Test dug the Mandy Wilks file from her backpack, set it on the kitchen island. She respected Rath, even liked him personally, to a degree, but to have to report to him and have him conferring with Grout behind her back, it was hard to stomach. She didn’t appreciate Grout nosing in her case. He’d chosen to be a mall cop, let him be a mall cop. She especially didn’t need her old superior getting the idea he could strut back into his old post as if his resigning were a temporary distraction.
As a superior, Grout had been dismissive and haranguing, not respectful of her work. Personal and philosophical differences were one thing. Test did not have to be chummy and have barbecues with other cops’ families to work well together; but there did need to be respect for the work.
If Grout ever cajoled Barrons into rehiring him, Test did not know what she’d do. She was not a quitter, but she would not brook such disrespect.
Test opened the file.
From the living room, Elizabeth shrieked, “Get up off me!”
“Then tell me where you hid my car!” George shouted.
“You two stop it in there,” Sonja said, wondering where Claude had gone off to in the house that he wasn’t hearing the kids. She needed him to referee so she could work.
“Then tell her to stop hiding my cars!” George shouted.
“Don’t shout at me,” Test said.
“He has a hundred cars!” Elizabeth shrieked. “I only took one.”
“And quit shrieking,” Test said.
“She took my favorite!” George shouted.
Of course Elizabeth took his favorite. It was his favorite because she took it. If she’d taken a different one, that one would have been George’s favorite. It never ended.
“Where’s your father?” Test said.
“I don’t know, upstairs,” Elizabeth said.
“You two need to go upstairs in five and tell your father to start your bath,” Test said, returning to her work.
At the back of the file, she discovered the list of attendees for Keep at It Casting’s auditions held at the Double Black Diamond.
There were eleven sign-up sheets. Forty names per sheet. Nearly 450 names. No, twice that. The sheets were double sided.
Test took an apple from the bowl on the island and took a bite. It was one of the last apples from those she and the family had picked in September. It had gone soft and mealy. She was tempted to toss it, but was too hungry.
“Ow!” Elizabeth shrieked.
Jesus, Test thought. How was she supposed to get any work done? Where was Claude? If he couldn’t help out when she needed him to, so she could find a balance, she’d have to take all her work to the station.
“Tell me where it is!” George shouted.
“Enough! There is no shouting in this house!” Test shouted, cringing as she said it.
“You just shouted!” Elizabeth shouted.
“I’m allowed, believe me,” Test said.
“What’s going on in here?” Claude said.
“Where’ve you been?” Test said.
“Upstairs, in the bathroom.”
“Didn’t you hear them?”
“Of course I heard. It wasn’t going to do any good to shout from upstairs when I couldn’t back it up.” Claude pointed at the kids. “Upstairs, both of you. Let’s go. Bath time.”
“But she hid my car,” George said.
“And instead of sharing, you torture her? Upstairs. Come on.”
With the kids stomping and muttering their way upstairs, Test took another bite of the apple and was about to return to studying the list when it struck her.
Jesus.
She picked up her phone and called Rath. When he picked up, she said, “Why do we torture?”
“What?” Rath said. “What are you saying?”
“Why do we torture?”
“To get sick kicks out of seeing a person suffer.”
“You’re seeing it wrong. Like I was. Why do we torture? Entities? Governments? The mob?”
“Shit,” Rath said.
“Right. To extract information. Maybe Jamie Drake and Lucille Forte were targeted. Because they knew something?”
“What information could teenage girls have?”
“No clue. But maybe he targeted them specifically. Because they knew something. About him. Somehow. He tortured them not for kicks or pleasure. For information. Maybe Dana Clark is being held somewhere and— ”
“But both girls are so far apart, different countries, can both have the same important information? And the same info a woman in her forties would have? Where does that leave us with the Quebec girls from the early nineties? And Preacher?”
“I don’t know. But it doesn’t exclude Preacher, necessarily.”
“True. Keep after it. Dig and find the girls’ common ground, if there is any, and we may get an idea about who they knew in common and what they might know.”
Test hung up.
She returned to the files in peace, underscoring each name with a ruler as she went so as not to miss any.
She searched for Abby Land and Jamie Drake.
Halfway through, she found both. Jamie Drake right above Abby Land.
Test’s breathing slowed. Both names. Right there in black ink.
The two girls had befriended each other over acting, so why was Test surprised to see their names on this list? Why wouldn’t the girls travel a couple hours to audition for a movie?
