Free The Case of the Sin City Sister by Lynne Hinton

nowhere in sight. She only shook her head.
    “What, she’s not there?” he asked, a look of surprise on his face. “I just talked to her,” he added. “Let me see,” he said, and he reached out for the phone.
    Eve shook her head again as she handed the phone back to him. “She’s not there,” she said.
    The Captain took the phone and began calling out, “Hello, Dorisanne. Hello, are you there?” He held out the phone to studyit and turned back to his daughter. “I swear she was just there. I talked to her.”
    Eve walked past her father toward his room. “Here,” she said when she returned, handing the crutches to him that she had retrieved. “Come into the kitchen. I need a glass of water.” She turned down the hall and he followed behind.
    In the kitchen, Eve took a pitcher of water from the refrigerator and poured herself a glass. Jackson sat down at the table. Trooper had joined them both and was lying next to his chair. The loyal companion dropped her head onto her paws.
    “You want something?” she asked Jackson.
    “No, I’m fine,” he answered.
    Eve drank some of the water and joined him at the table.
    He was shaking his head, still staring at the cell phone in his hand.
    Eve reached for it and he gave it to her. She scrolled through the recent calls but could not place Dorisanne’s number anywhere on the list. “Your last call was from Daniel,” she noted, handing the phone back to him.
    He looked at the list. The call from his former partner had come in at eleven thirty that morning; he had called just before he came into town for lunch. He snapped the phone shut. “Well, I don’t care what the phone says—she called, woke me out of a deep sleep. I heard it ring, picked it up, answered it, and she said, ‘Daddy, can I speak to Eve?’ And I got up, hopped over to your door, and got you.”
    Eve didn’t know what to think. Captain Jackson Divine was not one to make up tales of people calling who had not called. Evenwhen he was in his worst state of confusion following the surgery, following too many pain medications, he had never hallucinated. This kind of behavior was like nothing she had ever experienced with him before. And yet, there was no record that Dorisanne had placed a call to him. Besides, Eve thought, she never called his cell phone, only the landline at home.
    “When did she get your cell number?” she asked.
    Jackson thought about the question. “I don’t know. I figured you gave it to her.”
    Eve shook her head. “No, when I got you the phone last year, you told me not to give out the number to anybody. You didn’t want it, remember, and then when I bought it I told you just to keep it for emergencies. I didn’t even know you kept it on at night.”
    “Well, of course I keep it on at night. How else would I use it for emergencies if I didn’t keep it on?”
    She didn’t answer. It was the middle of the night, and she was certainly in no mood to argue.
    “You don’t believe me?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. I was sound asleep, having some weird nun dream, when you yelled and woke me up. She wasn’t on the line when you handed me the phone.”
    “Well, that doesn’t mean I’ve made this whole thing up!”
    Eve leaned against the back of the chair.
    Neither one of them spoke for a few minutes.
    Eve rose and looked at the Captain again. “Tell me what she said one more time. And how many rings were there before you woke up and answered?”
    “I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s loud, though. I can’t believeit didn’t wake you. And there’s a stupid jingle instead of a normal ring. It sounds like a car horn.”
    Eve raised her eyebrows. “Could it have been a car horn?”
    “A car horn with your sister’s voice at the end of it?” He blew out a breath and shook his head. He started to get up from the table. “Well, this is a waste of my time. If you don’t believe me, I don’t need to try and persuade you.”
    “Sit down,” she pleaded.