Page 13 of Mean Streak

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J eff, who’d been channel surfing, dropped the remote to answer his cell phone. “Hello?”

“Jeff? It’s Dr. Butler, calling from the clinic.”

Dammit! “Uh-huh.”

“I’m on speaker phone with Dr. James. We’re calling to check on Emory. She didn’t come in this morning, and we haven’t been able to reach her either on her cell phone or at home. Is everything all right?”

He sat up and swung his legs to the side of the bed. “She went out of town for the weekend.”

“We’re aware of that. But our understanding was that she would be back by this morning.

She had appointments scheduled. At first we thought she was just running late, which isn’t like her, but the receptionist juggled appointments, trying to cover.

It worked for a while, but now the waiting room is overflowing.

The receptionist will have to start rescheduling Emory’s appointments if she doesn’t come in soon. ”

“You’d better do that. Reschedule, I mean.”

“For tomorrow?”

“On second thought, you might want to hold off until…until we know for sure when she’ll be back.”

He could hear Emory’s two colleagues in whispered conversation, but he couldn’t catch what they were saying.

Finally, Dr. James said, “We don’t know how else to ask this, Jeff, except to come right out with it.

What’s going on? Emory’s personal life is none of our business, but not showing up for work, standing up patients, that’s not like her.

We checked at the hospital to see if she’d made rounds this morning.

We were told you’d called there yesterday asking for her and expressing some concern. Have you spoken to her yet?”

“No.” Realizing he could no longer put this off, he imparted the troubling news.

“The truth is, I haven’t heard from her since Friday evening.

But,” he rushed to say, “we’d had an argument Thursday evening.

A doozy, actually. When she didn’t call over the weekend, I figured that she considered us not to be on speaking terms. Foolishly, I decided to wait her out. ”

“Oh.”

One syllable, and Neal James applied it like the blade of a guillotine. He’d always been a prick toward Jeff, having an air of superiority that was as obvious as his honker of a nose.

Trying not to sound defensive, Jeff continued. “I wasn’t alarmed because Emory hadn’t been specific about when she planned to come back. She mentioned staying over Saturday night, too. So I didn’t become worried until yesterday afternoon when I still hadn’t heard from her.”

“You’ve had no contact since Friday evening?”

“That’s correct.”

Dr. Butler’s shocked response was to ask if Jeff had reported Emory’s unexplained absence to the police.

“Yes. I drove up here—the town is called Drakeland—yesterday and started looking for her at the motel where she spent Friday night. She ate an early dinner at the café next door. She called me from her room telling me that she was in for the night. The trail stopped there.”

“She was doing her run on Saturday morning, right?” Dr. Butler said. “Did anyone see her leaving the motel?”

“No, but you know her. She likes to get an early start, so she probably left before daylight. The desk clerk had imprinted her credit card the night before when she checked in, so there was no need for her to stop there before leaving.”

“And she didn’t return to the motel Saturday night?”

“No. She didn’t plan to either. She took all her stuff with her when she left.”

Dr. James said, “That’s even more cause for concern.”

“I agree,” Jeff said. “As soon as I learned that, I notified the sheriff’s office.”

“And? What did they say? What are they doing?”

“Nothing yet. I was told that it was too soon to panic, but, as you said, this is out of character for Emory. I impressed that on the deputy I talked to. Even if she’s angry with me, she wouldn’t stand up her patients.”

“What can we do?”

He could tell by Dr. Butler’s voice that she was deeply concerned but trying not to think the worst. He said, “For the time being, hold down the fort there. Emory would hate having patients inconvenienced. I’ll let you know as soon as I know something.

I’m supposed to report back to the sheriff’s office an hour from now. ”

“Maybe you should go immediately. Another hour is an hour wasted.”

He hadn’t asked for Dr. James’s advice and resented it being so sanctimoniously dispensed, but he responded in a neutral tone.

“I was on my way out when you called.” After promising to keep them informed and exchanging good-byes, he checked his appearance in the dresser mirror.

His flannel trousers and silk sweater would stand out here in overalls country, but God forbid that he blend in.

He dreaded this mission but welcomed a reason for leaving the motel room, which left a lot to be desired.

Drakeland was the seat of a large and mostly rural county.

The sheriff’s office was busy despite the inclement weather.

