Free Sinister by Lisa Jackson, Nancy Bush, Rosalind Noonan Page A

restaurant, so Bart’s wife, Shelly, who worked as the primary waitress, was able to take a minute and look at Amber’s photo.
    She stuck her pen behind her ear and frowned. “Face doesn’t ring a bell, but I do like your iPad. It’s so slender.” She held the device up so that Bart could see it from his spot at a table in the back, where he was going through rubber-banded stacks of receipts. “See this, honey? Mm-hmm. This is what I want for Christmas!” Shelly handed it back to Sam. “I’ve been hinting around, but he’ll probably just get me some earrings or perfume again.”
    “You don’t recall this woman?”
    “Mmm . . . no . . . ask Carol or Jane.”
    Sam was about to check with the other waitresses when Bart let out a hoot. “I got it. Amber Barstow,” he hollered, holding a receipt high in the air and motioning Sam to the bar. Sam let out a slow breath and walked over to Bart, not liking that he’d shouted out the woman’s name.
    “She was here Saturday, right?” Bart asked. Sam was scanning the receipt as they moved down the dim corridor. “Maybe she came to hear the band. You know, we have live music on Saturday nights.”
    “It says her server was Grady,” Sam said.
    “Well, just your luck. Grady’s working now.”
    Bart clapped Sam on the back as they stepped up to the bar to talk with the wiry man with the gold tooth and pale eyes. Grady Chisum was not Sam’s favorite citizen. The man had been at the center of dozens of barroom brawls before he decided to clean it up and malinger on the other side of the bar.
    It took Grady no time to recall the woman. “Amber,” he said, almost with an “aha” attached to it.
    “You know her,” Sam said.
    “Nah. She just came in that one night. She in trouble?”
    “That’s her Honda Civic outside, the one with the flat tire,” Sam said.
    “I just want her to get the car out of my lot,” Bart said, holding the receipt up to Grady’s face, which he turned away from.
    “Irish coffee with a green drizzle on top,” he said as he hung the glass he’d been drying in the overhead rack. “Yeah, that’s her. Dark hair. She was kind of quiet, kept to herself most of the time. She checked out a guy at the bar, but I don’t think they hooked up or anything.”
    “She was alone?” Sam asked.
    “Yup. And so was the other guy. Didn’t recognize either of ’em. He had a dark jacket and a black Stetson. I can’t remember what she was wearing, but she was shivering when she came in. It took her a while to unzip the jacket and relax.”
    “Did they leave together?”
    Grady squinted. “Don’t think so, but I’m paid to pour, not to babysit.”
    Sam went back outside to talk with Bud Thomas the tow truck driver. Since the car’s owner wasn’t a missing person yet, he wasn’t going to voucher all the possessions in the car, but he didn’t want the vehicle going all the way over to county impound. “Just take it back to town,” Sam told the driver. “Leave it in the lot behind the precinct.”
    “Will do,” Bud said, his breath steaming the cold air.
    By the time he rolled into the lot back at the precinct, the muscles in the back of Sam’s neck sang with tension. He cut the engine to his county-issued Jeep and rotated his neck far enough to hear his vertebrae crack. The neck ache was chronic. Like the Jeep, it came with the job. Lately, the department was on overload. They were down two deputies, one from retirement, the other a pregnancy, and he was having some difficulty getting anyone qualified to take the jobs.
    The holiday season was always stressful and seemed to bring out the worst in some people. Domestic violence reports were on the rise, along with the usual traffic accidents, power outages, drunk drivers, poachers and fights. But he had a niggling fear about the abandoned vehicle. He sincerely hoped Amber Barstow was all right.
    Locking the Jeep remotely, he walked through the back entrance of the low-slung cinder block