Page 99 of Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

Bible considered the statement. “That don’t make sense to me. You press her for an explanation?”

“I tried, but the buzzer went off for the dryer. When she came back upstairs, she brushed it off.”

“Well,” he said. “What about your little Fourth Amendment foray?”

Andrea slipped out her iPhone. She was going to have to organize her photographs into albums so that she didn’t accidentally send her vacation photos to the USMS cloud. She swiped through the pictures as she talked. “There were a bunch of yearbooks going back to elementary school. A lot of group photos, but Emily was cropped out. A Zippo. Eric Blakely’s New Mexico death certificate dated June 23, 1982. A death certificate for Al Blakely from 1994. I guess that’s Big Al. There was a burial policy for him, too.”

“Huh,” Bible said.

Andrea had found the picture of the metal case. She showed it to Bible. “Is this a small cigar case or a business card holder or—”

He laughed. “That’s a pocket index.”

“I have no idea what that is.”

“It’s from the Stone Age, back before people carried their lives in their pockets.” He pointed to the window with the letters. “The little slider there, you line it up to the corresponding letter, like for Bible, you’d point to A-B, or Oliver, you’d slide to—”

“O-P,” Andrea said. “It’s an address book.”

“You got it, partner,” Bible said. “So, if I wanted to look up your number, I’d slide the pointer to the O-P, then click a button at the bottom of the case, and the top pops open and shows you all the O-P pages.”

Andrea zoomed in on the photo that captured the bottom edge. The button was nothing more than a sliver imbedded in the case. “How do you press it?”

“With your thumbnail. If you weren’t careful, you’d end up with a bruise under your nail. Very uncomfortable,” Bible said. “You kids don’t know how good you have it.”

Andrea’s life would be two thousand percent less stressful if she didn’t have a phone. “The address book must’ve belonged to Ricky’s brother or her grandfather. Everything else in the drawer had their names on it.”

“Drawer?” The way Bible said the word felt different. “You have probable cause to look inside a drawer?”

Andrea’s face turned red. “I’ve got a justification.”

“Partner, for future reference, justifications don’t work for me. I need it by the book. You don’t do right by doing wrong.” His tone was soft, but the rebuke was firm. “Understood?”

She forced herself to look him in the eye. “Understood.”

“All right, lesson learned. You can put that away.”

Andrea clicked off her phone. She hadn’t realized how much she wanted to impress Bible until she had disappointed him. “It was for nothing. I didn’t get any information that would help Star Bonaire or any of the girls at the farm. Ricky played me. I’m sorry.”

“Lady, you need to stop running down my partner.” Bible pulled the car over to the curb again. He unclipped his seatbelt and shifted to face her. “I wanna tell you something, partner. There’s two kinds of types you’ll meet during what I am certain will be your long and successful law enforcement career: people who want to talk to you and people who don’t.”

“Okay,” Andrea said. Obviously, she needed more training.

“With each type, you gotta ask yourself—why? If he clams up, that don’t always mean he’s a bad fella. Maybe he’s seen videos of people who look like you hurting people who look like him. Or maybe he just wants to go about his business and keep his dang mouth shut. And that’s fine, because not talking to the police is your inalienable right as an American citizen. Hell, you ever read your employment contract? Every law enforcement union makes ’em put it in writing that you cannot interview an officer unless that officer has a lawyer present. That’s some real goose/gander irony right there.”

Andrea chewed the inside of her cheek. “Ricky definitely wanted to talk to me.”

“That’s the other type,” Bible said. “Sometimes, straight up they just wanna be helpful. Sometimes, they don’t know squat but they wanna be in on the action. Or maybe they’re trying to bend your thinking in a direction that’s better for them. Or maybe they’re guilty as hell and wanna know what you know. Or maybe they’re a spoon—always stirring up shit.”

“Ricky could be any of those things,” Andrea admitted. “I don’t know what her agenda is but, by the end of the conversation, my gut was telling me that she’s hiding something.”

For once, Bible was the one with a phone in his hands. He squinted as he tapped, but he quickly found what he was looking for. He passed his phone to Andrea.

She didn’t know what she was expecting to see, but it wasn’t a scanned letter. Twelve point type. Times Roman. Black on white. One sentence, all caps—

HOW WOULD YOU LIKE THE WORLD TO KNOW THAT YOUR HUSBAND PHYSICALLY ABUSED YOU AND YOUR DAUGHTER, BUT YOU DID NOTHING TO PROTECT HER?

Andrea looked at Bible.