Into Thin Air Read online

  “When did she die?”

  Either Seifert was genuinely upset, Austin thought, or he was good at faking it. “Around the middle of December, give or take a few days.”

  “I was on the job twelve hours a day, seven days a week. I didn’t even have a car, man. I’m telling you, I haven’t seen the girl for months.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I already told you, it was some time before Mindy and me broke up. April or May. It was way before Marcy disappeared.”

  Austin stood up and began to pace. “I suppose you don’t know anything about Marcy’s baby, either.” He watched Seifert’s face closely. He noticed that Caro, too, had stopped filing her nails and had grown very still.

  Seifert’s eyes widened in surprise. “Marcy was pregnant?”

  Suddenly Caro was out of her chair, slapping the palms of her hands on the tabletop and leaning menacingly toward the suspect, reminding Austin of a cobra. “Of course she was pregnant, because you got her that way.”

  “Whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” Seifert said. “I didn’t have nothing to do with that.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Caro said, almost nose to nose with Seifert. Even the attorney was unconsciously backing away from her. “That’s not what Debby Phelps says. She was listening at the bedroom door that day you raped Marcy. You remember, don’t you? That day during spring break when Mindy went to the video store and you decided to get yourself a little from her baby sister?”

  “Hey, that girl was no baby,” Seifert objected.

  Austin sent up a silent prayer of thanks. Seifert had just as good as confessed. Caro sat back down, and the lawyer whispered a few frantic words into Seifert’s ear.

  “She was no baby,” Seifert repeated. “But I didn’t rape her.”

  “Debby Phelps says you did,” Austin said, continuing the interrogation. He chanced a look at Caro, but she was back to filing her nails, glancing up every few seconds.

  “Debby Phelps is a little girl with a big imagination,” Seifert said. “I can’t believe you’d even listen to her.”

  “Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on her testimony,” Caro interrupted again. “When Marcy found out she was pregnant, she promised you she wouldn’t tell anyone. But she didn’t keep that promise.”

  Damn, but Caro could bluff, Austin thought. He would remember never to play poker with her.

  “She confided in her teacher, Melanie Blaylock,” Caro continued, idly tapping her nail file against the tabletop. The lawyer whispered something else to Seifert—probably reminding him that Melanie Blaylock’s testimony would be hearsay evidence and not admissible in court.

  Caro went for the kill. “And then there’s the baby. When we catch up with him—and rest assured, we will—a DNA test will prove you’re the father. It seems to me, Ray, that you had a very good motive for kidnapping little Marcy and stashing her away someplace where she couldn’t slap a paternity suit on you. It’s the only motive we’ve got. So you better tell us the truth now. Getting caught in a string of lies won’t look good to a jury.”

  Seifert conferred briefly with his lawyer before responding. “Okay, look, I had sex with Marcy, okay? Consensual sex.”

  “Ray,” the lawyer interrupted, “I don’t think you should—”

  Seifert became very agitated. “They’re trying to pin a murder on me, you idiot, don’t you see? If they catch me lying about this, they’ll think I’m lying about everything.” He turned back to Austin. “Marcy invited me into her bedroom and started taking off her clothes. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Just say no,” Caro murmured, quietly enough that only Austin heard her.

  “And then later she told me she was pregnant, but I don’t know that I was the father. That girl was hot to trot, I’m telling you. She could have been doing it with her whole high school football team for all I know.”

  “Marcy Phelps, hot to trot?” Austin said, skeptically shaking his head. “I don’t think so. In fact, I think she was a virgin. A scared little virgin.”

  Seifert began picking at a splinter in his hand. “She said she wasn’t. And she didn’t act scared. But she wasn’t very experienced.”

  The lawyer said nothing. He just looked on with his arms folded, wearing an expression of extreme annoyance.

  Austin sat back down, rubbing his hand over his face. Abruptly he changed tack. “Look, Ray, there’s been no murder committed. Marcy died of natural causes. If she ran away and met you someplace, if you lived with her in Oklahoma or wherever, there’s not much we can charge you with. The worst I can imagine is, um, improper disposal of human remains.”

  He shook his head. “No way, man.”

  “Now, come on, Ray. It’s easy to imagine what happened. She had the baby, you couldn’t get her to a hospital in time, she died, you panicked. It’s natural. You drove her to—”

  “I’m telling you, I ain’t seen that girl since last spring.”

  “Then how did you find out she was pregnant?”

  “We talked on the phone.” His eyes darted back and forth nervously. “She was gonna take care of it, you know? I even gave her the money. But then she split. I figured she used the money to buy a bus ticket or something.”

  “And you never saw her or heard from her again?”

