12th of Never

Chapter 38

CONKLIN AND I stood outside Tracey Pendleton’s front door. Her house was small and nearly identical to the surrounding cheap wooden houses, which had been built in the fifties.

School was out. Kids called out to each other as they biked along the patched asphalt on the poor residential street. Cars with loud radios and old mufflers sped past.

We had knocked on the door, peered through the dirty windows, and looked up and down to see if Pendleton’s Camaro was parked anywhere on Flora Street. It wasn’t.

It didn’t appear that the ME’s night-shift security guard was at home.

Conklin and I had our weapons out and were ready to execute the warrant that gave us the legal right to break down Pendleton’s door.

I stood back, looked under the cushion of the porch rocker, and found it just as Conklin kicked open the door.

“Oops,” I said, holding up the key.

Conklin called out, “Miss Pendleton, this is the police. Please come out with your hands over your head. We just want to talk to you.”

There was no response and no sound coming from the house at all.

The house had two and a half rooms—about four hundred square feet altogether—and I could see almost every inch of it from the doorway.

We were standing in the living room, which was furnished with a worn brown sofa and a sagging armchair. The TV was off, and the only movement was the upward spiral of dust motes in the dim ray of sunlight coming through the window.

Conklin went ahead of me and toed open the bedroom door. A moment later, he called, “Clear.”

I went ahead to the kitchenette, checked the broom closet, then called out to Conklin that the room was empty.

There was a pot of old food on the stove, one dirty dish, one glass in the sink. The refrigerator was empty, except for the bottle of vodka in the freezer. The garbage pail held two beer bottles and an empty can of Beefaroni.

Conklin came in and said, “Her suitcase is in the closet. I couldn’t find a weapon.”

He checked under the sink and found more vodka standing among the containers of Mr. Clean, Easy-Off, and Windex.

We went through the house again. There was no computer, no sign of pets. No purse. No keys. We searched the hamper, the cabinets, and drawers, but found nothing but the residue of a life lived on the night shift and boozy days spent passed out on a single bed.

Conklin used a dish towel to pick up the phone. He tapped the redial button, then let me hear the ringing. The call was answered by a recorded woman’s mechanical voice announcing the time and temperature.

Conklin said, “It’s like she checked the time, went to work, then vanished along with Faye Farmer’s body. Where’d she go? Who is she, anyway?”

I called the squad room.

“Lieutenant, we need a warrant to dump Pendleton’s phone records and see her bank activity. Yeah, there’s no sign she’s been home in the last twenty-four hours. There’s hardly any sign of life here at all.”