The two names did not give her as much pause as the notepad from the Double Black Diamond Rath had found in Wilks’s bedroom. Wilks might have acquired the notepad anywhere—Test owned plenty of pens and notepads from places she’d never visited. That theory didn’t float anymore. It could not be coincidence that Mandy Wilks had a DBD notepad, and both her killer and a friend of her killer, now murdered herself, had been to the same resort.
In the file, there was one more person of interest mentioned linked to the resort at the time Mandy Wilks’s case was being investigated.
Boyd Pratt.
Grout had run into Pratt at the DBD when there to interview staff about Wilks’s notepad. Pratt had later proved he was at the DBD to meet a woman about a private adoption he was trying to arrange for him and his wife. The adoption agency was under investigation, but Pratt was dropped as a suspect.
Test opened her laptop and typed in notes.
What did any of this prove?
Not a thing.
Test looked deeper into Grout’s notes about the Double Black Diamond.
What was this?
Boyd Pratt had been at the DBD at least three times: the day Grout had run into him, as well as earlier on September 26 and October 12.
The day of the audition.
Pratt, Land, and Drake were all at the DBD on the same day? And Mandy Wilks had a notepad from the resort.
Test took a bite of apple. Its punky flesh had gone brown and nasty where it was exposed to the air. She tossed it in the trash and did what she thought inconceivable just minutes before: she called Grout.
“I didn’t trust that prig from the start,” Grout said when Test asked him about Pratt. “But I chalked my prejudice up to disgust for all pricks born with a silver spoon up their ass.”
Test had to admit part of her missed Grout’s unvarnished takes, even if she disagreed with him most of the time. He was irascible, even more so than Rath, who somehow managed to remain cool while simmering. Not Grout. His evisceration now of the wealthy, and his jealousy of them and insinuation that money scrubbed life of all problems, was naive. Its parallels to Abby Land’s jealousy over Mandy Wilks’s beauty were not lost on Test.
“What made you suspect Pratt, besides the spoon up his ass?” she said.
“Besides the fact he was at the resort that matched Mandy Wilks’s notepad, a resort nearly a three-hour drive from his estate, a long drive for a big step down in luxury and privacy from the estate? The way he is. Arrogant. Entitled. Superior. A wolf in creep’s clothing.
“He and his wife lost their only child, a young teenage daughter, a year ago and were desperate to have another, but couldn’t. So they sought adoption. Pratt didn’t want to adopt just any baby. He demanded a white, American male from ‘good stock.’ After losing a daughter to leukemia? It was as if he finally had a chance to correct the mistake he believed his daughter was.”
“But you had no evidence?”
“If I’d had evidence, I’d have brought him in for questioning, if not arrested him. I interviewed him at his estate. The family’s estate—thousands of acres on the lake, guest houses and cabins. Technically I guess half of it is his, though Pratt himself seems to have no job. He’d probably be homeless if he hadn’t won the parent lottery.”
“You really like this guy,” Test said.
“He’s a catch, if you like a pompous ass in tweed and moleskin and Chameau boots who looks like he just got back from a driven shoot in the Hebrides.”
“A what? Where?”
“Skip it. Why call me? It’s all there.”
“Abby Land and Jamie Drake. They were on the audition list. The same day Pratt was there. That’s not coincidence.”
“I agree.”
“That’s a first.”
“As your boss, I took the other side to keep you thinking of theories other than your own. On your toes. I don’t have to bother with that shit now. You’ll want a chat with him. How I’d love to grill him like a cheap steak. I miss that part. I miss most of it.”
Test wondered if Grout were being more agreeable the past five minutes than in the previous five years because he wanted back in.
“What should I expect from him?” Test said.
“Arrogance, deflection. BS and subtle threats.”
“You found no one who could ID Mandy Wilks? No indication she’d been there at all? You have no notes speculating if you thought Wilks was at the resort or not.”
“I had no evidence. I suspected. With the notepad from the resort. It’s not a place she could afford. But no proof to suggest she’d been there. Now, though, with the other two girls being there, same day as Pratt, I think it’s a lock she got the notepad from the resort herself. She was there.”
“Were the pads available in the rooms or out in common areas, or only at the concierge? Only for employees?”
“They’re called team members. But the notepads are in the rooms.”
“All of them, or just business suites?”
“You have a lot to look into. I wish I could help more.” Grout sounded forlorn.
“I wish you could, too,” Test found herself saying, despite her self-interest.