Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) (7 page)

“Lynette, I’m sympathetic. I know this has got to be pretty hellish for you. I just don’t know how you think I can help.”

“I thought maybe you could kind of hint to the cops what I’m telling you so they don’t waste time going on the wrong track—the wrong track being
me
.”

“It’s a little hard to ‘hint’ about faking a death.”

“Or you could sort of, you know, do your own investigating. I’d pay you. And Culver will pay you a ton if you help find him.”

Nola noted the fervor in Lynette’s voice. Genuine. The fear she’d professed yesterday had been fake after all. She really thought her lover was still alive. “You’d be wasting your money. I’m not a trained investigator. All I do is this one thing.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she hated having said them.
All I do is this one stupid little thing. Other than that, what good am I?

Lynette was clearly a woman who could tell when she was having an effect on another person. Now she smiled, relaxed her posture, and put her hand on Nola’s wrist tenderly, almost flirtatiously. “Oh, please say you’ll do it. I need your help—
we
need your help. You’re the only one I can turn to.”

Nola wanted to laugh. “Sweetie, that might work on a potential sugar daddy, but you were better off being honest,” she blurted before she could stop herself.

For a second, anger flared in Lynette’s hard grey eyes. Then she relaxed again, leaning back and nodding. “Fair enough. Here’s the bottom line: I do need your help. Telling you all this stuff was taking a huge risk, and I’m not someone who trusts anyone,
ever
. That’s how desperate I am.”

Even with this bald admission, Nola felt like she was being played, but then that was probably the way Lynette dealt with everyone. “I can’t promise anything. It’s not like the cops hang on my every word. What I can do is keep in mind what you’ve said for my own part of the investigation and see if—”

“That’s not good enough. You need to do more than just following the dicks around like a puppy. Oh, don’t get all pissy—I know how it is.”

Nola was not about to get pissy, though the words stung her quite a bit. “Considering I don’t have to do anything for you, I suggest that
you
control the pissiness.” Something else occurred to her. “Hey, how did you know about me anyway?”

“Culver’s brother. I guess he’s interested in paranormal stuff. Me and Culver sometimes met at Grayson’s place when he wasn’t there so Culver’s wife wouldn’t get suspicious if she ever put a tail on Culver—it would be just like he was visiting his brother. Sometimes I’d have to wait for a while for Culver to get out of business meetings and stuff, and Grayson had all these articles about tracists that I read. There was one with your name in it, about that case with the girl last year. I’d never heard of trace, though I do believe in ghosts and I . . .”

Nola tuned out Lynette’s chatter. So Grayson had been aware of her even before his brother’s disappearance. She wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Do you think Grayson is involved?”

Lynette looked confused. “Involved in what? You mean he and Culver have something cooked up?” She shook her head. “No way. They get along and all, but they’re not close. They don’t talk much. Don’t have much to do with each other. Culver would have told me if Grayson was involved.”

That wasn’t quite what Nola had meant, but she didn’t know how to ask whether Grayson might have cooked something up on his own without freaking Lynette out—or confusing her further. “What about Culver’s business partner, Vincent Kirke?”

Lynette’s face softened, and she smiled. “Vincent’s a sweetie. Culver would have told me if Vincent was helping him.”

Nola suspected that Lynette would say only positive things about attractive, wealthy men regardless of who they were. She decided to test her theory. “And Maureen Bryant?”

Theory gained support. Lynette’s face hardened, her lip curling into an ugly sneer, and she let loose. “That bitch. She married him for his money. He married her because he felt sorry for her. They never loved each other. Now he’s stuck with her and she won’t divorce him, because she says she’s Catholic, and I mean, come on, like no Catholics have ever gotten divorced before. They don’t have any kids—
her
fault—so they could get an annulment, but she won’t do it, the fucking bitch.”

Nola had a feeling that this little rant would go on for a while if unchecked. “One more thing,” she interjected. “The bird.”

“The
what
?”

Again Nola tried to read Lynette’s expression and saw nothing but puzzled annoyance for being interrupted. Still she needed to make sure. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“Uh,
no
. Look, are we done here? You are agreeing to help, right? If that’s the case, then stop jerking me around.”

