishing with a tire gauge, he managed to nudge the phone out to where he could retrieve it.

He checked the
CALLS MISSED
menu. The number was not familiar to him. He'd try to trace it later—it might be a simple error. They were getting more and more common these days.

That's when his body gave him another instant signal. His late breakfast rose up in him and he opened the car door, taking deep breaths to keep it all down. He wasn't used to vomiting—hadn't in his memory since college binges, until a week ago when he lost it twice.

A car came dangerously close to him, blaring its horn in one long terrifying note. He brought the door closed with his left hand. His right still clutched the phone. And perhaps because of that, he began to think about phones.

If the police were messing around, still asking questions, clearing the decks as they said, to eliminate other possibilities, would they look at the girl's phone records? He got sick to think of course they would. But they'd be looking at Cal still, right? And any calls made from boss to paralegal could be … could be business calls.

He had to talk to Connolly, give him a program of things he could say about a work project.

God, the man was naive. Had he called her much? Todd hoped not, though a superposition lawyer had a right to call an employee whenever he wanted. Connolly couldn't be arrested for that.

Even if they cottoned on to the affair, it proved nothing, really. Still, it made him sick to think how careless Connolly was.

He had been given an impossible task.

But he did the impossible. And he did it well.

*   *   *

“JOHN! DID YOU SEE
who that was?” Colleen asked. “Not the guy blasting his horn, the one on the side of the road, losing his cookies?”

“Oh,” Potocki said, eyes widening. “Was it?”

“He's back and forth to Harrisburg all the time, I guess. It doesn't mean anything.” But then she said, “Slow down some in case he catches up with where we are and we can spot him along the way.”

“We're still going to need to stick to the motels in Breezewood. It's already a long day.”

They would see signs along the turnpike soon:
BREEZEWOOD, TOWN OF MOTELS.
What a distinction. Breezewood wasn't actually a town; it was a
place
on the map. There were roughly ten motels and several fast-food joints. Breezewood was a place to stop briefly for something.

They'd get there at one, they'd need to eat something, then start the questioning and probably get done at four or so—a three-hour stop, probably.

She had a laptop with her, equipped for Wi-Fi but without a card. “There'll be someplace to use this. Probably any motel lobby.”

After a while she saw the Saab moving past them, going at a pretty good clip. “There he is.”

Potocki picked up speed. “Nice car.”

“Would you describe it as gray?”

“If I were
me,
I would say silver. But if I were Iris Mender, I might very well say gray.”

“I was thinking, if we put together what Iris Mender saw in the front of the houses with what Cal says he saw in the alleyway behind, it means the guy got her drunk at Casbah, comforted her about something, saw her home safe, but didn't try to go in, right?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Kindly? Aware of Cal? Or casing the joint?”

“I choose C. He wasn't forthcoming about knowing her. He said he didn't. He never said he went for a drink with her.”

“Right. Maybe it was someone else who went for the drink.”

“Another dude in another gray car? What is your soft spot for this guy?”

“It's not a soft spot. It's fascination/horror.” She added irritably, “And hating to be wrong about a person I might have liked.”

Potocki reached over and took her hand for a moment.

They couldn't keep up with the Saab. They let it go and got off at the exit that pointed them to the town of motels, where they soon chose the Bob Evans restaurant for a road-style breakfast to be consumed as lunch.

Right after they'd settled in a booth and put in their orders, Colleen got a call from Christie.

“We have a pattern,” he said. “Cassie Price got phone calls from another phone in her name on many Thursdays and Fridays.”

“Interesting. Tricky.”

“Do you have a pen handy?”

“Yes,” she said fumbling for one.

He waited. Then he said, “I have some specific dates you can target. Evidence of the phone calls. Ready?”

“Yes.”

He gave her a series of dates.

“Got it,” she said.

“We don't know who paid for the phone. It's not on her charges.”

“We're thinking Connolly,” Colleen said glumly.

“Right. So, go for it with the motels, see if you can establish it was Price and Connolly anywhere. You know, the truth is, there's nothing to say they stuck to Breezewood.”

She could hear Dolan in the background saying, “I'd mix it up.”

“We'll check as much as we can check today,” she told Christie.

She didn't tell him they were at Bob Evans. The Bob Evans wasn't where Cassie had used her credit card, but she might have gone there on another occasion. They could show her picture and ask if anybody remembered her.

“Good. The other thing that's interesting is that Connolly, assuming it's Connolly, made all the phone calls until late July, when she started calling him on that other phone. What does that mean? She got bolder. Antsy.”

“Angry,” Colleen says just as she hears Dolan say the same thing in the background.