Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
What?
That didn’t sound right.
I mean, maybe she wasn’t abducted there, so there wouldn’t be overturned furniture and such.
But still.
Neat as a pin?
I thought I was neat as a pin, but there was probably always something that would indicate I’d recently been there.
“Bed made. Carpets vacuumed. No food spoiling in the fridge,” Harlow kept going. “Like you leave your house before you go on vacation.”
That was off too.
So off, it was hinky, and I could tell all the Angels thought the same.
My attention went back to the photo, and I hyper-focused on it.
“Outside this picture, you?” Luna inquired.
I tore my attention away from Amy to look back at Luna. “We had visitors while we were in there.”
Luna’s eyes got big. So did Harlow’s. Jessie’s narrowed. Tex grunted again.
“What?” Luna demanded.
“Shanti saw them coming, but they were moving too fast, Raye and Willow couldn’t get out in time,” Gemma reported. “Shanti went in to warn them. They hid, and whoever showed left the photo while they were there.”
“The guys that came in didn’t even search the house,” I added. “Saw the back door busted, and although one of them thought that was weird, the other one thought he was stupid for thinking it was.”
“Not smart,” Jessie muttered.
“Didn’t get the impression they were,” I agreed. “But as we listened to them talk, we did get two names. TJ and Dex.”
“TJ and Dex,” Luna muttered as she turned back to the image on the wall.
“What are those two doing?” Joey jerked her chin toward Raye and Shanti, who were engrossed with something on the computer.
“Arthur sent the Food City CCTV footage and other stuff,” Gemma told her. “They’re looking through it.”
At a glance, I noticed they were more than looking through it. They seemed mesmerized by it.
But I turned back to the photo, studying, particularly, Amy’s face.
“She looks like she’s sobbing,” I blurted. “But it also kinda looks like she’s laughing.”
Everyone focused on the pic.
“And why isn’t she tied to the chair?” I queried.
After a few beats, Harlow suggested, “I don’t know, but if I was beat up that bad, if told, I’d probably sit docilely in a chair and hold up a proof-of-life newspaper.”
“And I’m not sure we can tell what her facial expression is, because of that gag,” Gemma said. “But you’re kinda right. I don’t see any tears.”
That was it!
There were no tears!
Joey got up, rounded the desk to the other side of where Luna, Jessie and Harlow were standing, and then bent close to peer at the photo.
She jerked back, announcing, “That’s a fresh mani.”
My breath stuttered.
“It is?” Gemma asked.
“No more than a couple of days old,” Joey declared, and since she was a nail tech, she would know.
“Also, the makeup job is off,” Tex offered.
We turned to him.
He tipped the bottom edge of his rosé can to the picture.
“I’ve taken my fair share of beatings,” he announced. “Given them too. You get swelling and discoloration. She’s got the discoloration of a woman who recently took a beatdown, but no swelling. Beatdown like that, she’d be swelled up for days. By the time the swelling went down, the bruising would not look like that. It’d be a lot more faded.”
Joey scrutinized closer before she decreed, “Holy shit, it’s a makeup job.”
“Yeah, it is,” Raye piped in from the back.
We turned that way.
Raye was sitting at the desk, still staring at the screens, her expression hard.
Shanti was standing straight as an arrow beside it, appearing like she wanted to kill someone.
This did not bode well at all.
“Amy Small doesn’t miss visitation days with her son at prison,” Raye stated. “Including last weekend.”
“Oh my God,” Harlow breathed the words I was sure we were all thinking.
“Prison records show, he also frequently calls her, and that has not dropped off at all in the last two weeks,” Raye added. “The only difference is, he’s calling her on a different number. She has two phones.”
“Son’s name is Dillon Small,” Shanti put in. “On his list of known associates is a Thomas Jefferson “TJ” Boda. And Dillon and TJ run with a loose gang headed by a man named William Dexter.”
I gasped.
TJ and Dex!
“Dexter also pays for Dillon’s phone calls from prison to his momma,” Raye put in.
I stood, my blood heating in my veins, my attention turning back to the photo, what was happening maybe not fully forming in my brain, but I was getting the gist. “She’s playing him. She found her mark at Food City, and I don’t know what they want him to do, but she’s playing him.”
The photo on the screen changed to the mugshot of a white guy whose looks were so average, I might not even remember what he looked like after I turned away from the pic.
“William Dexter,” Shanti said.
That image disappeared and some grainy footage of a parking lot came up, and sure as shit, there was Amy Small, standing beside a car, talking to the man in the earlier mugshot.