Actually, because of it. While Jeff waited his turn in the lobby, trying to keep the hem of his long overcoat off the dirty aggregate floor, there was a steady stream of official personnel and civilians going out, coming in, dealing with weather-related problems such as the jack-knifed eighteen wheeler that had brought highway traffic to a standstill in both directions.

One woman was noisily carrying on about the collapsed roof of her barn and the horses trapped inside. The manager of a hardware store was filing a complaint over the shoplifting of a kerosene lantern.

It was a zoo.

Finally the deputy Jeff had spoken with the night before came through a set of doors and motioned Jeff forward. “Hate to see you here, Mr. Surrey.”

“I told you she hadn’t just run off.”

“Come on back.”

Deputy Sam Knight was preceded by his big belly as he walked Jeff through a squad room, where harried-looking personnel were handling the overflow from the lobby.

Knight motioned Jeff into the chair facing his cluttered desk as he sank into a swivel chair.

The name plate on the desk designated him as Sergeant Detective .

Jeff thought Knight was a bit too homespun for the title.

He said, “My wife is a responsible individual. She wouldn’t—”

Knight held up a hand as large and pink as a ham. “Bear with me, Mr. Surrey. We gotta get the basic stuff first.” He slid on a pair of reading glasses and pecked at his computer keyboard until a blank form appeared on the monitor. “What’s Mrs. Surrey’s full name?”

Jeff explained why Emory used her maiden name. “And it’s doctor.”

“How do you spell Char-ban-o ?”

Using the hunt-and-peck method of typing, Knight filled in all Emory’s pertinent information—Social Security number, age, height, weight.

“Five feet six. One twenty. So she’s…slim?” the detective asked, peering at Jeff over the smeared lenses of his glasses.

“Yes. She’s in excellent physical condition. She’s a distance runner. Marathons.”

“Yeah, you mentioned that last night.” He then asked the color of her hair.

“Blondish. Actually very light brown, with highlighted streaks. About to here.” Jeff touched his collarbone.

“Eyes?”

“Hazel.”

“Last seen wearing what?”

“I don’t know.” Knight’s hands stilled on the keyboard.

He turned his head to look at Jeff, who explained somewhat impatiently.

“The last thing I saw her wearing was a pair of jeans, brown riding boots, and a camel-colored sweater. She was carrying her coat. But as I told you last night, she planned a long-distance run on Saturday. I assume she left the motel dressed in running clothes.”

“What kind does she usually wear?”

Jeff described them by brand name. “They’re high quality, designed for serious runners.

She’d counted on it being cold. She would have a zip-up jacket.

Something thermal underneath. Gloves. She usually wears one of those bands around her head to keep her hair back and her ears warm. Sunglasses, maybe.”

“Got any pictures of her?”

“At home. But there are numerous ones of her on the Internet.”

Knight used a search engine and immediately got a couple dozen hits. “That her?” Jeff nodded when the deputy pointed to a picture of Emory, taken at the ribbon cutting when she and Drs. Butler and James opened their clinic.

“Pretty lady.”

“Thank you.”

“What kind of doctor?” Knight asked.

“Pediatrician.”

“These two still her partners?”

“Yes. I talked to them half an hour ago. They haven’t heard from her either.”

“They all get along okay?”

“Of course.”

“No professional rivalry?”

Jeff blew out a breath of exasperation. “You’re barking up the wrong tree. Her colleagues are very concerned.”

“Okay. Just asking. I’m gonna be asking a lot of things that might seem irrelevant, or just downright nosy. But, unfortunately, awkward questions are sometimes necessary. It’s about the worst aspect of my job.”

Jeff doubted the accuracy of that statement but didn’t dispute it.

Knight scanned through some of the other links. “She’s an active lady.”

“Very.”

“You sure she’s not off doing one of these charity things?”

Jeff drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “She came up here Friday afternoon so she could run on a mountain trail on Saturday. For conditioning.”

“You know which mountain, which trail?”

“Not offhand. She showed me a map. If I saw it, I might remember.”

“You know which park?”

“There’s more than one?”

Knight just looked at him for several seconds, then said, “In this region of North Carolina alone we’ve got four national forests, and they merge with Great Smoky and Cherokee over in Tennessee. Then if you go south into Georgia—”

“I’m beginning to get the picture,” Jeff said, cutting off the geography lesson. “I don’t know which park, or which mountain. But she stayed the night here in Drakeland, so the logical place to start looking for her would be the nearest hiking area.”

Knight looked pessimistic. “That still gives us a lot of choices, a lot of square miles to cover.”