Cold-Blooded by Carlton Smith

Author:Carlton Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504047593
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

In her initial version of what took place that night, Sarah said that after Elisa and Larry went into the house, she next checked her cell phone for messages. Her boyfriend Jason had called. Sarah called him back. Jason told her that Sarah’s mother and father had come over to Sarah’s apartment, and had taken her new puppy, Ralph, a Maltese terrier about the size of a shoebox. They’d also taken her recently acquired BMW.

Sarah was furious. She called her parents. Elisa by this point had come out of the house and was listening to Sarah as she made the call. Sarah let Mark and Karen know that she was unhappy, and said she’d be over to pick the dog up as soon as she could get there. She didn’t understand why they had taken the dog to begin with, since Jason had agreed to take care of it while Sarah was away. She hung up. Elisa told her to use the truck to drive to Vacaville to pick up Ralph, then to come back to Lodi—about a ninety-minute round trip. Sarah had to come back that night because Elisa needed the truck in the morning—she’d already decided to sell it back in Los Angeles.

Which certainly seemed to indicate that whatever was ailing Larry, it might be permanent.

For Mark and Karen Dutra in Vacaville, the day had begun in terror and ended in recrimination.

Not long after the planes hit the World Trade Center, Karen remembered that her son, a student at Georgetown Law, had a job interview scheduled for that day in New York City. She worried that he might have been in one of the towers, or on one of the planes that had been hijacked. When she couldn’t immediately reach him, she called Sarah. She guessed that Sarah would also be worried, since the whole country was seeing the devastation in New York City. A little after 7 in the morning, she called Sarah and left a message at her Sacramento apartment. Sarah retrieved the message and called Karen back while she and Elise were still in the Whalens’ hotel room at the City of Industry.

Karen thought Sarah sounded strange, even distant. She’d had no idea she had returned to southern California to be with Elisa. When Karen said she’d been worried about her son, Sarah’s older brother, Sarah sounded “robotic,” as Karen put it later—very preoccupied. In fact, she didn’t sound at all concerned about him. Karen was at first mystified as to why Sarah would be in Los Angeles on a school day, and then a little miffed that Sarah was being so blasé about the disasters. “Pray for your brother,” Karen told Sarah.

“I will, Mom,” Sarah said.

Sarah ended the call fairly quickly, and Karen got ready to go to her job, part of her thinking that Sarah had been acting strangely distant for weeks—ever since she had returned from Italy, in fact.

That afternoon, after the Dutras had determined that their son was safe, they’d received a call from a Texas car dealer.

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