All Dressed in White

64

Detective Marlene Henson sprawled on the area rug in her den and allowed her two standard poodles to jump on top of her. They were three-year-old sisters named Cagney and Lacey. Even on days when her daughter Taylor stayed with her father, these two sturdy girls gave Marlene someone to come home to.

Their exuberance about Mommy coming home temporarily quelled, the two dogs ran into the living room to continue an epic round of wrestling. She had learned the hard way when she adopted them as puppies not to leave anything breakable within a few feet of the floor. The upside was she no longer had so many knickknacks cluttering the house.

She felt her eyes begin to close involuntarily. Marlene loved her job, but today had been a rough one.

She had inherited the Amanda Pierce case-already cold-three years earlier when homicide detective Martin Cooper died of an aneurysm in his sleep. She reached out to Sandra and Walter the following week. She had told them that no new leads had come in of late, but Marlene had a standing alert with the department that she be called-day or night-if that ever changed. Then last night came the tip about the body. Since then she’d been working more than twenty hours straight.

She was starting to doze off right in the middle of the floor when her cell phone buzzed on the coffee table. It was a New York City area code.

“Henson,” she said, stifling a yawn.

“Detective, it’s Leo Farley.”

The ex-cop, she thought. He’d been invaluable in dealing with his daughter and her team. She was usually distrustful of the media, but she trusted Leo, and he seemed to trust the people who worked for that show.

“Hi, Leo. What can I do for you?”

“We know you’ve got officers watching Jeff, but they need to keep their eyes on his wife, Meghan White, too. Laurie got some photographs from that intern we told you about-”

Marlene sat up immediately. “She did what?” So much for trusting them.

“She thought she had a better shot getting him to open up if she went in alone. I waited outside, worried every moment. But she was right. It worked. Jeremy gave her some facts we didn’t know before.”

Marlene felt a headache coming on as Leo started talking about pictures of Meghan looking lovingly at Jeff, and then fighting with Amanda the very night she disappeared. She was close to a migraine by the time Leo got to Meghan’s phone call to Amanda’s lawyer and her connection to the girl who’d been killed at Colby.

“Where are you?” he asked. “Do you have a location on Jeff and Meghan right now?”

“I came home, but I’m sure everything’s fine. Last I heard, they were at dinner with their friends. Let me call my lead guy on the scene now.”

She hung up without saying good-bye, pulled up the number for Sergeant Jim Peters, and hit enter.

“Thought you were grabbing some shut-eye,” he said.

“Me, too.” No such luck, she thought.

“This sure is a beautiful place. I almost feel guilty collecting overtime for sitting here. Almost.”

“You’re still watching Hunter?”

“Yeah. He and the wife went to their room after dinner. If I see him leave, I’ll duck into the stairwell and call Tanner downstairs. He’s camped out near the elevators. We’ve been rotating for a change of scenery.”

“So they’re both there: Jeff and the wife?”

“No, just him. They had some kind of dustup and she stormed out of here a second ago. I went into the stairwell so she wouldn’t spot me.”

“Where’d she go? Is Tanner following her?”

“No, we’re trailing the husband, I thought.”

“We were. And are. Just call Tanner, okay? Tell him to keep his eyes on the wife, and you watch Jeff. Don’t lose either one of them.”

Marlene had changed into fresh work clothes and was putting on her shoes when Sergeant Peters called her back.

“You found Meghan?” she asked.

“No. I just talked to Tanner. He says she walked through the lobby, but he doesn’t know where she went from there.”