Page 103 of Blood Moon

“I never even heard her say that word. Now, there, I’veanswered your question. That desk gets busy. I need to get back.”

“One more question.”

“I—”

“One more,” John said. “Did Crissy have a tattoo?”

“You asked me that the morning after she disappeared. I gave you and that other detective a physical description of her.”

“I know I asked you then. This morning I went back to my notes and that’s what I’d written down. No tattoos. But I’m wondering, Beth is wondering, if Crissy might have had one you didn’t know about.”

Beth said, “The reason we’re asking is that the girl who disappeared a few months before Crissy had a tattoo she’d kept hidden from her parents. No one knew about it until yesterday when the young man accused of her disappearance told about it. It was under her arm, covered by her bra. It was a red crescent moon, the goddess Luna’s symbol.”

Carla snorted. “Back to Luna.” She divided a disparaging look between them. “Crissy would never have gotten a tattoo.”

“Perhaps without your knowledge.”

“Nope.”

“Maybe peer pressure—” Beth began, only to be cut off.

“No. Wouldn’t have mattered if I approved it or not, whether it was hidden or in the center of her forehead, under no circumstances would she have gotten a tattoo, because of the needle. She had a needle phobia like none other. She’d scream like a banshee. Whenever she had to get a shot, I practically had to hog-tie her.”

She looked each of them in the eye, hard, then said, “Call me if you ever catch the bastard who took my girl. I want to see him shackled, in handcuffs, and an iron collar around his neck. Otherwise, leave me the hell alone.”

After leaving Carla, her strong admonishment still ringing in their ears, John suggested they pick up a late lunch of carryout and find a place to park and eat. “That warrant hasn’t gone away, so I don’t want to risk going into a restaurant.”

“I’m not really hungry,” Beth said absently as she checked her borrowed phone for messages.

“Well, my breakfast has worn off. Besides, it’ll give us a chance to figure out where we go from here. Any luck?” He chinned toward the phone in her hand.

“No. I wish to heaven Richard would grow a pair and storm into Brady’s office, demanding that he talk to me.”

“How likely is that?”

“As likely as Carla having us over for afternoon tea.”

At a drive-through he got a loaded burger for himself and a salad for Beth, then drove around a sleepy neighborhood to a municipal park. He pulled into the crushed shell lot, turned off the car, and dug into their lunch.

Around his first bite, he said, “I don’t get Carla’s hostility toward us.”

Beth was squeezing dressing over her salad. “She still holds you—and everyone on the police force—responsible for failing to find Crissy.”

“Of course, but I’ve owned up to all the foul-ups. I’veapologized for my part in letting her down, and now I’m trying to make amends by getting justice for Crissy and Billy. None of that has made a dent with Carla. In fact she’s thornier now than—”

One of his phones rang. He checked the readout. It was Morris, whom he hadn’t expected. He answered and put it on speaker. “Hi, Gayle.”

“You bastard.”

“Sorry?”

“You laid a guilt trip on me. I skipped lunch so I could talk to the Whitmores and just wrapped up a conference call with them. I told them about the numerology stuff and asked if Larissa or any of her acquaintances were into the paranormal of any stripe, as you phrased it.

“They reminded me that I’d already asked them that. I apologized but told them to stretch. Was anyone in Larissa’s sphere a little ‘off’? After a moment’s thought, her dad said, ‘That tree trimmer.’ They’d hired him to do some work in their yard, and he was good, so neighbors also retained his services.”

“Which kept him in proximity to Larissa for a length of time.”

“You got it. The two of them talked, flirted, and hung out for a week or two. But then Larissa tried to close it down. She told her folks that he was into some ‘weird stuff.’ This coming from a reputed party girl.”