“Asshole,” Kerri muttered.

She tried Keaton again. Voice mail. Damn it. “He said he’d be waiting to hear from me. Something must have happened.”

“Maybe the boss ran him off so he could close up,” Falco suggested. “We might as well get some food while we wait for this thing to happen. There’s a Jack’s across the street.”

“Whatever you want.” She couldn’t care less about food at the moment. “I’ll hang around here and call in the request. Maybe Keaton will come back.”

“I can do that while you go, if you’d prefer.”

Kerri shook her head. “I’m not moving until I search this place.”

“I’ll be back in five.” He climbed out of the car and headed across the street.

Kerri climbed out as well. She wanted to make the call standing in plain sight of the office beyond the chain-link fence and gate. While she waited for the callback about the warrant, she surveyed what she could see of the salvage yard. Keaton had absolutely no reason to make that call to her unless what he said was true.

The car was here, and she wasn’t going anywhere until they were allowed to have a look.

Falco returned with burgers, fries, and colas. The lunch of hero cops everywhere. He ate his fast and completely. She nibbled. Sipped at her drink. She wasn’t really hungry. She hadn’t been since school let out and Tori started being mad at her all the time. Then her ex had launched the legal stuff. With the Amelia situation added to that and this case, food wasn’t a priority.

“How’s your sister?” he asked.

Kerri nibbled on a fry. “She’s hanging in there, trying to get right with the idea that Amelia would just disappear like this.” It felt wrong. And terrifying.

“I passed off tracking down the history on the house that burned to Cross since my girl at property records is out sick today.”

“Whatever it takes,” Kerri said. She wasn’t going to complain about his tactics as long as no laws were broken and they got the answers they needed.

They ate in silence. The minutes crept by like hours. Whatever Old Man Tate was doing in there, he hadn’t left his office, at least not beyond the view of the front window.

A ping from her cell signaled a text had arrived. She checked the screen. It was the warrant. Two unis were en route with the paper.

“We got it.” Kerri called Tate. He answered, but he took his time, allowing the phone to ring three times. “We have the warrant, sir. Open the gate, please.”

Within five minutes they were walking the salvage yard, which was a good deal larger than she’d estimated. This was going to take a while. Backup arrived, and they split up and moved in a grid pattern to ensure they didn’t miss anything.

Just over an hour later it was clear the blue Plymouth in question was not on the lot.

Kerri looked for a rear exit. Maybe he’d had the vehicle moved while they waited for the paper. Falco was giving Tate hell. Kerri surveyed the area again, looking for anything they had missed.

Her gaze landed on the compacting machine. She walked the twenty or so yards to the machine and did some looking. Sure enough, beyond the bars that prevented a person from accidently getting caught in the process was something blue.

She strode back to where she’d left Falco questioning Tate.

“What’s in the compactor, Mr. Tate?”

He looked surprised that she had thought to ask. “I have no idea. My employee George Sanders does the crushing.”

“Then I guess you’d better get Mr. Sanders over here, because there’s something blue in that crusher, and my money is on the Plymouth.”

Two hours were required to round up Sanders. The Plymouth was in the crusher, and both men claimed Keaton had brought it in.

Kerri needed to find Joey Keaton.

52

Friday, June 15

9:00 a.m.

Birmingham Police Department

First Avenue North

Major Investigations Division

Kerri collapsed into the chair behind her desk.

It was done.

Amelia was officially listed as missing . . . an endangered-adult alert had gone out.

“They’re going to the carrier with a warrant for Amelia’s cell phone records,” Kerri announced. “We need some idea of where she is. We needed it yesterday, damn it.”

Falco nodded. “That’s a step in the right direction, but the problem is it’ll take even more time to get those phone records the usual way. It might be Monday or Tuesday before that happens.”

Kerri closed her eyes. “Damn it, Falco, tell me something new, will you?” Then she looked at her partner, hope daring to swell inside her. “You have a better option?”

“Cross can go a different route and have those cell phone records as early as tomorrow.”

Of course she could. Cross obviously didn’t play by the rules. At the moment, Kerri didn’t care how they got them as long as they got them. “Make it happen.”

“You got it.”

Kerri listened to the low rumble of Falco’s voice as he made the call. This morning she felt as if she were in a black tunnel and couldn’t find her way to the light. The murders at the Abbott home had taken place nine days ago, and they still had nothing concrete. No true suspects, though they did now have a plethora of persons of interest and fragments of information and leads that all appeared to circle around and come back to the same place.

Sela Rollins Abbott.

Kerri rubbed at her forehead. She’d gotten home really late last night, and she’d barely had a minute with Tori this morning. Her daughter had gone to breakfast with the family of a friend, and then they were heading to the mall. Kerri had watched out the window as her little girl had loaded up with Sarah Talley and her mother.

The good news was that Tori had completely understood Kerri’s need to ask a slew of questions. They had both watched how Amelia’s MIA status was affecting her parents. On top of that, Kerri’s attorney had called and said that the hearing regarding Tori’s custody was on Tuesday. Evidently, Nick was dead serious about going after primary custody. His own attorney had pulled some strings to get such an early date on a typically crowded docket.

Great. Just great. But Kerri wasn’t so worried about the hearing now. Tori wasn’t trying to escape her mother. She would speak the truth to the judge and with the innocent impartiality of a child who loved both her parents. As Kerri’s attorney had suggested, the whole thing was just a pain in the ass.

Her cell vibrated. She picked it up without even looking at the screen. “Devlin.”

“Detective, this is Officer John Brashier. We have a gunshot victim over here on Shades Crest Road. The victim is male, but I thought I should call you anyway because your card is in the man’s wallet. Name’s Joseph Keaton.”

“Is he alive?” Hope dared to make an appearance.

“No, ma’am. Looks like he’s been dead a little while.”

Son of a bitch! “I’ll be right there.”

His own call finished now, Falco looked to her. “Where we going?”

Kerri stood. “Shades Crest Road. Joey Keaton is dead.”

Well, now she understood why he hadn’t answered her calls.

Keaton’s red Porsche sat behind a long-closed gas station. He was in the driver’s seat, his body slumped forward. He had one bullet wound to the left temple. No exit wound. Probably a small-caliber pistol not unlike the one used on Ben Abbott and Jacqueline Rollins. The scene might have passed for a suicide except the weapon used was missing, and Joey Keaton had been right handed. She had watched him write out his statement the first time they met.

Kerri thought of the gun that had been hidden in the Abbott nursery and how it had disappeared on Sunday night.

“If Sela Abbott is still alive and we indulge the theory that she killed her husband and mother,” Kerri said to her partner, “this would seem to indicate she’s trying to tie up loose ends.”

Frankly, Kerri still had an issue with the idea of her killing her mother. Then again, maybe Sela was just tired of taking care of her. The ME’s call about finding no cancer or anything else wrong with the woman nudged Kerri. There was something more to that chapter in this story.

The same went for the husband. If he was helping Sela with her search for the truth, as Bellemont had suggested, why would she kill him?

“If that’s what’s going on, she’s a little behind the curve,” Falco commented as he surveyed the area around the defunct gas station. “Keaton gave us a heads-up about the car. Why kill him now?”

“Maybe he was blackmailing her for more money?” Kerri could see Keaton pushing the envelope that way.

There were no operating businesses on either side of the station or across the street. The chance that anyone had witnessed the shooting was about zero.