Three Women Disappear Read online

  I waited for the lunch hour to pass, then drove to the facility, punched in the access code, and watched the steel gates slide open. Anthony’s units were at the back, in an alcove beyond the sight lines of his fellow tenants. Picking the industrial lock—Anthony, like his uncle, trusted me only so far—took longer than I care to admit. I stepped inside, flicked on the overhead, pulled the door shut behind me.

  If I’d been the one writing Anthony’s eulogy, I’d have led with this: He was the most compulsively organized human being I’ve ever met. The walls of the double unit were lined with identical floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, each cabinet representing a calendar year. Turn to the left once you walked through the door and you could go from 1995 all the way to 2017 without finding a single sheet of paper out of place. I turned to the right. The year I wanted was 2015.

  My knees knocked a little as I stood there flipping through manila folders. Something about being in a dead man’s storage unit spooked me, as if maybe his ghost was camped out here, contemplating its next move. Lucky for me the living Anthony had made things so easy: Serena Flores’s personnel file was right where I’d expected it to be, halfway into a row marked DOMESTIC HIRES.

  According to the paperwork, Serena was in her late twenties, just five feet tall, single, or had been when Anthony hired her. Previous address: a town in Mexico called Tecomán. A note penciled in the margins said Tecomán was a drug-smuggling hotbed midway down the West Coast. Maybe Anthony thought Serena would be amenable to more than housework. Maybe he’d offered her a lucrative little sideline, then pressed too hard when she said no. I wondered if that was a motive I could sell to Vincent. Something to get him off Sarah’s tail. And mine.

  Serena’s next of kin—Símon Flores, older brother—lived in the Bowman Heights section of West Tampa. He was a vet tech. The file gave no info beyond his occupation, address, and work number. With any luck, at least one of the three would still be valid. I jogged back to my car, took out the burner phone, and started dialing. A woman answered. I heard barking in the background.

  “I was hoping I could talk to Símon Flores,” I said, cranking up my slight southern accent. A little charm never hurts.

  “Sorry,” the woman said, “he’s in with a patient. Can I take a message?”

  “No, thank you. I’ll catch him later.”

  She’d already told me what I wanted to know: a) Símon still worked there, and b) he was on duty right now.

  Fifteen highway miles and a stretch of side streets later, I arrived at Ybor City Animal Hospital. The receptionist was busy handling a small backup of incoming and outgoing customers, some straddling carrying cases, one with a cockatoo perched on his shoulder. I slipped into the waiting room, picked up a magazine, kept my eyes open for a Mexican male in scrubs. An elderly woman sat down opposite me and started weeping at full volume into a floral handkerchief. I figured things weren’t looking good for Fido.

  I’d called in a background check during the drive over. Símon had come to the US in 2005, applied for and received citizenship in 2014. Nothing on his record said he was anything other than hardworking and upstanding. The kind of guy a sister with a conditional visa might lean on when her employer turned up DOA. Especially if she was the one who’d killed him.

  I didn’t have long to wait before a Latino in blue scrubs pushed his way through a set of double doors and sat down next to the old woman. The name tag above his breast pocket confirmed he was Símon Flores. I looked him over. North of thirty, tall, hefty. Not hefty like Anthony, but large enough to get noticed on the street. The way he carried himself—shoulders back, chest out, eyes full of compassion—you’d have thought he was the vet instead of the tech. Maybe he’d been promoted. Maybe he’d put himself through canine med school and was now Dr. Símon Flores. I hoped it was true. The more he had to lose, the easier my job became.

