“It’s someone they all knew,” Eddie said suddenly. Martin looked up from his case notes.
“What makes you say that?”
“Hazel wouldn’t walk off with a stranger. Like I said, she didn’t have a big social life. She barely spoke to people she did know. I even told her…” Eddie pressed two fingers against his closed eyes. “I warned her not to talk to anyone she didn’t know. I said that to her, Detective.”
“Call me Martin,” he corrected quietly.
“Martin. I told my daughter that.” He shook his head and cleared his throat. “She wasn’t wearing headphones. No one could’ve snuck up on her. She knew the world isn’t all nice. I tried to be real honest with her about the good and the bad. She wasn’t sheltered. And she could run, Martin. She could run faster than all the boys on our old street when she was nine years old. If she got a split-second head start, there’s no way anyone could’ve beat her off that trail. My wife used to say she was built like a greyhound.”
Martin’s focus tripped on Eddie’s mention of his wife. He could barely bring himself to look at the widower, revisiting how sure he’d been that Eddie was responsible for not just one crime but three: Ama, Hazel, and Raelynn. Even last night, swallowed by the pit of desperation and dead ends, he’d reached back for that conclusion just like he’d reached into the medicine cabinet for want of a fix.
“Martin?” Eddie’s voice reached Martin in the internal maze he was building.
Martin cleared his throat and blinked the haze of recent memories clear from his mind. He wanted to ask Eddie about his wife’s death, but now was not the time.
“Were teachers interviewed at the time of her disappearance?” he asked instead. “Did they ask if she seemed to be close to anyone new? Did any new students enroll midyear?”
“Officers went to the school a couple times. The captain did, too. We didn’t have a detective back then.”
“Okay.” Martin dropped his elbows down on the table and stared point-blank at Hazel’s photo. “We need to start the investigation into Hazel’s disappearance from scratch, like you woke up this morning and she was gone. If she’s still alive, there’s a reason. You say her circle was small, and that’s a good thing, especially since we both believe she knew whoever took her. She’s how we solve this case—hell, maybe all of these cases. She’s how we find her.”
Eddie lifted up on his toes several times and shook his hands loose at his sides.
“There’s just one thing, Eddie. We have to solve this without letting anyone know that we’re looking for her. We cannot let anyone know we believe she’s tied to the Ama Chaplin case.”
“Why?” Eddie came down on his heels.
“If whoever has Hazel realizes we know she’s alive, he will do one of two things—neither of them good.”
“Leave town, or…” Eddie planted his hands on his hips and dropped his chin to his chest.
“Shit.” Martin closed his eyes. The reporter from the AJC. She may not have enough of a scoop for a story, but she also may not have been showing all her cards. If she ran a story connecting Ama and Hazel, implicating Eddie Stevens in the murder of his own daughter, it would follow him for the rest of his life. If Esther instead took the angle about Hazel being alive, Tarson Woods would be crawling with do-gooders and the morbidly curious. Whether they meant well or not, they’d likely do more harm than good, and either way, they’d put a dangerous kind of pressure on whoever had taken her.
“Hang tight, Eddie. I gotta make a phone call.”
Back at his desk, Martin recovered the number Esther Kim used to call him and dialed her back. He glanced at the clock. It was past ten.
“Change your mind?” Esther answered, sounding very much awake.
“You can’t run your story,” he said.
“Because I’m right?”
“I don’t know that yet,” he answered.
“I’m running the story.”
“You can’t even have enough of a story to run!” Martin pled, exasperated.
Esther threw Martin’s words back at him. “You don’t know that yet.”
Martin drummed his fingers on his desk. He couldn’t ask her what she knew without revealing there was something to know. He needed something to point her to, something to keep her busy, in case she agreed and her word wasn’t as good as her pride.
“I don’t know what you know and what you don’t, but I am positive you don’t have the whole story,” he offered.
“I’m listening,” she answered.
“I don’t just have Hazel’s file on my desk. I have seven files.”
“Would the name on one of those files happen to be Toni Hargrove?” Esther asked, her voice sickeningly sweet. “I find it interesting, you coming to Tarson. Could you not get a job anywhere else after your little habit ruined your career and flushed your solve rate down the toilet?”
Martin went utterly still, his lips ajar, his mind racing. She’d dug into his history, his life. Here he’d thought he’d start over in Tarson, bring only the pieces of his old life with him that he wanted to, and she was going to unpack his entire past, spinning it whichever way made for a more compelling story.
Martin heard the sounds of paper rustling over the phone.
“Your wife—sorry, ex-wife—didn’t have much to say about you or Ms. Hargrove’s murder. She’s pretty frigid, honestly. Guess you have to learn how to be cold when you’re married to a detective. Or maybe that’s just her nature. She’s only quoted once in the article so far. I worry for her, though. You know how readers respond when a woman says ‘no comment’ to crimes against other women.”
“That’s low. And honestly, it’s the easy way out. It’s beneath you. Or it should be.”
“So give me something I can use,” Esther countered.
Martin managed a terse laugh, but inside he was in full panic. Stacy didn’t deserve this. Neither did Eddie or Hazel. “You’re right. This is a high-profile situation, and it deserves to be on the front page of every paper. It’s also much, much bigger than you realize. Eddie Stevens is a piece of it, but just a piece. You wait to run your story, and I’ll bring you into the station and tell you everything I know. You’ll have plenty of information, I assure you. Way too much to fit in a filler line from a washed-up detective’s ex-wife.”
“It’s tempting, really. But there’s just one thing. The space for my story has already been committed—front page of the Sunday paper. I’ve been working on this story for months, and it’ll be my first front-page Sunday byline, and I’m not giving that up. And if seven files are on your desk, and Eddie Stevens isn’t charged with anything yet, it sounds like you’re either tallying up a body count before filing, or you’re looking at someone else—someone who isn’t in custody. The public has a right to know, don’t they?”
“Just wait, please. I’m begging you. One life might be actively at stake, and if you run this story, you’ll increase the risk that we don’t find this person alive.”