Free Big Jack by J. D. Robb Page A

always meeting him somewhere. We don’t bring guys here much. Jeez, look at this place.” She looked around it with the forlorn and resigned expression of a woman who knew it was the best she was going to do. “She was going out to meet him Saturday night, after work and shit. To a play or something. When she didn’t come home, I figured she’d stayed at his place. No big. But she doesn’t miss work, and she hasn’t ever stayed out of touch this long, so I’m starting to worry, you know?”
    “Why don’t we file a report?” Peabody stepped back out of the bath. “A missing person’s report.”
    “Oh man, you think?” Essie scratched at her bicolored hair. “She comes waltzing in here and finds out I did that, she’ll be on my case for a month. We don’t have to tell my parents, do we? They’ll get all twisted inside out and come running over here hysterical and whatever.”
    “Have you checked with them? Maybe she went home for a couple days.”
    “Nah. I mean yeah, I checked. I buzzed my mom and did the hey, how’re things, la la la. She said to have Tina call ’cause she likes to hear from her girls. So I know she hasn’t seen her. My mom would flip sideways if she thought Tina’s shacked up with some guy.”
    “We’ll take care of it. Why don’t you give the information to Detective Peabody?” Eve looked at the tidily made bed.
     
    “She’s not off with some guy for extended nooky,” Eve said when they were back in the car. “Girls like that don’t take off without a change of clothes, without taking earrings and their toothbrush. She doesn’t miss a day of work in eight months, but she just happens to miss the Gannon job?”
    “You think she was in on it?”
    Eve thought of the tiny, tidy apartment. The little music box of trinkets. “Not on purpose. I doubt the same can be said for Bobby.”
    “It’s going to be tough to track down some guy named Bobby. No full name, no description.”
    “He left footprints somewhere. Do a check on Jane Does, any that came in since Saturday night. We’re heading down to the morgue anyway. Let’s just hope we don’t find her there.”
    “Want your taco?”
    Eve unwrapped it on her lap, then decided eating it while she drove was just asking to go through the rest of the day with taco juice on her shirt. She switched to auto, clicked back a couple inches and chowed down.
    When the in-dash ’link signaled, she shook her head. “Screen it,” she said with a mouthful of mystery meat by-product and sinus-clearing sauce.
    “Nadine Furst,” Peabody announced.
    “Too bad I’m on lunch break.” She slurped up Pepsi and ignored the call. “So, a maid from the projects somehow hooks up with some guy named Bobby, who takes her to art galleries and the theater, but he never comes to her place and meets her sister. She’s out of touch, missing work, among the missing for three days, but her new boyfriend doesn’t call, leave a message, scoot by to see what’s up. Nothing.”
    “He wouldn’t if she was with him.”
    “Point for that. But this girl, who makes her bed like a Youth Scout, doesn’t call in to work sick, doesn’t tell her sister she’s cozied down in a love nest, doesn’t want extra clothes or all the equipment females take on sex safaris. She risks her paycheck, ignores her family, stays in the same outfit? I don’t think so.”
    “You think she’s dead.”
    “I think she had the access code to Gannon’s place, and somebody wanted that code. I think if she was alive and well or able, she’d have seen or heard the media reports bombarding the screen about bestselling author Samantha Gannon’s recent problem and she’d have gotten to her sister if no one else.”
    “Three Jane Does last seventy-two,” Peabody reported. “Two elderly indigents, no official ID on record. Third’s a crispy critter, status pending.”
    “Where’d they find her?”
    “Abandoned lot,” Peabody read off her PPC. “Alphabet City. About