  He set a hand on the weeping woman’s back, called her Carol, spoke to her in hushed tones. His best guess was that her cat had eaten a poisoned mouse. The news was more than Carol could bear. Her weeping turned convulsive. She seemed to want to say something but couldn’t find the breath. I understood what she was going through. I’d seen the look on her face—equal parts remorse and sorrow—countless times before. Símon, without meaning to, had just accused her of killing her cat. He leaned in and draped an arm around her shoulders. For a second I thought he was going to kiss her forehead.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  I could tell he meant it, and that made me glad. Símon had the kind of bleeding heart that would never turn away—or turn in—a sister. It was clear now what course I had to take. Confronting him would be the same as warning Serena off, but tail him and chances were I’d be talking to her before sundown.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asked Carol. “Anything at all?”

  I thought, Yeah, a new cat.

  He gave her a card, told her to call day or night. If you took away the accent, his English was better than mine.

  “Thank you,” Carol sobbed. There was a tear in Símon’s eye, too.

  I thought, Better your sister than my wife.

  Chapter 9

  Sarah Roberts-Walsh

  October 12

  11:30 a.m.

  Interview Room C

  “THE JEWELS,” Haagen said. “You stole Anna Costello’s jewels.”

  “I didn’t steal them,” I said. “I mean, I did, but I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even know I had them until it was too late.”

  “Really?” she said. “You accidentally walked off with six figures’ worth of your employer’s jewelry?”

  Her grin was pure gloating, as if now she’d pinned down my motive, as if she was looking forward to watching me squirm out of this one. I just stared at my fingernails, refusing to take the bait.

  “All right,” she said, “let’s back up. I don’t want to miss any of this. You’re in the kitchen. You know Anthony reached out to Vincent before he expired. So what next?”

  I shrugged.

  “For a while,” I told her, “I just froze.”

  I stood beside Anthony’s body and couldn’t muster a single thought. I couldn’t make my feet move. Then the spell broke, and I grabbed my purse and ran for my car. I floored it down that mile-long driveway, desperate to get off the property before Vincent’s men could stop me.

  “No time to call 911?” Haagen asked.

  I thought about it—I did—but Anthony was dead, and if Vincent heard that I’d called the cops, then he’d know it was me who’d found his nephew’s body. At the very least he’d want to talk to me. The kind of talk where I was tied to a chair. And if he didn’t like what I had to say, there’d be a well-fed alligator somewhere in the Everglades. If Anthony had been wounded, if there’d been any chance of saving him, then I’d have made the call. But he was gone, and there was no point in risking my own life.

  “Heroic,” Haagen said.

  “I’m not claiming to be a hero.”

  “No, but what you are claiming doesn’t make any sense. How did you come by those jewels if you ran right out of the house?”

  “I’m getting to that,” I told her.

  I needed to pull over, collect my thoughts. I was shaking uncontrollably. And bleeding. There was blood leaking from the gash in my pants. I could feel it spilling down my calf. But the only place to pull over was a narrow shoulder, and that would have left me sitting out in the open.

  I rounded a bend, saw a cop car idling in a small clearing. My blood really started pumping then. I thought for sure he was waiting for me. I couldn’t say if I was speeding or not, but I yanked my foot off the accelerator. Sean taught me never to hit the brake: It only makes you look guilty, he said. My eyes shot to the rearview mirror, but the cop didn’t budge. At first I felt relieved. Then I figured he was radioing ahead, setting a trap. I braced for a fleet of squad cars, but they never came.

  I made it to the nearest gas station, parked in front of the convenien
ce store, and sat gripping the steering wheel.

  “Get ahold of yourself, Sarah,” I said out loud. “Think.”

  First things first: I needed to stop the bleeding. I pulled a handkerchief from my purse, took off my belt, leaned forward, and fashioned a makeshift tourniquet. As I was straightening back up, I saw it: a PBS tote bag resting on the seat beside me.

  All I knew was that it couldn’t be mine. I’m not the tote bag type, and I’ve never given a dime to public television. Slowly, as if something might jump out and bite me, I reached across and pulled the straps open.

  Instead of a rat, I found pearl necklaces, a tiara, a gem-encrusted bracelet. Anna’s collection. She’d shown it to me more than once. I’d even say she rubbed my nose in it. Any one of those pieces cost more than I make in a year. Maybe a decade.

