I stepped out into the hallway, pulled the door closed, took a deep breath, and called the chief.
“I have another suspect for you,” I said.
Chapter 28
The chief sent out an APB on the unwed mother, and suggested that he would appreciate talking to me when I got back to the fair. Within half an hour I was in the fair office, seated in one of our uncomfortable folding chairs.
“We’d have a lot better chance of locating this young woman if we had a more specific description,” the chief was saying. “Young and wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt doesn’t help much.”
I winced.
“I can’t really tell you much more,” I said.
“Try,” the chief said.
“I am trying. But I didn’t really get a good look at her.”
“You were able to recall a fairly lengthy conversation,” he said. “Are you telling me you weren’t looking at her all that time?”
“I was looking at her,” I said. “But we were in the very back of the restaurant at the Caerphilly Inn. The part where they put guests when they approve of your wallet but not your wardrobe. The part where the menus ought to be printed in braille. The part—”
“Understood,” the chief said. “You can’t give me the kind of precise description I could normally count on you for. But any details you can remember would help.”
I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths. I pretended I was walking into the Caerphilly Inn again. I replayed my conversation with Genette. And then we heard the cry of “Hussy!” and we’d both looked up and saw her. I tried to remember if there was anything memorable about her hair, her eyes, the shape of her face, her mouth, her nose—
“A ski jump,” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“She had a nose like a ski jump,” I said. “Long and sloping and with a little upward swoop at the end. It was very distinctive.”
“Ski jump,” I heard the chief mutter, as his pen scratched in his notebook. “Anything else?”
“Shorter than me.”
Which wasn’t much help, because at five ten, I was taller than most women. The chief refrained from saying so.
“You were sitting, she was standing,” he said instead. “Can you show me about how far above you her head was?”
I held up my hand. But then I wobbled it a bit to emphasize that I wasn’t sure how accurate I was being.
“I’d make that about five foot five inches, give or take. What do you remember about her shape.”
“Average,” I said.
He waited in silence while I continued to replay the scene in my head.
“Hair’s brown, I think. Medium color, medium length, a little on the poufy side. She might have acne.”
“You don’t know whether you saw acne or not?” His voice held a trace of exasperation.
“I might not have spotted leprosy in that light, but she wore her hair pulled over her face. She was just peering out from this tangled cave of hair. Some girls do that to hide acne. Then again, some just think it’s cool.”
I heard the faint skitter of his pen.
“And she’s probably from Virginia,” I added. “Not that far from here, at a guess.”
“You could see that?”
“I could hear it.” I opened my eyes. “Her accent. Not a Tidewater accent. Could be from the mountains. Or a country accent from the Piedmont. Probably not from Caerphilly; it’s a little too heavy. But not that far away.”
“Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Probably, if I could hear her talk.”
“Keep your eyes and ears open, then,” he said. “And if you do recognize her, call me. Don’t confront her.”
I nodded.
“I’d like you to work with Horace on doing a composite sketch,” the chief said.
“Horace is a sketch artist now?” I said. “Cool.”
“No, but he’s got some kind of software he’d been nagging me for months now to let him try.” This time the exasperation was more than faint. “And this is the first time in months we’ve wanted to find someone and didn’t just have a photograph we could circulate.”
He stood up and turned to Vern.
“I’ll be over at the Caerphilly Inn,” he said.
“The lobby’s better lit,” I said. “Maybe the doorman or the desk clerk got a better look at her.”
“Find Horace,” the chief told Vern. “And tell him to bring his laptop. We want him to use that crime scene sketch artist program to do a likeness we can use in that APB.”
“You think she’s a suspect?” Vern asked.