Henchley leaned back in his seat the next morning after hitting a key on his keyboard to send Morrow a copy of the press release he’d written. “Guess we go with the driver’s license photo for the release.”
“Don’t have much choice. What’s Sutton trying to hide by not giving us another photo?”
“Could be he really doesn’t have one.”
“Or he’s listening to Mike Delaney and not cooperating with us. How about that business with advising Sutton to get rid of all her stuff?”
“You think he will?”
“Who knows with that kid? He doesn’t think straight. Cause and effect are beyond his reasoning abilities.”
“Any chance the DA will give us a warrant to confiscate her belongings before he decides he wants to toss them?”
“On what basis? If Paul Morris hadn’t called us, we wouldn’t even know Sutton was thinking about it. DA will call it hearsay. He wants more than that to issue any kind of warrant.”
“I’d hate to lose that photo where he covered up Matterson’s photo with a truck. It’s very suggestive. Let’s ask for surveillance to report any activity to suggest he’s packing up her stuff.”
“Captain will yell about the budget. Bet he’d go for patrol drive-bys though. Sutton’s working all day during the week so we’d only have to request special attention at night.”
“And on the weekends.”
“Drive-bys aren’t a big imposition. I think he’d okay it. I’ll ask when I take the press release to him to review and feed to the press. You wanna come too?”
“No. You handle that while I check the new cases that came in and prioritize them.”
While waiting for the media to publicize their press release, Morrow and Henchley interviewed Jose Vargas and Mike Delaney. As they did with the others, the detectives approached them at home. Vargas, like Paul Morris, did not socialize with the others, except for the occasional drink at Mick’s on Friday nights. He had no information to share.
Mike Delaney lived in an apartment. Instead of inviting them in, Mike stepped outside and closed the door behind him. His bulky girth, long hair and scruffy beard reminded Morrow of the stereotypic motorcycle gang member. Dress him in black leather and he’d fit the part perfectly.
“So it’s my turn to be bullied, eh?” Mike said.
“We don’t interview people to bully them, Mr. Delaney. We’re seeking information to help us find Jack’s girlfriend. Don’t you want to help your friend?”
Mike grunted in response.
At first, Mike simply refused to answer their questions. His responses bounced back and forth between “I don’t know” and “Can’t remember.” The detectives wanted to bait him about giving advice to Jack to not cooperate with them, but they had to be careful. Paul Morris had been the only person in the garage to overhear those comments, and they didn’t want to pinpoint Paul as their source. They approached the subject indirectly and asked more personal questions—questions that Mike couldn’t pretend he didn’t know the answers to.
“Jack is your buddy?”
“Sort of. We share a few beers at Mick’s, that sort of thing.”
“You came to his defense at the fight at Mick’s two weeks ago.”
“So?”
“So you were arrested for his sake.”
Mike shrugged. “Big deal. We all were. It’s only a misdemeanor.”
“Sounds like you were looking out for him. Do you look out for him in other ways, too?”
“Like what?”
“Oh, for example, do you ever warn him if he’s drinking too much or give him advice?”
“About what?”
“About anything.”
Mike folded his arms across his chest, a recognizable defensive gesture. “What if I do? It’s one of those amendment rights—free speech and all that. I can say whatever I want.”
Indirect question, indirect answer. But Morrow and Henchley were satisfied that they’d gotten a rise out of him. It was enough to know they could goad him in the future if the need arose.
After ending the interview by thanking Mike for his time, Morrow said to Henchley, “Let’s check with patrol and make sure those drive-bys are in effect.”
“Don’t you think Sutton would have acted by now if he was going to take Delaney’s advice?”
“Look how long it took him to report Matterson missing. The guy doesn’t act quickly.”
Having concluded the interviews, the detectives turned to calls generated by the press release, hoping to find new leads. One call caught their attention. The caller claimed to have seen Jack driving Emma through town on Thursday night in a red truck.
“Thursday night?” Morrow said. “Come to think of it, we only have Sutton’s word that Matterson was alive and well on Friday morning. If he got the truck on Thursday, that changes the timeline.”
“Hmmm. Something’s jogging my memory.” Henchley pulled out his notebook and flipped through a number of pages. “Here it is. When we searched Sutton’s house, I picked up the plate number on his truck. I called DMV and ran the plates. Sutton hadn’t registered the truck in his name yet, but I got the owner’s info and called. The son answered because the owner had died. He confirmed the sale took place early Friday morning. Our timeline’s accurate.”
The rest of the calls followed the usual pattern of the majority of responses from media outreach; in other words, they were useless. Most came from people who had seen Emma prior to her disappearance but had not seen Jack and Emma together for days before she’d gone missing. Then there were the usual crazies. One man said he’d seen an alien spaceship beam Emma on board. A woman claimed Emma’s ghost had appeared to her and reached out as though asking for help, but the ghost hadn’t indicated where she was or what had happened to her.