  “And still you didn’t call the police?”

  “Are you kidding? That bag was one more reason not to call the police. Someone had put it there. Someone was trying to frame me.”

  And what could I do but run? From Vincent and the police.

  “Any idea who that someone might be?”

  “There are only two possibilities,” I said.

  “Let me guess: the missus and the maid?”

  I nodded. It had to be one of them.

  “Serena, maybe,” Haagen said. “But you think Anna Costello would part with her personal fortune? On purpose?”

  I shrugged.

  “She’d get it back, wouldn’t she? Once I was caught. Meanwhile, she’d count on you asking that very question. What better way to throw you off the scent? And Vincent, too, for that matter. She’d been robbed. She was a victim, like her husband.”

  Haagen took a sip of water while she mulled things over.

  “Not bad,” she said. “But I have an alternative theory.”

  I waited, knowing full well she’d share it with me whether or not I asked.

  “Maybe you really did black out,” she said. “But it had nothing to do with diabetes. Maybe Anthony caught you robbing his wife. Maybe you only saw one way forward. You hadn’t planned on killing him. You figured they’d blame the theft on the maid. Everyone blames the maid. But stabbing a man to death—that’s more than a fluctuation in blood sugar. That’s a real shock to the system, the kind of thing a mind might try to erase. Don’t you think?”

  Of course that made sense, but it wasn’t what happened. The question was how to convince Haagen, who seemed bound and determined to throw away the key.

  “There’s just one problem,” I said. “If I was planning to blame Serena, then why did I run?”

  It was her turn to shrug.

  “Maybe you’re not that bright,” she said. “Or maybe you’re the type who’s always dreamed of running away, starting over.”

  Chapter 10

  I TOLD her I wasn’t that type at all. Not consciously, anyway.

  As usual, Haagen wasn’t buying it.

  “Let’s focus on the timeline,” she said. “I’m guessing you didn’t gun it straight for Texas?”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

  “So where’d you go next?”

  With the tourniquet in place, I pulled out of the gas station, thinking, Sarah, you need to be anywhere but here. I needed a safe haven. Someplace where I could patch up my leg, find some insulin, and above all else devise a plan.

  Only one destination came to mind.

  No way, Sarah, I told myself. No way do you bring this to her doorstep.

  Aunt Lindsey: my mother’s sister, and my only surviving relative. The woman who raised me. An ER nurse who spent her weekdays coaxing strangers away from death’s door and her weekends managing a community garden. Aunt Lindsey, the purest heart I knew. She’d give her last possession to anyone who asked.

  Which is exactly why you can’t ask, I thought.

  But there wasn’t anyone else. Least of all Sean. If Vincent was looking for me, if the police were looking for me, then Sean would be their first stop. And if he needed to serve me up to save his skin, I had no doubt he’d do it.

  An hour later I came skidding to a halt in Aunt Lindsey’s gravel driveway. I grabbed my glasses from the glove box, hesitated before reaching for the tote bag. I couldn’t leave it in the car, but how would I explain the contents to my aunt? Not that she was likely to demand an explanation.

  I dragged my injured leg up the splintering steps and burst through the door. No point in knocking: she never wore her hearing aid at home, and she didn’t believe in locks.

  “Aunt Linds!” I called out, standing between the twin rubber plants in her narrow, gleaming foyer.

  I waited, heard nothing besides the ticking of an antique clock. I set the tote bag beside an umbrella holder and started down the hallway, checking the living room, the dining room, the den. In the kitchen, I stared out the back window, scanning the foliage she let run wild because, as she put it, repairing the ozone was more important than having a neatly trimmed lawn. Never mind the periodic infestations of mice and spiders: every creature had a right to live.

  “Aunt Linds? Are you upstairs?”

  “I’ll be right with you,” came a voice from the greenhouse off the kitchen. “I’m just trying to resurrect this basil plant.”

