Page 23 of Missing White Woman

I shrugged. “I work a two-to-nine shift.”

“Got it. So you wake up at ten as usual.” She smiled. “Then do your normal routine. Brush your teeth. Shower. Do your hair.” She took in my yoga pants. “Get ready to exercise?”

“I went to find Ty. Like I said, he had to work this morning. Promised he’d be back by the time I woke up. I went downstairs and that’s when I… found her.”

The hair. The hands. The jeans. The blood covering it all.

“Any idea how long she’d been there?” I said.

“We don’t know, but early thoughts are she’s been dead a ballpark of eight hours at this point. Give or take.”

Drew had a clock on one wall. I glanced at it. Eight hours would be around 4 a.m., but that didn’t make sense. Ty was an early bird, but even he wouldn’t have gone to work at that time. He would have found her when he woke up. But he hadn’t.

Calloway read my mind too, because she spoke again. “We called JPMorgan. Your boyfriend didn’t go into the office today.”

And that’s when the room lost all its air. I struggled to breathe as Calloway stared me down.

“Any idea where he might be?”

No. Ty should’ve been at work, and that woman should not have been in the foyer.

Calloway kept on. “You spent every moment together until this morning, when you woke up to find him gone and a body downstairs. That’s what you said, correct?”

I said nothing, but my brain was busy hurling out questions. Something would have to be very wrong for Ty not to go in. For him not to be outside right now, demanding to be let into Drew’s house. What if something happened to him?

“And you didn’t see the woman at all before this morning, when she magically appeared in your Airbnb. Dead. While you were upstairs and Ty was not at work.” This time Calloway didn’t wait for me to purposely ignore her. “Let’s try it a different way. You didn’t see any blond women the past couple of days?”

Of course I had. Blond women were everywhere. I didn’t say that, though, too focused on something else. My heart sped up. What if he had stumbled on the woman when she was breaking in?

“You’ve been here for two whole days and never seen her before? Not anywhere?” She paused then, long enough for me to finally force myself to inhale. “Not even in a photo?”

And then it felt like my heart stopped. What if she had hurt him? It was a huge house, and I hadn’t checked everywhere. He could be—

I finally spoke. “Was anyone else in the house?” The words came fast, following one another so quickly that it sounded like I’d created a new language.

Calloway was midsentence. She stopped.

I tried to speak English again. Slower this time so she could comprehend. “Was anyone else there?”

“No. Just the woman,” she finally said. My heart started again as she kept on. “The one you never saw before. Not anywhere. Not even in a photo?”

“I never saw her. I don’t know how she got inside. When she got inside. Like I said, I was sleeping when she fell. She must have been heading upstairs.”

Calloway pushed the button on her cell. It went black. No more notes. She spoke as she put the phone back into her designer bag. Her voice was soft. “She was face down.”

It took me a minute to get what she meant. The woman should’ve been on her back. And yet… “Maybe she realized I was home. Came back downstairs.”

“Or maybe she didn’t fall.”

“You think someone pushed her?” I said.

And that’s when I caught sight of what else was in her bag, just a quick flash of pink before she zipped it up. It didn’t matter, though. I knew exactly what it was. Because, like blond women, I had in fact seen it everywhere—including on the trees smack-dab outside where I was sitting.

Janelle Beckett had finally been found.

EIGHT

As Calloway picked her bag up, my eyes followed as if Superman had loaned me his X-ray vision. They stayed there as she spoke. “I’m gonna grab a coffee. Want anything?”