I WAS AWAKENED FROM a deep sleep by the old-fashioned ringtone of my cell phone. The phone was on the nightstand. When I touched the screen I saw that it was 2:12 in the morning.
UNKNOWN CALLER again.
I sat up in bed, switched on the light, as wide awake as if an alarm had just sounded. I touched the screen to accept the call.
“Sunny Randall,” I said.
I could hear breathing at the other end.
“Hello?” I said.
“It’s Lisa Morneau.”
“Are you all right?” I said. “I was up in Paradise tonight looking for you.”
“How’d you know I was there?” she said.
“Tracked you off my phone,” I said.
“Mine and not yours? You can do that?”
“Cops helped.”
“No cops!” she shouted.
“Where are you right now?” I said.
“Boston.”
“Tell me where, and I’ll get dressed and meet you,” I said.
“I don’t know why I should trust you,” she said.
“Lisa,” I said. “You’ve now called me twice.”
“I don’t even know why I did,” she said. “All I know is that you’re helping Tony right now. Find me.”
“I want to help you,” I said. “But I can only do that if you’ll let me.”
“Running out of options on people I can trust,” she said.
There was another silence, longer than before.
“See, the thing is, nobody has to be afraid of me,” she said. “But now it’s me that’s afraid of them.” I thought I could hear traffic sounds in the background. “They didn’t have to kill Callie!”
“Lisa,” I said, keeping my voice calm, not wanting to agitate her any more than she already was. “Who’s they? Who killed Callie?”
“Fuck!” she yelled.
Keep them talking, my father had always told me.
“Why would Tony hire me to find you and then come for you himself?” I said. “How does that make any sense?”
“I won’t tell!”
She sounded out of breath.
“Won’t tell what?”
Another pause.
“Talking to you got Callie killed,” Lisa Morneau said. “What do you think will happen to me?”
She was shouting again, in circles now.
“Did she know where you were?” I said.
“I never should have told!”
I knew she wasn’t going to give me the answers I wanted over the phone.
“I can come to you,” I said. “Tell me where you are.”
“I just wanted to get out,” she said. “I just couldn’t take it anymore. Girls dying like that. Those girls could’ve been me.”
Before I could even respond to that she said, “I’ll call you back.”
“Don’t hang up,” I said.
She did.
Now I was the one yelling “Fuck!”
Rosie, who didn’t like loud noises of any kind, jumped up at her end of the bed, staring at me. But we both knew she’d heard worse.