Free Buried Secrets by Joseph Finder Page A

something happened to her?”

    I was about to answer when she looked around and said, “Look, if you want, you can come up for a sec, explain this all to me.”

    I shrugged, playing it cool. “Hell, seems a shame to waste a perfectly good parking space,” I said.

    19.

    Her apartment, on the second floor, wasn’t very big. It couldn’t have been much more than seven or eight hundred square feet. Yet it didn’t feel small. It felt lush and rich and textured.
    The walls were painted various shades of chocolate brown and earth tones. It was furnished with what looked like stuff from flea markets. But every single piece of furniture, every object, every strange iron lamp or tapestry-covered pillow or copper picture frame, had been carefully selected.

    She pointed me to a big overstuffed corner sofa while she made coffee for me—freshly ground beans, a French press—and served it in a big mug that looked hand-painted. It was dark and strong and perfect. She didn’t have any, though, because she needed to sleep. She fixed herself a glass of sparkling water with some lime squeezed into it.

    She had music playing softly in the background, a simple and infectious tune, a gentle guitar, highly syncopated. A smoky female voice singing in Portuguese and then English, a lilting song about a stick and a stone and a sliver of glass, the end of despair, the joy in your heart.

    The lilting voice was singing in Portuguese now: É pau, é pedra, é o fim do caminho …
    um pouco sozinho . I didn’t know what the words meant, but I liked the way they sounded.

    “Who’s singing?” I said. She’d always loved female vocalists—Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Judy Collins. All the greats, all of them different.

    “Susannah McCorkle. ‘The Waters of March.’ It’s an amazing rendition, isn’t it? The more you listen to it, the more its layers unfold. It’s casual and easygoing and then it just gets deeper and deeper and more soulful.”

    I grunted agreement.

    A woman invites you up to her apartment, you usually know what to expect. But not in this case. We’d both moved on. We’d gone from Friends With Benefits to Just Friends.

    I had plenty of friends. But there was only one Diana.

    And being Just Friends didn’t change the way I felt about her. It didn’t make her any less attractive to me. It didn’t keep me from watching her from behind, appreciating the curve of her waist as it met her shapely butt. It didn’t make me admire her less or find her any less fascinating. It didn’t diminish the strength of her magnetic field.

    The damn woman had some kind of built-in tractor beam. It wasn’t fair.

    But we were here to talk about Alexa Marcus, and I was determined to respect the implicit boundaries. I told her what little I knew about what had happened to Alexa, and about Taylor Armstrong, her Best Friend Forever.

    “I hate to say it, but Snyder has a point,” she said. “It hasn’t even been twelve hours, right? So she met a guy and went home with him and she’s sleeping it off in some BU dorm.
    That’s entirely possible, right?”

    “Possible, sure. Not likely.”

    “Why not?”

    “For one thing, it’s not like a girl her age to go dark, go off the grid. She’d have checked in with her friends. These girls are constantly texting each other. They work their little mobile phones like speed typists.”

    “She’s an overprotected girl with a troubled home life, and she’s testing the limits,” Diana said. She was sitting in an easy chair set at a right angle to the matching couch, her legs crossed. She’d removed her cowboy boots. Her toenails were painted deep oxblood red. The only makeup she had on was lip gloss. Her skin was translucent. She took a long drink of sparkling water, from a funky handblown blue glass tumbler.

    “I don’t think you really believe that,” I said. “With the kind of work you do.” The shape of her mouth gradually changed, so subtly