Free Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1) by Pamela Fagan Hutchins Page B

“You’re not tape recording me, are you?”
    That got my attention. “No, why?”
    “Because I am not granting permission to be recorded, and I don’t want what I say on the news. So, this is all off the record.”
    “I’m not a reporter. I’m just a paralegal looking for our client’s daughter.”
    “Good.” Now he flat out whispered. “Then may I speak frankly?”
    I tucked my phone tighter toward my shoulder and dropped my voice, too. “Yes, please.” I almost laughed at myself. We were acting like two kids telling secrets on the playground.
    “We can’t find anyone that has ever seen or heard of Valentina.”
    I stood up, accidentally knocking my chair back, its rollers not responding on the carpeted floor. Snowflake raised her head. She looked like she was starting to get annoyed with me.
    “No one?” I asked.
    “No one. Not neighbors, not your client’s co-workers. She’s not enrolled in school or day care. The police haven’t found anything, either.” He pitched his voice even lower and softer.
    I cupped my hand over my non-phone ear to block out other sounds as he spoke.
    “Is it possible your client’s, you know, nuts?” He asked.
    Was it? I thought about the woman I’d talked to the day before. “Hmmm. I’ve only met her once. She didn’t seem crazy.”
    Nausea came over me again, and I slipped the last saltine from my baggie and nibbled it silently. Snowflake smacked her lips. I fished some broken pieces out of the bag and tossed them to her. She licked them daintily, then swallowed them whole.
    “There was no evidence whatsoever that a child lived in that apartment. None. Not clothes, a toothbrush, toys, nothing. Wait, I take that back. There was one picture on the refrigerator—an odd drawing of a brown person in a skirt. But that was it.”
    “That sounds promising, at least as evidence of a child. Did you get anything else from it?”
    Snack completed, Snowflake stood up and stretched, then whined. I shot her a look. What did the whine mean?
    “Yeah, it was interesting. The guy in the picture wore a skirt and no shirt, and he had a big thing on his head—feathers or horns or something. He was dancing or hopping, too. There were two letters in the bottom right corner, an E and a P.”
    “Where little artists usually sign their pictures. Those aren’t her initials, though.”
    The P could be for Perez, but the E didn’t fit Sofia or Valentina. Snowflake’s whines had increased in the last minute and now she walked to the door and started howling.
    “Nope. But it did look like it was drawn by a child, a young child, although I can’t say whether it was a boy or a girl, if that would even mean anything. But there were no pictures of a girl in the apartment. The police said there were none in Sofia’s purse or on her phone either.”
    I shook my head. “That’s just odd. What kind of mother doesn’t have pictures of her kid?”
    “The kind that doesn’t have one, maybe.” He clucked.
    Snowflake’s howls changed to glass-shattering yips.
    “What’s that noise?”
    “The office mascot, Jack’s dog.”
    I decided Snowflake must be asking for a potty break, which wasn’t a bad idea for me, either. Yesterday afternoon Jack had set me up to take her out every few hours. I snapped my fingers and she leapt over to me as I pulled her leash from my left hand drawer. I clipped it on, then grabbed a doody bag before returning to the subject at hand.
    “But Sofia was genuinely upset, to the extent she wasn’t acting in her own best interests. She seemed sincere to me.”
    I opened the door and Snowflake lunged against the leash like a five-pound sled dog.
    “As she would, if she was delusional.”
    “She said she wasn’t crazy. Of course, she could be delusional about being sane.”
    Delusions of sanity. I could relate to that. I pressed the elevator call button.
    “Have you
ever
had a murder defendant that didn’t want to claim they were crazy?” Wallace asked.