She shook her head. “No, but he definitely works or worked for my ex.”
“Well, that we might be able to do some good with.” Mack looked at her and smiled and said, “And now we have a reason to contact your ex.”
She looked at him in horror. “Oh, no. No, no, no, you can’t do that.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because he’ll get really angry,” she said, clearly worried.
“So I suppose now you’re worried I’ll get hurt.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Actually I’m not,” she said. “I’m worried Chester will get hurt.”
At that, Mack raised his hands. “I don’t get it. Why aren’t you worried about me getting hurt?”
“Because your head is too thick, and you’re too stubborn,” she said, “but Chester here is much smaller, and he could really get hurt.”
Chester immediately nodded. “She’s right. I could. I definitely could.” But even he couldn’t hold back his chuckle.
Mack glared at him. “Don’t you start,” he said. “Go contact her ex and see if he has this person working for him.”
“He used to work for him,” she said. “I didn’t see him much in the last year I was there.”
“Did you see him at all?”
She frowned and said, “He was off doing jobs for him, so I don’t know what he was doing, but I didn’t see much of him.”
“Do you know what kind of jobs he was doing?”
“No, I don’t, and he told me that I wouldn’t understand it.”
“Well, that could very well be true. Who knows what he was into. And, if you didn’t know, you couldn’t be asked to explain it to anybody,” he said.
“Maybe so.” She shrugged. “In the end, asking too many questions of my ex had proven to be problematic for me more than once, so I stopped and didn’t pursue it.”
“Which is probably smart,” he said in understanding. “This Snoz guy could actually be somebody who does jobs, like attacking people.”
Her eyes grew round. “That would not be very much fun,” she said. “I hate to think of my ex-husband involved in all that stuff, but the evidence does seem to be fairly overwhelming.”
“The bottom line is,” Mack said, “that we need to find out who this guy is, and maybe this other one as well, so we can figure out what they were doing at the cemetery.”
She looked at the first one again and tapped the photo. “He still looks familiar, but I just don’t remember where I’ve seen him.”
“Well, that’s a start,” Mack said. “We’ll flash these photos around town and see what else we can come up with.”
She smiled. “Good. Then we can go after that little boy.”
“What do you mean, go after that little boy?” Chester asked.
She faced him. “Thaddeus was kidnapped, and that little boy seemed—” She stopped. “I can’t say suspicious, but definitely something was off about him.”
“I heard about that,” he said. “Arnold was working on tracking down the people there. We don’t have many problems in that corner at all,” he said, “even though it is a known lower-income area.”
“Interesting,” she muttered. “Any idea why?”
“Doesn’t matter, we’re just grateful.”
She had to admit he had a point. Because any problem-free areas benefited everybody. “I’ll walk back up there again,” she said. “I’ll take the animals with me.”
“And just how will you get there?” Mack asked her curiously.
Frowning, she realized that she hadn’t driven her own vehicle here. Suddenly smiling, she asked, “Could you give me a ride, pretty please?”
When Mack hesitated, Chester said, “Considering she’s been recently injured, why don’t you just take her home?”
“Because Mack knows that I’d leave again as soon as he dropped me off,” she said, with a bright smile. “That little boy is on my mind, and I’m worried about him.”
“Well, I guess we could always try to find his family,” Mack said.
“Good.” She hopped to her feet and said, “Chester and Arnold can check out these photos around town.”
“That too,” he said. “Run me off a copy of those pictures, and we’ll take them with us.”
At that, Chester nodded and left to make the copies.
She smiled. “See, Mack? That’s a really good thought.”
“Yes, it is,” he said. “We’re not idiots, you know?”
“No,” she said, “you’re not. But you guys miss things.”
“Unfortunately we miss way too much,” he muttered. “You’re starting to make the whole department look like idiots.”
“You’re not idiots, but sometimes it takes fresh eyes to see what’s really been under your nose the whole time.”
“We don’t want to hear about that,” he said with a laugh. “Nobody wants to think that you’ve overlooked all this stuff.” When Chester returned with the copies for him, Mack got up and said, “Come on. Let’s go take a look.”
Chapter 13
In Mack’s truck they drove up and down the street and several other streets nearby but saw no sign of the little boy. Doreen frowned. “You know what? I think I’ll walk around here on my own,” she said. “I suspect that driving around in this big truck that they don’t recognize is what’s keeping us from finding anything.”
“But that would imply that somebody out here is always watching and keeping track to make sure that nothing is going on that they don’t know about,” he said.
“That’s not all that far off the realm of possibility either,” she said.
He looked at her in surprise, studying the area around them. “Chester was right,” he said. “I’ve hardly been into this area at all. We haven’t had any trouble here.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as unusual?”
He nodded. “Yes, but not criminally unusual.”
“Sure, but, if they do it right, there’s no criminality in it.”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “it just feels odd.”
“Well, I’ve learned to trust your instincts in many ways,” he said, “so keep talking and tell me what’s odd.”
“You would expect to see something here,” she said. “It’s obviously a low-income area, and the people here are clean but not well dressed. They look like they’re hardworking, and maybe they’ve formed together to have like a neighborhood watch to keep the area safe.”
“They also don’t like cops so they could have a criminal element, or just a distaste for authority.”
“Which isn’t unexpected. In theory, we should also be able to knock on a door to find out where Isaac lives.”
“But not if nobody is willing to share that information. And then the question becomes why?” he added. “Why won’t they share that information?” He tapped the steering wheel and nodded.