“Can I get you anything, m’lady? Or you, sir?”
Holding up my hand, I shook my head before pulling a tissue from my pocket to wipe my stuffy nose. I sure hoped I wasn’t getting a cold. “I’m fine, thanks.”
Hobbs agreed. “Thanks, but I’m good, too.”
“So what can I do for you?” he asked before he took a sip of his coffee from a big green mug with snowflakes painted on it.
“We’re just curious about the opinion piece you wrote on the missing girls and the connections you made.”
He winced. “Yeah, I really stirred up a hornet’s nest there, didn’t I?”
With a wry smile, I agreed. “Yeah, you really stepped in it. Over fifteen hundred comments and counting.”
Westcott gave me a sheepish glance. “Well, what is a journalist without adversary? It’s the nature of the beast.”
“So what made you choose these cases and question whether the police were picking and choosing importance based on their backgrounds?” Hobbs asked.
“Truthfully? It sort of just fell into my lap, and all I did was spin.”
I put my elbow on the table and cupped my chin in my hand. “But tons of people go missing all the time and these girls hardly made a splash, their disappearances didn’t even make it to the local news as far as I know. The biggest deal made was on their Facebook pages, and that was from family and friends. What drew your attention to them? How did you find out about them?”
Westcott looked at me thoughtfully for a moment before he answered. “I’m always looking for a scoop. I’m low man on the totem pole at this online only magazine I work for—”
“You work for The Scene, right?” I asked.
He smiled and leaned forward, cupping his chin. “Yeah. That’s it. And the answer’s simple, really. I usually get the fluff pieces. You know, local stuff here and in the surrounding areas like the Christmas tree lighting, the sled races, stuff like that. But I’m always looking to prove myself, move up the ladder, get stories with some meat and potatoes. Call me foolish, but that’s how you get ahead in this business. So I do a lot of looking at missing persons cases, murders, you name it, and like I said, this just sort of fell into my lap.”
I understood what it was to have to prove your worth. I’d done it when I was an interior designer. I’d scoped out hotels and restaurants, looking for updated décor and presented them to my bosses with my ideas for renovations all the time. It wasn’t a bad trait to have, but I got the impression Westcott did it for less altruistic reasons than I had.
Still, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Smiling, I nodded, folding my hands in front of me. “I get where you’re coming from. I was once young and hungry myself.”
He bobbed his head, pushing his glasses up along the bridge of his nose with slender fingers. “Anyway, when I came across the one missing girl, Lisa Simons, the one who’s been missing the longest, I didn’t think a lot about it other than she was a pretty girl with no leads on her disappearance…but then Jasmine Franks popped up, and man, did she look like Lisa. It made me start looking for more missing girls with similarities. I do a lot of Facebook searches, Twitter, all forms of social media, and that’s how I found Kerry Carver, and it blew me out of the water that no one had bothered to put this together. I tried talking to Lisa Simons family, but they wanted no part of me or the article.”
“So next you went to Jasmine Franks’s mother to see why a bigger deal hadn’t been made of her disappearance and why the police weren’t doing more?”
He looked at Hobbs, his eyes intense. “Yep, and you know the rest. The police said she’d probably run off with a boyfriend somewhere.”
“But you don’t think she did?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said so cavalierly, it was like a kidney punch. “My gut says probably not, but my job isn’t to know or not to know. I’m just a lowly investigative journalist trying to get a leg up to bigger things.”
So he wasn’t invested in their stories—not truly invested—he was only interested in stirring people up.
“So you brought the story to your editor?” Hobbs asked as he unzipped his jacket.
“Yep, and they finally gave me a shot, so I did an opinion piece because the cops didn’t seem to be taking their disappearances very seriously. As in, no one had even mentioned the fact that they all disappeared within a thirty- or forty-mile radius of each other, and of course they look a lot alike. I wondered why the police hadn’t put it together the way I had. I wondered why it wasn’t getting any attention. The economic-class supposition thing just emerged as I wrote it. I mean, were the police deciding one person’s life was less important than another’s?”
My inner suspicion was this guy wanted to be noticed, and he didn’t care how he did it, and even though his questions were valid enough, I didn’t feel like he was fighting for truth, justice and the American way.
He didn’t come off as totally sleazy, but he didn’t exactly come off as a guy who wanted these women found because he gave two hoots. It was just a story to suit his climb up the journalistic ladder and that wasn’t sitting well with me.
After that revelation, I just wanted to be done with him. “A fair question indeed. But that’s not why we asked you to meet us, Westcott.”
He hooked his finger in the handle of the mug, preparing to take another sip. “Why did you?”
“My Uncle Monty,” I said, almost perversely enjoying the momentary confused look on his face.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Being the journalist you are, I’m sure you heard about the murder at the convenience store out on Snowy Road? Feeney’s Fuel and Gruel?”
Then he nodded, pretending he had any sympathy. “I did. Shame. The kid was around my age. Left behind a wife and a baby. What about it?”
“There was someone else involved in the shooting last night. It was my uncle. He had to have major surgery as a result of his involvement.”
Now I had his attention. He leaned forward with obvious interest. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t know how I can help.”
“Have you heard about the police finding Kerry Carver’s lipstick at the scene of the crime?”
He blinked and then he swallowed, his throat working. “Holy Cow! I had no idea. How did you find that out?”
“It was all over Facebook, and apparently on this afternoon’s news,” Hobbs explained.
What kind of investigative journalist didn’t keep alerts on Google about the subjects of their stories?
Drumming his long fingers on the table, he asked, “I still don’t know how you think I can help?”
I’m not sure what it was about Westcott, but the longer I talked to him, the more I felt like he was no better than Abraham Weller—he just didn’t have a law degree. He was an ambulance chaser just like Weller.
Hobbs spoke then, I think sensing my discomfort. “We were hoping you knew something about Kerry Carver’s disappearance that you didn’t disclose to the public. We realize we’re asking you to reveal something you might not yet be ready to reveal, but there’s a killer on the loose who needs to be identified. If you have any information that can help us, we’d appreciate it. You never know what might trigger something the police can look into.”