“All right, never mind.” There seemed no point in prolonging the interview, so Nola got up to leave. Lynette got up, too, flouncing around the bar and turning her back without so much as a good-bye. That was fine with Nola. Lynette was exhausting. She wondered whether Culver Bryant really intended to run away with her after all or if that wasn’t just one of those things married men said to their mistresses. After just half an hour, Nola was eager to run away
from
Lynette.

___________

When she got home, Nola could hardly take the time to struggle out of her leather jacket, fling it and her purse aside, and grab a notebook and a pen. Something about this business demanded literally hands-on work and not a keyboard and screen. She wanted to write down everything she knew about the case and then figure out what else she needed to know and how she might find out about it. It was goofy, she knew, but she was excited. This would not be another Sunday night of lousy TV and leftover pasta. True, it wouldn’t be a night at Tryst with the cool kids (what did they all do for a living that they could go clubbing on a Sunday night, anyway, and why did thinking about them always make her feel like she was eighty years old?), but that was fine. She had a sense of purpose. That’s all she needed at the moment.

She wrote down the names of the four key players, in the order in which they were interviewed. The wife, the business partner, the mistress, the brother. Interestingly, if she had to order them in terms of their likely involvement in Culver Bryant’s disappearance, that’s how it would go. Under each name she jotted down whatever came to her without censoring anything or trying to organize it. After half an hour of solid writing, she put the pen down and considered what she’d written to see what stood out as being potentially significant.

No trace had been found at any of the main suspects’ houses (with an asterisk next to Grayson in this regard). That meant if Culver had been killed, it probably wasn’t a sudden crime of passion. That helped Maureen’s case for innocence, since the wife was traditionally the one most likely to commit such a crime, though Nola’s impression of Maureen was that she hardly seemed the type to be moved to sudden violent murder, or sudden violent anything, really. Lynette would have been the next-most likely, but if Nola believed Lynette’s story—and for now there was no reason not to—it hadn’t been her.

Lynette had suggested Culver was having financial difficulties. Both Maureen and Vincent suggested Culver had been preoccupied by something—or, as Vincent had put it, guilty about something. If Maureen had suggested it, it might have been put down to his affair with Lynette. Nola wondered if it had anything to do with Greenbriar, his latest project. She definitely needed to find out more about that.

According to the bits and pieces she recalled from the interviews, the last person to see Culver alive was his wife, and she’d seen him before he left home around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday. About a half-hour later he’d called Lynette to tell her not to come to Grayson’s house to meet him after all; he had too much to do that night. That was his second-to-last call. Then he called his business partner and spoke very briefly about something he needed to do, and that was it. His car had not been found and there had been no sightings of it. He had not used his credit cards since his disappearance. He had not taken any other possessions when he left his house that evening, according to Maureen.

Grayson had been out of town when Culver disappeared, though, of course, that didn’t mean he was absolved of any involvement. Nola knew with absolute certainty that he was involved in . . . something.

Again a rustling sound came from the hallway outside her apartment, and she froze. Then she stood up and moved toward the door, burglar-silent. She stood before it wondering what would happen next. Her heart was pounding to a ridiculous degree. She heard a cough—most definitely a Mrs. Lafferty cough, followed by a Mrs. Lafferty clearing of the throat. Nola’s body slumped in relief to the point where she might have collapsed into a puddle on the floor. She opened the door.

“Hey, Mrs. L,” she called out. She figured it might be good penance to endure a lengthy conversation with her neighbor to atone for having turned into Nancy Drew, just as Mutt and Jeff had chided.

Angela Lafferty turned and smiled, but Nola could see immediately how tired the smile was, how the corners of her neighbor’s mouth twitched as if it took effort for her to do even this. “Hello, Nola,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. She had stopped fishing for her keys in her purse and seemed like she wanted to talk, but she didn’t say anything more. Her husband must have been giving her even more hell than usual. Perhaps she didn’t want to talk so much as just delay going back inside with him.

Quickly, because it was on her mind, Nola said, “Someone left something at my door yesterday evening and didn’t include their name. I was wondering if you saw anyone around the building around seven-ish, someone you didn’t recognize coming or going?”

Normally, this would have launched Mrs. Lafferty in about a dozen different conversational directions, but now she simply blinked several times as she considered Nola’s question. “You know, I believe there was someone waiting outside the building around that time.”

