I exhaled and rubbed my forehead in frustration. “No, she is not in school, Joe. They called and said she hasn’t been there all day.”
He went quiet.
“Well, that’s not good. Have you tried calling her?”
“Of course, I have. She doesn’t pick up and she turned her location tracker off, so I can’t use Find My Phone to track her.”
He exhaled. “She’s sneaky, huh? You know what? She’s just being a teenager. It happens. We’re just not used to her doing stuff like this.”
It happens. Is that all you have to say?
“Well, it shouldn’t be happening,” I said. “This is not okay. She needs to know this. She can’t just skip school without telling us. Especially not now that we have a killer on the loose. This is terrifying to me. What do we do?” I hadn’t told Joe about the case, but he’d have seen it on the news.
“Listen, it’s Charlene. She’s a smart girl. I’m sure she will be fine. She’ll be home later today pretending like she was in school, and then we’ll have to talk to her, tell her that they called and that we know she is lying. She’ll tell us she’s sorry and that it will never happen again. She’ll probably cry a little. But it will be okay. I promise. Cut her some slack. She’s probably just acting out a little. I’m sure she can sense that something is going on with us.”
“So now it’s my fault?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“That’s what you meant.”
“You can’t expect our children to not react to this, Billie Ann. Charlene is a smart kid. She probably already knows we’re separating. She could easily have heard us talking. Listen I gotta go. I have a five o’clock meeting later today with the architect. I’ll be home afterward.”
We hung up. I parked in front of the station and turned the engine off. I felt bad. No, I felt absolutely awful. Was Joe right? Was this affecting my children already? I couldn’t bear the thought. How could I do this to them? What kind of a mother was I being to them?
How can I not? They want to see me happy. I’m teaching them that it’s okay to choose happiness.
I took the elevator up to the third floor and got out. Tom and Scott were sitting at their desks as I walked in. Tom lifted his head and saw me.
“Well, you look like sh—”
I lifted my hand. “I’m gonna stop you right there. I do not want to hear it. I don’t have time for it.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it in a bad way. You seem like you’re in a bad mood or something.”
I looked at them both, deliberately choosing to ignore his comments. Who cared what I looked like? Yeah, I was in a terrible mood. Could you blame me? It wasn’t exactly a good day for me.
“I need to know everything we have on Cassandra’s parents,” I said. “I know we have gone through them before, but I want to dig deeper. Let’s go over everything again. Especially her father. Background checks, do they have priors, where do they work, where did they used to live before they came here, who have they been married to? Heck, I want to know what they had for breakfast this morning. They both seem like they’re hiding something, and I need to know what it is. Tom, you’re on that one.”
He nodded and sat up straight in his chair.
“Scott?”
Scott smiled behind the soft curls. I wanted to tell him he needed a haircut, but this wasn’t the time.
“I need you to find all the information you can on Ashley Wittman, the girlfriend who disappeared. Does she have any connections to any of the others, to the Perezes or Marissa Clemens? If they used to play tennis together or be Girl Scouts together, I want to know, okay? If her sister’s husband works for any of them, I need to know. Okay? Stuff like that. Details. The answer is in the details, you hear me?”
He nodded. “I’m on it. And the pediatrician’s family? Do you want me to run backgrounds on them too? He wasn’t married but his parents and siblings and all that?”
I paused.
“Pediatrician?”
Scott nodded. He snapped his fingers. “Yes, you know—what’s his name—Bryan Henderson.”
“He was a pediatrician? How come I didn’t know that?”
Scott threw out his arms. “I thought you knew.”
“No one told me this! You just said he was a doctor.”
“Technically he is a doctor.”
I grabbed my car keys and started to walk toward the elevator again. “But this is an example of an important detail,” I said, turning to Scott. “These are the kinds of details I need to know.”
Scott looked up at me, his expression unreadable as he gestured to the papers scattered around him.
“I’m working on it,” he told me. “It’s all here.”
I took a deep breath, trying to contain my impatience. It was my fault; I had been distracted. I turned back around and continued to walk away.
“Where are you going?” Scott asked.
“To the pediatrician’s office,” I replied. “Text me the address and all the info you have on him ASAP.”
With that, I stepped into the elevator and pushed the button, doing my best to not be mad at myself and my team for missing this important aspect. The doors closed behind me, and I was enveloped in the sound of the elevator’s humming as it carried me down. I knew this information was important, and time was of the essence.
When I arrived at the lobby, I hurried to my car, my feet moving faster than my thoughts. This could be the missing link I was looking for. If Cassandra or Emma was one of Bryan Henderson’s patients, then that would link them all together. It could be my missing piece.
