Free Indulgence by Liz Crowe Page B

police?” the old man asked when I didn’t acknowledge
him. “They stopped looking for her a long time ago. Such a shame.”
    “No, I’m not police,” I replied. “Private detective.”
    He looked me up and down with his watery eyes. “You look the
part with your fancy car and suit.”
    Glancing out the window, I frowned.
    “I saw you sitting there,” he went on. “Watching.”
    “Oh, shoosh, Eddie,” a woman said and waved him off.
    Glancing up at the waitress, I saw her name tag read,
‘Patrice’.
    “Pay him no mind. They say his head was screwed up in
Vietnam,” she said to me. “Alison was the only one who paid him any attention.
That’s who he means by ‘her’.”
    “It seems like Alison was well liked around here.”
    “I knew her from high school,” she went on. “She was top in
everything. Everyone wanted to be her.” She puffed out her chest, sticking her
tits into my line of view. Apparently she had to compensate for her
shortcomings next to Alison Crawford by being a tart.
    No doubt Alison had been voted ‘most likely not to
attempt murder’, but better people had been driven to do dark things before. If
they could, so could she.
    “Such a terrible thing what happened. Her family all shot
dead like that.” Patrice shook her head. “What can I get for you?”
    “Coffee. Black.”
    “Is that all?”
    “Yes.” I shifted my phone and sunglasses on the table and
glanced back to the old man.
    “Why a private detective?” Eddie asked as Patrice moved off.
    Solidifying the lie, I replied, “The police are at a loss,
that’s why they sent me. Alison’s disappearance is considered a cold case now.
They wanted to shut it, but I thought it was worth another look.”
    “Stop with your stories.” Patrice, the tarty waitress,
hushed Eddie as she put a coffee in front of me.
    “They think I’m bloody crazy,” Eddie said and she rolled her
eyes. “They just don’t see what I do.”
    “And what do you see?” I asked calmly, turning in my chair,
effectively dismissing the girl.
    “Alison didn’t kill herself. I won’t have it. There was too
much attention on the poor lass. If I were her, I’d try and disappear. Start
afresh. No help staying round here with this lot prying into your business.
Nosey lot of money hungry codgers around here.”
    It confirmed my suspicions that she’d tried to disappear
after her family was murdered, but where had she gone?
    “Where do you think she’d have gone?” I asked.
    “I don’t know. But she had to have had friends up at that
fancy school of hers.”
    I frowned. I didn’t want to have to make another trip, but I
doubted she would’ve turned to her University friends for help. She was
intelligent, well liked, a people person. A girl like that would’ve been known
by a lot of people. If she was reported missing and someone had seen her, they
would’ve notified the authorities. The Necromancers would’ve found her months
ago if that was the case.
    “I thought I’d seen a ghost,” Crazy Eddie said, breaking me
out of my thought pattern.
    I glanced up at him, suddenly interested. “What do you
mean?”
    “Alison was blonde. If there’s such a thing as
doppelgängers, I swear this woman was her. It’s sad.” He shook his head.
    “What did this other woman look like?”
    He lifted his cup of coffee and took a sip. “There’s light
and dark in this world boy. I’ve seen it all. This woman was the spitting image
of Alison, but she was dark. Not just her hair, but her entire presence. I’ve
seen good men go bad in the middle of war, but this was different. She had
murder in her eyes.”
    They sure didn’t call him Crazy Eddie for nothing.
    “Nothing good can come of that,” he went on. “Nothing at
all.”

 
Chapter Twelve
     
    Mercy
     
    X had just disappeared.
    I wanted to see him, to say…I didn’t know what I wanted to say,
but I felt the overwhelming need to lay eyes on him.
    He’d