Sliver Of Truth

He shrugged. “Jacobsen was last seen on her porch, pounding to be let in. About an hour later he was seen running from her residence.”

“When?”

“Earlier today.”

“Who called the police?”

“Anonymous caller.”

“But you have a positive ID?”

“Esme’s next-door neighbor recognized him from a prior visit. Apparently Esme had told her who he was, asked her to call the police if she ever saw him around when she wasn’t home.”

I shook my head. “If he was going to kill her, he’d have been more careful.”

“Unless it wasn’t premeditated.”

I shook my head again. I knew the heart of exactly one person in the world. Yes, I knew the sadness and the rage that dwelled there, but I also knew the sheer goodness of him. I knew Jake. No way.

It still hadn’t sunk in that Esme was dead. Later I would grieve her and everything she was to me once. Now all I could think about was Jake.

“Trust me,” I said. “I know this man. There’s no way he would ever kill Esme, especially not like that.”

He seemed to consider saying something, then changed his mind. I could almost guess what he was thinking: that I’d been wrong about people before, that maybe I wasn’t the best judge of character. He might have wanted to say that at one point nearly everyone I knew turned out to be someone different than I’d thought.

I stood and pointed toward the loft. “What about the bloodstain on the floor? Something’s happened here. Maybe the person who killed Esme hurt Jake, too.”

I thought about the red computer screen (hidden for the moment behind the screen saver), the street scene in London, the matchbook with its odd symbol and note still in my pocket. It was all on the tip of my tongue. But I remembered the text message: Trust no one. It seemed like good advice. I kept my mouth shut.

“What?” asked Agent Grace. His eyes were trained on my face as though he could read my thoughts there. “What are you thinking right now?”

I could almost believe that I might trust him, turn all of this stuff over to him to investigate or to dismiss. It is so easy to turn over power, to shift off responsibility and walk away. Maybe if Jake wasn’t missing (not that he was missing exactly, but we weren’t sure where he was at the moment), a bloodstain marring his floor, I might have been more willing to enlist Agent Grace’s help. Something deep told me to heed the advice of the text message, that Jake might be the one to pay if I didn’t.

“I’m thinking,” I said, sounding slightly hysterical to my own ears, “that something has happened to Jake. And I’m wondering what you’re going to do about it.”

He didn’t say anything, just kept those gray eyes on me.

“If someone killed Esme and there’s blood on the floor here”-I was yelling now-“doesn’t that seem like a connection to you?”

“I’m looking at the connection, Ridley.”

Now it was my turn to go silent.

“My missing couple, Myra and Allen Lyall. A dead woman, Esme Gray. A large bloodstain on the floor of Jacobsen’s apartment, Jacobsen nowhere to be found, last seen leaving the scene of a homicide. What do these people have in common? What links all of them?”

You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out where he was going.

“I’m not the only thing that links them,” I said defensively.

“No,” he said slowly. “There’s Project Rescue. But you’re intimately linked to that as well.”

I sat back down in the chair. Agent Grace pulled the other chair close to me and tilted it back against the wall, balancing on its two rear legs. I wished he would fall backward, hit his head and look like an idiot.

“When’s the last time you saw your boyfriend?” He leaned on the word boyfriend with some kind of sarcasm or even hostility, maybe both. I thought about telling him that Jake wasn’t technically my boyfriend any longer, but I didn’t want to be disloyal to Jake. Or answer the questions that would follow about the current nature of our relationship.

“The night before last.”

“And the last time you heard from him?”

“He left a message earlier today. Asked me to meet him here for dinner around eight.”

“What time did he leave the message?”

“I don’t know. Around three or four, I guess.”

“How did he sound?”

“Fine.” The truth was I couldn’t quite remember what he had sounded like.

“Did he call you from the landline here,” he said, nodding toward the phone on Jake’s desk, “or from his cellular phone?”

“I don’t know. I think from this phone. I can’t remember.” He’d called me from his cell; I could tell by the background noise. At least I thought so; I would check my caller ID when I got home. In any case, I didn’t want Agent Grace to know that he’d been on his cell; it seemed incriminating somehow. I was dying to call Jake now but didn’t know if it was wise to do this in front of Agent Grace.

He continued with the questions, writing my answers in a little black notebook he’d extracted from his pocket. “Where were you today that you weren’t available to take his call around that time?”

I hesitated, thought about lying, decided against it. “I went to Max’s apartment.”

He looked up at me. “Why?”