“Don’t get carried away. How’d you fare?”
“It’s cold out here,” he said around a bite of muffin. “Sorry if I woke y’all up, turning the car on and off for the heater.”
“You didn’t. Jenn couldn’t sleep, but it didn’t have anything to do with you or your car.” Speaking of . . . I lifted my chin toward the car. “How long you gonna be out here? Do you need to use the bathroom?”
“Uh, no. I’ll be leaving soon. Williams is coming to relieve me. But thanks for the offer.”
I scratched my cheek, nodding. He’d given me the information I’d been after; the sheriff wanted Jenn and Jenn’s house watched. They’d come and go in shifts until Diane was found, or until some undefined future event, or until the sheriff couldn’t spare the deputies for the assignment.
“Well, all right then.” I made a show of shivering. “I’m getting my ass back inside. It is cold.”
“Tell Jenn I said thanks for the muffin.”
“I will.” I turned and lifted my hand, giving him a little wave.
I hadn’t taken three steps before I heard Boone’s radio click on and Flo McClure’s voice say, “They found her, boys. Time to head home.”
I stopped in my tracks.
“Roger that,” Boone said, followed by a chorus of other voices acknowledging the order.
It only took me a split second to decide what to do. Glancing over my shoulder, I watched Boone set aside the coffee and the muffin. Then he turned the engine. I cleared my throat, making my way back to him and raising my voice over the hum of the car.
“I thought you said you were here ’til Williams arrived?”
“Oh, no. That was Flo with dispatch. We’re all done.” He gave me a tired and mostly flat smile. “But I guess you probably knew that?”
“How’d you mean?”
“Diane Donner.”
“Yeah? What about her?”
Boone’s eyebrows pulled together, and his eyes flicked over me in an inspection. “They found her. I thought you would know.”
I allowed my actual and genuine surprise to show. “I did not. No one called us.”
“Jenn’s momma didn’t call her? Last night or this morning?”
“Well, no. Jenn’s phone is missing. And Diane didn’t call me.”
“Jenn’s phone is missing? Since when?” Even in his exhausted state, this news seemed to perk him up.
I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering again to stall answering the question. The truth was the phone had been missing since last night. Apparently, Jenn had left it in the honeymoon cabin during the party. Since everyone she knew was going to be in the fancy faux-barn, she had no reason to bring it. Plus, it’s not like her delightful red dress had a phone pocket.
But when the police had released everyone at 2:00 AM and we went to retrieve her things before driving home, her phone wasn’t where she’d left it in the cabin. Her bag, wallet, clothes, and even her earrings were present and accounted for. But no phone.
“You know, I can’t rightly say when she misplaced it.” I shivered harder, backing away, and raising my voice. If he asked me something else, I would pretend I couldn’t hear him, what with his car engine, the distance, and my slow brain. “Sorry. I didn’t sleep much either, and it is damn cold out here. Maybe when I warm up my brain will work better.” I said this last bit from the front porch, waving again as I backed into the house. “Well, see you later!”
With that I shut the door, and just in time too. The burner phone in my pocket buzzed.
Burro.
Jogging on the balls of my feet, I silently vamoosed to the kitchen and shivered for real. Once there, I skadoodled to the pantry, closed the pantry door—Hmm. Hiding in pantries. Seems to be becoming a habit—and answered the phone.
“What I really want to know is, does he have an old lady?” I launched right into it. Burro and I didn’t exchange pleasantries. Ever.
“I wondered when you were going to find out.” He chuckled, sounding pleased as a pig in pie. Or more precisely, like a donkey. He had this crazy laugh, like a hee-haw, even when he chuckled.
“You knew?”
“Of course.”
I made a sound of disbelief, not catching it in time. “You knew and you didn’t tell me?”
“That’s not our arrangement. I answer all the questions you ask and none of the ones you don’t.”
That was our arrangement, mostly because Burro liked to talk, and I didn’t always have time for his stories.
“Fine.” I narrowed my eyes, frowning. No use schooling an expression he couldn’t see. “Just to be sure we’re both referring to the same person, who is Repo’s woman?”
“Diane Donner.”
“Fuck.” I stopped myself just before hitting a bag of flour with my palm. How was this possible? How had I not known? How . . . many bags of flour did Jenn have in here?
Focus!
“How long?”
“Well, that’s complicated.” Burro still sounded gleeful. “The first time I saw them together was Christmas, over a year ago now. Believe it or not, she just showed up here, la-di-da. And in a miniskirt.”
“Well, God bless her.”
“Repo saw to that.” He was chuckling again.
“Moving on. They’ve been together for over a year?” That didn’t seem right. What else had I not noticed while I’d been pleasantly ensconced in amor facit with my fiancée?
If Diane and Repo had been together for over a year and I’d failed to notice? Then this was the intervention I required, the wake-up call. Mind you, I didn’t plan to do a single thing about it. I would not change my current course of pleasurable actions for anything in the world, but at least I’d be prepared for the fact that I was no longer omniscient.
“No, they have not been together for over a year. And I kept an eye out, ’cause that was something worth knowing. I’d started to think it was a one-time thing, a fluke. No contact for a year, at least none that made it into my net. And then all of a sudden, as of the week after this past Christmas, they’ve been fucking around a lot.”
I grimaced at his choice of words but remained on task. “Where do they meet?”
“One of the safe houses known only to the top brass, barely used.”
“I can’t see that going over well,” I mumbled. Dammit. There I went, volunteering my thoughts again. What was wrong with me?
You haven’t slept and you haven’t had your coffee yet. You left it on the counter.
Oh. Well. That explained it.
“Repo has been diverting funds for upkeep recently. Had the interior painted two months ago I think, outside still looks like shit, though.”
I opened the pantry door and peeked around the corner. Coast clear, I stepped out just long enough to grab my coffee. “Send me the address. And where is Repo now?”
“He’s here. Walked in about an hour ago looking like the sole of my boot. I reckon he’s sleeping now.”
I swallowed a gulp of my now disappointingly tepid coffee. “I need to know where he was for the last—uh—twelve—no—fourteen hours. Where he was, how long he was there, in each place. Send everything to this phone. And I want to know when he leaves again and where he goes.”