Free Missing: The Body of Evidence by Declan Conner

dance on her bed quilt. She was fascinated
by the hypnotic spectrum of lights, but they failed to distract her thoughts.
    Other detectives had talked about their
personal cold-case files that stayed with them throughout their careers. In her
wildest dreams, she never thought that her first case would turn out that way.
She thought that if nothing else, she made a promise that she would not rest
until she could determine where Astral Chemicals fit into the equation. She
just worried how she could do it without Logan finding out what she was doing.

Chapter 15
    The
morning rays of sunlight penetrated the slats of the blinds covering her
bedroom window. Nancy felt groggy, sleep had been hard to come by, but she had
still managed to awake before the alarm clock offended her hearing. She reached
out and turned the alarm setting to the OFF position. Her arms rested on the
outside of the duvet. The face of David, the janitor’s son, appeared in her
thoughts. A fleeting recollection of a dream permeated at the back of her mind.
    David was smiling, holding out his hand
and inviting her to join him. ‘Come with me,’ he said. There was a sense of
floating and the dream fragmented to where she was outside the cabin depicted
in the painting on her living room wall. A glance at David, and he no longer
looked angelic. His expression had the look of evil.
    ‘Ouch.’
    Nancy flinched when she felt a sting on the
back of her left hand, and looked at the source of the irritation. There was a
small red patch on the back of her hand surrounding a small blister. A ray of
sunlight refracted through the crystal ornament on the windowsill and danced on
the duvet where her hand had been resting. Nancy ran her other hand through the
ray of light and felt the heat as her hand passed through the beam.
    ‘Damn.’
    She threw the duvet back and hurried to the
blinds. One of the slats in the blinds had a kink; she straightened it, lifted
the blinds, picked up the ornament and walked to the living room. Nancy placed
the ornament on her computer desk and sat down. She rested her elbows with her
hands holding her head and stared at the ornament. The concave in the crystal
magnified the LG symbol on her computer. Recollections of her time as a girl
scout and her attempts at starting a fire with a magnifying glass while on a
field trip passed through her mind. Well, I’ll be damned. I could’ve been
toast. The notion that it could be another explanation for the freak fire
at the professor’s apartment came to mind, but she quickly dismissed the idea
on account of the time of the incident.
    Her phone rang and she answered. Central
communications told her to meet Bill at McDonald’s on West Compton Boulevard at
ten-thirty, later in the morning. South Central. My old patrol area. It
sounded like something big was going down, as they were to meet there with the
sergeant of the gang unit, based at the LAPD substation in Compton.
    Nancy dressed, and mooched around her
apartment feeling restless. The circumstances surrounding the professor’s death
was bugging her. She took her notebook from her purse, started to go through
her notes and stopped at the scribbled telephone number of the condo management
company. Maybe they’ll have some knowledge of him.
    The receptionist took the call and
transferred her to the manager. What he had to say stunned her. ‘Astral
Chemicals paid the condo charges on the professor’s apartment.’
    When she asked how long the janitor had
worked for them, it was almost an aside to the conversation when the manager
mentioned, ‘Astral also pays Kelly’s condo charges.’
    The number he had for Astral was the same
as on the professor’s card, but there was no address on record for the company.
The call ended, leaving Nancy even more bewildered about the case. She dialled
the number the manager gave her, but the line was dead.

Chapter 16
    The
sun was beating down as Nancy headed in her car for her meeting with Bill.
Checking