Threads of Suspicion(10)
He settled in a chair and opened a bag of chips. “You don’t make assumptions to narrow down a case?”
“I run theories, play what-ifs, see how many different stories I can create out of the existing evidence. I try to simultaneously hold all of them as active possibilities as I explore for more facts.”
“We have very different brains.”
Evie laughed. “I’m often told I’m simply odd.”
“Yours works. I’m just more . . . well, let’s just say I shake the box of people connections and wait for the answer to fall out.”
She wrapped up the second half of her sandwich for later and opened her own bag of chips. “I’m going to learn a lot just by watching you work.”
David smiled. “With this case, I’m glad I prefer this approach. My PI disappeared sometime between Thursday morning and the following Tuesday morning. Throw a dart at a map of Chicago and its suburbs to sort out where it happened.”
“Ouch.”
“I chose a black hole for a case,” David replied with good humor. “Saul didn’t have someone he would check in with regularly. He used an answering service instead of a secretary. He was in contact with family, but not in a predictable pattern. There’s no steady girlfriend in the picture that I have so far. By this time tomorrow I’m going to know just how deep a mystery I’ve got here. Even his car is missing.”
“Your reputation will be well earned when you solve it.”
“Or this will take a bite out of it. Solve your case quickly, so you can come and help me out. I’ll need it.”
Evie laughed. “Ditto. Do you like hard cases?”
“Sure. It gives me something more to pray about.”
Evie wasn’t sure if David meant that literally, so she chose to let the comment pass for now. “I’ve seen enough paper with mine I’m ready to get out of here, go see the college and where my girl lived.” She pushed back her chair and picked up the remainder of her lunch. “I’ll be back by dark to join you for dinner. I want to hear the story of you and Maggie.”
“By then I’ll have opened all these folders and be ready for a break,” David said. “Good hunting, Evie.”
“You too, David.”
Three
Evie drove over to Brighton College, thinking about her case, trying to push what she did know toward possible answers.
At this point, it didn’t feel like Jenna had chosen what happened. She didn’t seem like the type of woman to take herself off the grid, walk away from her life, disappear of her own choosing. Not with a good relationship with her mother and the years she’d already invested toward getting her degree.
Jenna had no roommate, so scratch a personal collision of values—no college-style domestic violence, roommate doing away with roommate and successfully covering it up.
Jenna might have walked into her apartment to find unexpected trouble waiting for her. No indications of struggle could have been patience on the killer’s part. Tucked in, lying in wait. Comes at Jenna when she’s vulnerable, maybe after she turned in for the night, maybe after she went to sleep? Yeah. Maybe.
Someone hides for a couple of hours, though, they have to hide somewhere. Were there dead spaces in the apartment floor plan? Rarely used closets? She’d need to find out.
Evie reached into the console tray for another sweet-tart. Jenna Greenhill should, could and would be found. A real-life puzzle made this a good workday.
She drove onto the college campus shortly after two p.m., found a parking space near the quad. The open space of snowy ground was surrounded by buildings she assumed were devoted to various study disciplines—economics, chemistry, business, engineering, to guess a few. She picked up the backpack she preferred to a briefcase, locked the car. She could pass for an older student with the backpack, casual coat and boots, and that suited her for now. She’d look like a cop easily enough when that would better open doors.
From the groups of students crossing the quad, college hadn’t changed much since she’d attended—clusters of young people heading to classes, trying to fit in a personal life around their studies. The couples stood out, for they were laughing, chatting with each other, and basically not paying attention to the rest of the world. What had changed were the smartphones and the messaging and scrolling through screens for information—looking at their cells, reading as they walked, tied into their slice of the world, defined by the music they liked, the style of news they preferred, and the people whose opinions they chose to follow.
The missing Jenna had walked this quad many times. She would have blended into this mass of humanity, not stood out. Some of her fellow students would have known her, most would not. Professors, teaching assistants, classmates in lecture halls, study groups, the social world of a dorm, then the apartment building, the hangout for pizza and the favorite mall—maybe three hundred people at the outside would have been in Jenna’s circles? Forty or fifty people would know her well, another hundred would be casual acquaintances, another couple hundred would be able to place where they often saw her, the rest would be, “Oh yeah, the girl who disappeared, her photo looks familiar from the news.”