  A few beats later, she rounded the corner in her rubber clogs, her apron wet and streaked with soil.

  “Hey, sweetie,” she said. “It’s so nice to—”

  She stopped short once she got a close look at me.

  “What on earth…?”

  We stood at arm’s length while she studied my wounded leg, my torn clothes, my panicked expression. I could see her counting to five in her head as she took a breath, a technique she’d picked up at the ER.

  “You sit down now,” she said, pulling a chair away from the table. “Tell me all about it. I’ll get you a glass of water.”

  The promise of a brief rest made me realize just how long I’d been teetering on collapse.

  “I will,” I promised. “I’ll tell you everything. But I have to make a call first.”

  No need to say it was an emergency. She pulled a cordless phone from the wall, handed it to me, and turned to leave the room.

  “I’ll just be in the greenhouse,” she said.

  I called Anna. Twice. The second time, I gathered myself and left a message.

  “Anna, this is Sarah. I’m assuming you know by now…Listen, I have your jewelry. I have no idea how your collection wound up in my car, but I don’t want any part of…”

  I stopped. I didn’t hang up. Instead, I pressed the number 3: message deleted. No good would come from a voice mail. Anything on tape could be manipulated, entered into evidence. I took a breath, then called Anna’s pastor, the person most likely to know where she was. Anna’s not religious by nature, but sitting on the church’s board of directors made her feel a little better about being a mob wife, and she and Father Priatto had grown close. Maybe too close. Sometimes I wondered…

  The good father picked up on the first ring.

  “Hello,” I said, my voice already breaking. “This is Sarah Roberts-Walsh, Anna Costello’s personal chef. I don’t know if you remember me, but we—”

  “Of course I remember you, Sarah. How are you?”

  “Good. I’m good. I was just…I’m trying to get ahold of Anna, and I was wondering if you might happen to know where she is?”

  The line went silent. I could hear my own breathing, cycled through the electronic circuits, amplified back to me in the receiver. The call was still active. The father just wasn’t talking.

  “Father?” I said. “Are we still—?”

  “Where are you right now, Sarah?”

  “I’m with my…I’m sorry, but why would you ask that?”

  “Where are you?” he repeated, his tone cold, clinical.

  “Why would you want to know where I am?”

  “I think you know why.”

  I felt suddenly bloodless. The Costellos had judges and commissioner
s on their payroll. Why not a priest as well? What better informant than the man who hears confession for all the neighborhood cops and thugs?

  “I don’t,” I lied. “It isn’t obvious at all.”

  Aunt Lindsey was standing in the doorway now, looking me up and down, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and how she could set it right.

  “Let me give you a piece of very generous advice,” Father Priatto said. “You don’t know who you’re up against. Jail might be the best of your options at this point. I suggest you tell me where you are. I can create a degree of amnesty for you.”

  “It wasn’t me who—”

  “Stop right there,” he said. “You know what you did. They will come for you. I guarantee it. And when they find you—”

  I left him talking to a dial tone.

  Chapter 11

  AUNT LINDSEY bit back her concern long enough to lighten the mood.

  “Anna Costello goes to church?” she said. “Now that’s a hoot.”

  I almost laughed.

  “I think Anthony uses the diocese to launder money,” I said. “Nonprofit status makes for good cover.”

  “And your detective husband sent you to work for that man?”

  My complexion must have darkened a little. Telling her why he’d sent me to work for Tony wouldn’t have given her any comfort.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Last thing I want to do is shame you.”

  “Anyway, I don’t work for him anymore.”

  “I have a feeling that’s bad news. What happened?”

  I wasn’t ready to talk. I needed a prop, something to ease me into the conversation. I looked around for the tote bag, then remembered I’d left it in the foyer.

  “There’s something I want to show you,” I said.

  I pushed myself up from the table, took a step, felt my knees buckle. Aunt Lindsey had her arms around me before I could hit the floor.