After the last phone call, the detectives had no more active leads to follow so they concentrated on their other cases. In the burglary case, the lab had found fingerprints on the metal bar used to smash a window and analyzed hair caught on that broken window as the burglar entered. Both matched their suspect’s. They arrested the suspect and interrogated him to the point that he broke down and confessed. The detectives then turned the case over to the DA.
In a much easier case, Morrow and Henchley caught a Peeping Tom when he made the mistake of choosing the window of a woman who recognized him and identified him as a busboy at a local restaurant. They found the suspect at work, arrested him, and arranged for a lineup where the victim identified the suspect without hesitation. That case, too, went to the DA.
They also cleared a car theft, settled a neighbor dispute, and told a fighting couple that their complaints against each other were civil, not criminal, and referred them to lawyers.
On Friday, Henchley said, “I hate to end the week with no progress on the Matterson case.”
Morrow looked up from the report he was writing. “Ditto,” Morrow said. “I have an idea if you’re game to put in a couple of hours tomorrow morning.”
“To?”
“Visit Sutton. If we can get in the door, we’ll have a better idea if he’s packing up her stuff.”
“On what pretense? He’s not going to let us in again to look around, not if he’s listening to Mike Delaney.”
“When we double-checked that business with the truck—when Sutton actually took possession of it—you said he hadn’t yet registered the sale with DMV, right?”
Henchley nodded.
“Let’s check again. If he still hasn’t changed the registration, we pretend we’re delivering a friendly reminder such as it might have slipped his mind with all the trauma of his missing girlfriend and all, and we don’t want him to get into trouble. If you’ll run the plate again, I’ll finish this report for the captain so we can turn it in before we leave.”
“He hasn’t registered it,” Henchley reported several minutes later.
“So you game?”
“Sure, why not? What time?”
“How about 9? Not too early, but if he does his Mick’s routine tonight, with any luck, we’ll catch him with a hangover, and he won’t be thinking his best.”
Morrow and Henchley were rewarded the next morning beyond their expectations. They knocked several times on the front door before it opened a crack. A blonde with disheveled hair dressed in a man’s pajama top peeked out at them.
“What?” she asked.
Both detectives showed their shields. “We’d like to speak to Jack Sutton,” Morrow said.
“He’s sleeping.”
“Who is it?” Jack yelled from the bedroom.
“Cops.”
Jack stumbled out in pajama bottoms, shirtless and barefoot, looking like he needed eight hours of sleep and a full pot of coffee. “Why are you waking me up on a Saturday morning? What’d ya want now?”
Both detectives noted that he never associated their visit with the idea that they might have news about Emma, nor did he ask about her.
“We apologize if we woke you. We came to help you out.”
Jack ran his hand through his hair and yawned but did not invite them in.
“Yeah, what?”
“Jack,” Henchley said. “I’m afraid I drank one too many cups of coffee this morning. Could I use the restroom while my partner talks to you?”
“Oh, yeah, I guess.” Jack stepped aside to let Henchley enter the house. The blonde scooted out of the living room to the bedroom and closed the door. On the way to the bathroom, Henchley noticed the house no longer looked clean and neat, especially the kitchen, with a sink piled with dirty dishes and leftover carry-out containers and empty beer bottles and soda cans littering the countertops.
Henchley closed the door to the bathroom from prying eyes. The first thing he noticed was that Emma’s products no longer lined the countertop next to the sink. He flushed the toilet to hide any noise the door might make when he opened the linen closet. Jack hadn’t discarded her toiletries but thrown them helter-skelter into the back of a shelf. He turned on the sink faucet, closed the linen closet door, and checked the medicine cabinet.
“Thanks, Jack, I really appreciate that,” Henchley said back at the front door. Morrow still stood outside.
Jack nodded but said nothing. Once Henchley stepped outside, both detectives turned to leave. “Don’t forget that registration,” Morrow said over his shoulder.
Jack closed the door.
“That was worth putting in a couple of hours this morning,” Henchley said and recounted what he’d seen in the house.
“So he hasn’t cleaned her stuff out yet,” Morrow said. “Good to know.”
“If the girl hadn’t been there, I would’ve checked the closet, and we’d know for sure.”
“She didn’t have that much. If he was tossing stuff, he’d probably do it all at once. He didn’t pitch the bathroom products, only moved them.”
Henchley pulled his notebook from his pocket. “Hold on a second while I jot down the license plate on this Toyota. It’s got to belong to the girl. We’ll run down who she is on Monday.”
“And how about the girl? So much for claiming he’s heartbroken about Matterson.”
“Even better. You remember the Scott Peterson case in California where Peterson was accused of killing his wife and unborn child?”
“Yeah.”
“Opinion has it that the prosecution was losing the case until they put the mistress on the stand. After hearing her testimony, the jury thought Peterson was a liar and a cheat. That’s what convicted him. Same thing could work for us.”