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“A little.” Holsten shakes his head… but gently. “Never again.”

Until next Saturday night, Holly thinks.

“What’s this about, anyway? What’s your interest in Tom?”

Holly tells him, leaving Ellen Craslow and Peter Steinman out of it. Randy Holsten listens with fascination. Holly is interested to see how quickly the red is leaving his eyes. The older she gets, the more the resilience of the young amazes her.

“Bonnie, yeah. That was her name. She’s missing, huh?”

“She is. Did you know her?”

“Met her is all. At a party. Maybe once or twice before. The party must have been New Year’s. She was steppin dynamite. Legs all the way up.” Holsten shakes one hand, as if he’s touched something hot. “Tom brought her, but our place wasn’t exactly her milieu, if you know what I mean.”

“Didn’t like the flamingos?”

“They’re a new addition. I haven’t seen her since that party. She broke up with him, you know. I talked to her a little. You know, just your standard party blah-blah—and I think the breakup was like, happening then. Or about to happen. I was in the kitchen. That’s where we talked. Maybe she came out to get away from the babble, maybe to get away from Tom. He was in the living room, probably trying to score dope.”

“What did she say?”

“Can’t remember. I was pretty drunk. But if you’re thinking he might have done something to her, forget it. Tom isn’t the confrontational type. He’s more the can-you-loan-me-fifty-until-next-Friday type.”

“And you’re sure he hasn’t been back since June?” She tells him what she told Keisha. “I’m just crossing t’s and dotting i’s here.”

“If he did I haven’t seen him. Don’t think so. Like I said, Vegas is his kind of town.”

“Do you have his number?”

He finds it on his phone and Holly adds it to her notes, but she’s already close to taking Tom Higgins off her list of possible suspects, and he was never high on it anyway. Not that she has a list.

“If you call him, you’ll get one of those robots that just repeats the number and tells you to leave a message.”

“He monitors his calls.”

“Guys like Tom, that’s what they do. He owes money, I think. Not just the back rent.”

“How much of that does he owe?”

“His share for two months. June and July. Five hundred dollars.”

Holly gives him a card from her purse. “If you think of anything, maybe something she said when you were talking at the party, give me a call.”

“Man, I don’t know. I was pretty fried. All I can be sure of is that she was fine-looking. Out of Tom’s league, like I said.”

“I get it, but just in case.”

“Okay.” He puts the card in the back pocket of his jeans, where Holly guesses it will probably stay until it goes through the wash and comes out lint. Randy Holsten smiles. It’s charming. “I think Tommy was starting to bore her. Ergo, breakup.”

Holly gives him a lift back to the rambling apartment building. He’s improved enough to keep his head inside. He thanks her for the coffee and she asks him again to call her if he thinks of anything, but it’s just a rote exercise. She’s pretty sure she’s gotten everything from Holsten that he has to give, which amounts to nothing but a phone number that will probably lead nowhere.

Still, when she gets back to the commerce area of Eastland Avenue, she pulls into an empty parking space—there are plenty—and calls Tom Higgins’s number. It’s two hours earlier in Las Vegas, but not that early. There’s one ring, followed by the robo-voice Holsten warned her of. Holly identifies herself, says Bonnie Dahl has disappeared, and asks if Tom will call her back (she calls him Mr. Higgins). Then she drives home, showers again, and throws her Dollar General underwear in the washing machine.

5

While the washer is doing its thing, Holly gets on Twitter and plugs in the name Craslow. She’s not expecting a long list—it’s not a name she’s ever heard before—and only gets a dozen hits. Two Twitter Craslows feature thumbnail pictures of Black people, a man and a woman. Two are whites, both women. The other eight feature either blank silhouettes or cartoon avatars.

Holly uses Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter routinely in her work. Bill didn’t teach her; he was old-school. She can send messages on Twitter to the dozen Craslows from one of her several social media aliases, something simple: I’m looking for information about Ellen Craslow, from Bibb County, Georgia. If you know her, please reply. Even if the Craslow from whom she’s hoping to get information isn’t on Twitter, chances are good one of the twelve is related and will pass the message on. Easy-peasy, nothing to it, she’s done it before when looking for missing people (mostly bail-jumpers) and lost pets. There’s no reason not to now, but she pauses, frowning at the list of names on her desktop computer.

Why the hesitation?