Roy Ballard Mystery 01 - Gone the Next by Rehder Ben

Author:Rehder, Ben [Rehder, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

28

Detective Ruelas was staring at me with a total poker face. No emotion whatsoever. It was just after five o’clock — the earliest he’d been able to meet with us. I had almost finished giving him the complete story — everything that had happened since I had called him three days earlier.

I’d told him about the woman arriving at Pierce’s place in the Jetta. Told him about Emma Webster seeing a little girl in Pierce’s truck earlier that year. Told him about setting up the rock camera and putting the dryer in Pierce’s driveway. Described how I was ambushed and temporarily abducted when I went back for the camera. (He exhibited no empathy at all and possibly even looked skeptical.)

I mentioned that Mia had cleverly deduced that the camera might still be on the right-of-way. At this point, he’d glanced appreciatively at Mia, who was sitting beside me. He’d been glancing a lot, which I thought was a good thing. We’d predicted that having her along would give me credibility. I wouldn’t look so nutty with someone backing me up.

Then I’d shown Ruelas the video — which I had edited down to the important parts — on my laptop. We were sitting in the same interview room as the last time I’d visited the substation, Ruelas on one side of the table, us on the other, which allowed us to watch his face as the video played.

No expression. Like his face was made of stone.

When the video stopped, I said, “We were able to identify the woman through Facebook. I friended Pierce a couple of days ago, and she was on his friends list.”

“You friended Pierce?” The first words he’d spoken since we’d sat down.

“Yeah. Well, one of my alter egos did. Pierce has since unfriended me, but not before I was able to dig through his friends list and save some important information.”

Maybe — just perhaps — I saw a tiny bit of grudging respect in his eyes. Like he was thinking, Okay, that was pretty clever of you.

He tried to cover it up by saying, “Where are we going with all this?” Impatient. Busy man with urgent stuff to do and important people to see.

“Just give me thirty more seconds.”

I swung the laptop around where I could see it and opened a folder of jpegs on my desktop, talking at the same time. Time to drop the bombshell. “Just so you can see it yourself, here’s a screen capture of the woman’s face from the video. And here’s a capture of her Facebook timeline. As you can see, her name is Erica Kerwick. Here’s one of her own photos — a better shot of her face, so you can compare it to the frame from the video. Same woman. Agreed?”

“Sure. Any idiot can see that. Same mole on the chin.”

I might’ve heard a tiny sound from Mia. Stifling a giggle.

I was glad that I was about to shove this guy’s condescending attitude back in his face. “Here’s a capture of a post she left on her nephew’s wall.

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