Free Bleeding Out by Baxter Clare Page B

“the last thing I wanna do is leave you alone with a bereaved parent.” Frank didn’t smile. They were both relieved when the supervisor led Delia Wyche down the hallway. She took them to an office where they could talk, but before Frank had finished the introductions, Mrs. Wyche interrupted with the practiced snort of the chronically bitter.
    “What’s Jennie done now?”
    Frank herded the heavy-hipped woman into a seat, explaining that they had a few questions. She wasn’t avoiding telling the woman about her daughter, but it would be easier to get answers from her before she was too upset.
    “Mrs. Wyche, is Jennifer Peterson your daughter?”
    “‘Fraid so. What did she do?” the woman repeated suspiciously.
    Frank ignored her, asking when she’d last seen Jennifer.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” she said offhandedly. “Maybe three, four days ago. Let’s see, it must have been Sunday because she didn’t come home for dinner. I remember because I went to a lot of trouble to make something she and Randy both like—Randy’s my husband. He’s not Jennie’s father. I made pork chops. I try to make something they both like or else one of them bitches all through dinner and ruins everyone else’s appetite. They never seem—”
    Noah interrupted her.
    “So you haven’t seen Jennifer for three days?”
    “That’s right.”
    “And you weren’t concerned about that?”
    “Detective, you’ve got to understand, Jennie pulls stunts like this all the time. At first I was concerned, but when they started happening on a regular basis I just quit worrying. She always comes home sooner or later.”
    Not this time, Frank thought, and asked what it was that started happening on a regular basis.
    Delia Wyche gathered her patience with a large sigh and explained, “When she started running off. The first time was three years ago, right after I remarried. She and Randy don’t get along so good—she ran away to show me how unhappy she was. She did it a couple of times after that. I was worried in the beginning, but she’s always just at a friend’s house. I finally figured, let her knock herself out. I don’t have time to chase her all over.”
    “Mrs. Wyche, can you tell us exactly when you last saw your daughter?”
    “Well, yeah I can, but what’s this all about? What sort of detectives are you anyway?”
    Frank again ignored the questions and drilled the woman with a pitiless gaze.
    “Mrs. Wyche, what was your daughter doing the last time you saw her?”
    Mrs. Wyche wiggled uncomfortably in her chair. When she answered, her voice was tinged with a whine.
    “The last time I saw her was in the kitchen. I was doing the dishes—God forbid she or Randy should do them—and she came in to make herself a sandwich. She’d just gotten up, and she had her backpack with her. I asked her where she thought she was going, and she said to the park. Then I—”
    “Which park?”
    “The one off Jefferson, by all the oil derricks. It gives me the—”
    “Do you mean the Culver City Park? With the ball fields?”
    “I guess. It’s the one off Duquesne, right off Jefferson,” she said impatiently.
    “Alright, then what?”
    “I asked her about her homework, which she’d been putting off all weekend, and she asked what did I think she had in her pack? Then when I asked why she had to go to the park to study, she started bitching about the noise Randy was making in the garage.”
    “What was he doing?”
    “Shoot, I don’t know. He’s got an old jeep he’s always tinkering with. It hasn’t run since I’ve known him, but you’d think with all the time he spends on that thing he had it in the Indy 500 every weekend.”
    She paused, searching for a glimpse of sympathy from either detective and finding none.
    “You know I still don’t know what you—”
    “Just a few more questions, Mrs. Wyche. What happened next?”
    “I don’t know…nothing I think. I didn’t want to listen to her and Randy going at it