“Waiting . . . for someone to come in or out so they could get past our high-tech security system?”

Nola was gratified to see a wider smile on her neighbor’s face. The Laffertys’ apartment was right over the building entrance and Mrs. Lafferty frequently reported to Nola just how many people waited to “piggyback” off others to get in. Most of the time it was the residents themselves, who had forgotten their card keys or had their arms full and didn’t feel like fishing them out. “Gary Goodman never
once
used his card key this week, and I
know
he hasn’t lost it,” she would say, shaking her head. “I rather doubt he knows how to
use
the thing.”

Now she nodded and said, “Yes, that’s certainly what it looked like, and sure enough, the Petros went out for their usual Sunday supper right about then.”

Nola felt her heart pumping harder again. She really would have to hit the gym more often and do more cardio if she was going to continue this detective stuff. “Can you describe the person you saw?”

“I only got a glimpse—I was watching the Petros. I think she’s pregnant and hasn’t told him yet. All I know is that it was a woman.”

6

As she had told Lynette, digging into Culver Bryant’s disappearance was not going to be easy despite her connection to the detectives in charge of the case. She hadn’t appreciated just how difficult it would be until now. The files were not accessible, and she could hardly show up at, say, Maureen Bryant’s door asking questions without arousing suspicion. Even if Maureen Bryant or Vincent Kirke or whomever else she talked to accepted her as part of the investigative team, they were unlikely to tell her anything new or useful, and what’s more, Mutt and Jeff and Dalton would almost certainly find out.
Bye-bye, tracist career.

There was one person Nola knew she could talk to who might give her, if nothing else, a little background information on Culver Bryant’s business, and there would be no problem if anyone found out. Her father, Steven Lantri, had worked in construction all his life, which in Redfort necessarily meant working for Bryant. If she’d had a different kind of upbringing, she might have felt guilty about not seeing or speaking to her father for nearly three months and then only going to him when she needed something, but the truth was, that was how things worked with them. Her father would not feel miffed. He’d put on a big show of being happy to see her, of course, but then he did that every time he went to the grocery store and got his beer and hot dogs checked by a cashier he recognized, too.

As she made her way across town—the part inhabited by divorced men who weren’t as rich as Vincent Kirke—she wondered for the millionth time how her parents had ever gotten it into their heads that they’d make a suitable couple. A lot of people asked the same questions of their own folks, of course, but that didn’t make the Lantri marriage any more fathomable. What’s more, the Lantris’ incompatibility didn’t stem from the things most people would have thought would cause conflict. Even though Nola’s mother was a librarian, there had been nothing priggish about Emma Lantri’s upbringing, as she had been the sixth of eight children of factory workers; meanwhile, Steven Lantri, a construction worker, was an avid reader. But having to sit at the dinner table every night for years listening to them talk, Nola could not imagine two people less in sync. Her father seldom listened and her mother seldom spoke. Her father antagonized with words and her mother with silence. In conversations, her father was like an actor, taking on some larger-than-life persona or another. Sometimes he was trash-talking foul-mouthed construction guy, other times he was suave and charming ladies’ man, still others he was boyish smartass. Nola’s mother, by contrast, was like someone from outer space.

Today her father was being smart-funny dad, the way he used to act when she was a child and kids from school or the neighborhood came over to the house so they’d all think Nola had the coolest dad. Sometimes this backfired. Once when Nola was nine she bragged about how cool her father was and Karen Vanessi retorted, “Your dad’s so lame.” Another time, slightly older, she mustered the courage to join in with a bunch of girls complaining about their fathers by grumbling that hers always said the most embarrassing things in public. Gretchen Phelps gave her a withering look. “Your father is a
saint
compared to mine.” Olivia Zablonski chimed in scoldingly, “He’s so nice, Nola. He never hit you in his whole life, I bet.” No, her father had never hit her, or her mother, or done any of the things those girls claimed their fathers did—getting wasted, getting high, stealing, cheating, running off. The divorce, the one thing she could hold against him, was, she believed, in the long run a sensible course of action that benefited them all. She did wonder sometimes how much this belief had contributed to her own inability to have a serious, successful relationship. At those times, she’d remember those girls from her childhood and tell herself to shut up. It was pointless to sit around your whole life blaming your folks.