Belinda turned around to look at the corner booth. There was a man in a black sports coat with a red T-shirt under it, but he was not alone. The booth was full of men, odd-looking men. Some of them were wearing ties, and some of them were not, but all of them managed to look both expensive and seedy at the same time.
“Are they all from the National Enquirer?” Belinda asked.
Bonnie shrugged. “I’ve got no idea. They all seem to know each other, anyway. This really is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s driving me crazy.”
“Bonnie,” somebody on the other end of the counter called.
“I’ve got to go,” Bonnie said. “Most days we don’t even have a girl to wait tables in the afternoon. Just my luck we’ve got LeeAnne here today. Honestly. I never have any damn luck at all.”
Bonnie went down the counter. Belinda turned around and looked at the corner booth again. Then she looked at all the other booths, and at the tables. Everybody drinking coffee had that look about them, the one that said they did not belong in small towns. Maris had that look. Belinda swiveled the stool back so that she was facing the counter and attacked her Diet Coke again. Her hands looked old to her. The veins bulged out on them. She didn’t think there was anything like plastic surgery for the hands.
She was just starting to wonder what she was supposed to do now, when the man sitting next to her cleared his throat.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I overheard you talking to the waitress.”
“Her name is Bonnie.” Belinda wasn’t trying to be rude. She just didn’t want to talk to one of the outside people.
“Yes,” the man said. “I know. My name is Eddie Cassiter. I’m a reporter.”
“I know.”
Eddie Cassiter cleared his throat again. “I heard her talking to you and it sounded like you were a friend of that woman who got attacked this afternoon,” he said. “That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Of course I was. We were friends all the way from kindergarten.”
“Did you know the one who got killed, too? This Christine Barr?”
“Chris Inglerod,” Belinda said. “Nobody thought of her as Barr.”
“So you knew her a long time?”
“I knew her since I was six years old. Just like Emma. We all knew each other. We were all friends forever. Why is that hard to understand?”
“It’s not hard to understand. I’m just trying to figure out what goes on here. I’m not from here. Were you a friend of Liz Toliver’s, too?”
“Nobody was a friend of Betsy Toliver’s. Nobody was. We couldn’t stand her. And that’s her name. Betsy. Not Liz. Betsy.”
“Betsy,” Eddie Cassiter said pleasantly. “Yes, I’ve heard that. And she had a god-awful nickname when she was growing up.”
“Only because she deserved it,” Belinda said righteously. “It’s not true the way they put it in the papers. It’s not true that we persecuted her. She’s a terrible person, and she always was, and she’s ugly, too. She deserved it.”
“I understand that completely,” Eddie Cassiter said. “Why don’t you let me buy you another Coke?”
THREE
1
It took nearly three hours to find out just how badly hurt Emma Kenyon Bligh really was, and during those three hours Gregor felt as if he and Kyle Borden had been frozen solid in the middle of the road. Every investigation has its periods of stasis. They were warned about that at Quantico when Gregor was in training, and years later, he had given the same warning to the new agents who joined the Behavioral Sciences Unit. Sometimes nothing happens, and sometimes there is nothing you can do about it. If you try, you risk making a mess of the entire case.
Still, he also couldn’t imagine sitting still for too much longer, especially with Kyle Borden lecturing him at every opportunity about how traumatic violent crime was in “small communities.” He tried calling Cavanaugh Street again. He had no luck. Tibor’s phone was on the answering machine, and it wasn’t just to screen calls. Donna’s phone was also on the answering machine. He tried calling the Radisson and Bennis, but there was no answer there, either. God only knew where she was. He looked around Kyle Borden’s office, at the clutter on the desk, at the picture magazines in a pile in the corner (People, Us, Celebrity), at the photographs tacked to the walls.
Gregor got up and left the little office. The big open area outside was empty of everybody but Kyle and Sharon Morobito.
Gregor cleared his throat. “I was thinking that we ought to go out and make another call. There’s somebody I’d like to talk to.”