Free Deceit by Brandilyn Collins Page B

Tony had recently done something—bought a car, applied for a new credit card—to activate a report.
    I noted my findings in my computer file, then took a little time hunting down information about Tony Whistman. It wasn’t hard to find. He was a realtor with RE/MAX in San Jose. He had his own website, which included his photo and a cell number. Tony looked to be in his mid-thirties, gray eyes, light brown hair. Beneath his may-I-help-you smile lay a hungry, intense expression, as if this young man sought to make millions and retire by age fifty. Make that forty-five.
    Interesting. He’d be thirteen years older than my Melissa, but these days that meant little. Could they be living together?
    I copied Tony’s information into my file. Printed out the color picture from his website.
    Although I continued searching, I found nothing to definitively tie Tony to the Melissa Harkoff I sought. No blog or pages on his website with personal photos. Neither did I find anything to detract from that possibility, such as a newspaper article about his marriage to someone else.
    Turning aside from Willmott and Tony, I ran the older San Jose addresses attached to a Melissa Harkoff through phone-number searches. Each came up with a listed number in someone else’s name. If my Melissa had once lived at those addresses, she didn’t anymore.
    Willmott remained.
    Using the Gilroy addresses I repeated the process. The older ones yielded numbers under different names. The most recent came up with a phone number for a Melissa Harkoff. My gal or the florist?
    I’d bet on the florist. She had to have a home number somewhere. Likely it was in the same town as her flower shop. But hunches could be wrong. A phone call in the morning should tell me what I needed to know.
    Morning. I blinked at the computer clock. Four-fifty. In a few hours it would be light.
    I pushed back from the computer, walked through the darkened hallway and into the bathroom. Exiting there a minute later, I found myself skulking through the house, checking locks again, peeking through a curtain to look outside. The rain had stopped. The world, what I could see of it, lay sullen and spent. Small branches and leaves littered Dineen’s front lawn and her neighbor’s yard across the street.
    Where was Hooded Man now?
    Who was Hooded Man?
    I returned to Dineen’s computer, wishing it were my own. I needed to search my photos for a picture of Melissa. I knew I had at least one of her and Linda together. I could picture them now on my back deck, Melissa looking proud and lovely in the new clothes Linda had bought her. She’d been living with the Jacksons less than a week, and I had just met her at church the previous Sunday. Melissa would speak little of her childhood, saying only that she was glad the horrible days following her mother’s death were behind her. She seemed so grateful to be living at the Jacksons’ home. To her it was a mansion, a new life.
    The Café Latte Jelly Bellies were gone. I ate what remained of the Chocolate Puddings. Rot my teeth with sugar, yeah right, Dineen. It would never happen. She was just jealous of my hard choppers.
    I drank the last of my water and looked over the information in the computer file. Somewhere along the way I’d eased up on my handwritten notes. Not good. Even though I’d ask Dineen for a flash drive to copy the file and take it back to my computer, I still wanted the written backup, just in case.
    I stopped to write the notes on the yellow pad.
    Finished with that, I sat back, data chugging through my tired brain. I would run other searches while waiting for dawn. Meanwhile the Willmott address held real promise.
    A page I had seen on Tony Whistman’s website suddenly registered. I blinked. Returned to the site. I found the page…and in my soggy head a plan began to form.

SIXTEEN
    JUNE 2004
    The sounds wafted into Melissa’s subconscious, chilling hands pulling her from another terrible dream of her mother dead on the