  “I never saw her or heard from her again, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

  Austin went at Ray Seifert from several different directions, but his story didn’t change. After another hour, during which Caro had nothing to add, he called it quits.

  “You think he’s telling the truth?” Austin asked Caro as soon as they were out of Seifert’s hearing.

  Caro chewed her lower lip. “Unfortunately, yeah. I don’t think he knows what happened to her. We can check with his employer in Oklahoma, take a look at the place where he was living, but...” She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “And if he’s guilty of anything more than sexual assault, he’ll be long gone before we can arrest him again. Too bad we don’t have anything to charge him with that’ll stick.” But Austin didn’t really care about Ray Seifert now. If Caro was right—and Austin tended to believe she was—he would be no more use in the Phelps investigation.

  Austin waited until someone came to take Seifert back to his holding cell, but Caro disappeared. He found her a few minutes later in a break room, making tea from the tea bags she kept in her purse. She looked kind of pale. And pensive.

  “That was damn good work you did,” he offered as he perused the vending machines. No Twinkies or Ding Dongs. A generic cinnamon roll would have to do. He shoved quarters into the machine and pushed the appropriate button.

  She shrugged. “He was easy.”

  “Not to me, he wasn’t. I’m curious. What made you jump in when you did?”

  She stirred her tea with a plastic spoon. “When he acted like he was surprised to hear Marcy’d been pregnant, I knew he was lying. It was the first show of weakness I saw, and I...just couldn’t let it pass.”

  “How did you know he was lying?” Austin had interrogated plenty of car thieves, fences and chop shop owners. Sometimes it was easy to spot a lie. But with Seifert, Austin never would have been able to pick that exact moment as the one when truth was suspended and lying began.

  She shrugged again.

  He pulled a chair up next to hers and straddled it, then busied his hands by unwrapping the cinnamon roll. “Did you enjoy it?” he asked, dipping his head and peering into her face.

  She suppressed a smile. “If you have to ask, you’re doing something wrong.”

  The sexual innuendo produced a tiny frisson of pleasure along his spine, but he pushed it away—for the moment. She wasn’t going to evade his question that neatly. “Did you enjoy making Ray Seifert talk?” he clarified.

  She set her cup down with a thunk and looked him in the eye. “Yeah. Yeah, I did, smart ass. I wasn’t sure I could ever do that again. But I guess it’s like riding a bicycle.”


  “And you don’t feel guilty?”

  “For making him talk, or for enjoying myself?”

  “Enjoying yourself.”

  She took a deep breath, apparently taking his question very seriously. “I felt a little sick to my stomach. Scared, maybe, to know it’s still there inside me.”

  Austin didn’t have to ask what it was.

  “But I guess if I didn’t enjoy making slime squirm, I wouldn’t be able to do it so zealously. And someone has to do it, or guys like Seifert go free.”

  “Then are you glad I made you come in that room with me?”

  She bristled. “You didn’t make me do any...” Then she stopped and stared at him through narrowed eyes. “You want my gratitude, is that it? You want me to admit that you were right and I was wrong, to fall on my knees and thank you for forcing me to face my fears—”

  “A simple ‘thank-you’ would do.” He grinned. With her prickly self-righteousness, Caro made herself such an easy target. And he loved yanking her chain. When she didn’t respond, he reached over and touched her chin with his finger, nudging it until she was facing him. “Come on, Caro, you can say the magic word.”

  At that moment, Austin noticed two things. One was that Caro hadn’t batted away his hand when he had touched her. He had invaded her personal space—something he bet she didn’t normally allow, even from her close friends like Villaverde—and she’d let Austin touch her face. The second thing was that she was looking at his mouth.

  He lost all interest in teasing her. Without thinking much about it, he leaned closer and captured her full lips with his.

  He could almost taste her surprise. He definitely felt her brief acceptance, the instantaneous exchange of passion contained in one shared breath, the barely audible sound in the back of her throat, the hand that fluttered on his shoulder. Then all at once she was pulling away, jumping out of her chair, her hand over her mouth as if she’d done something unspeakable.

  “Are you nuts?” she said, her words no more than a frantic whisper. “Anyone could walk in here.”

  He should have said something clever, like, Is that your only objection? A lack of privacy? I can fix that. But he was more than a little shaken up himself. He certainly hadn’t planned to kiss her. He’d thought about it before, but he’d never dreamed he would actually be dumb enough to do it. So rather than being witty or urbane, he blurted out, “I’m sorry, Caro. I didn’t mean to. It just happened.”

  His totally graceless reply seemed to take the starch out of her. Maybe she recognized that his distress was at least equal to hers. “Well...” She reclaimed her chair, although she scooted it a few inches farther from his, and she sipped at her tea, clutching the cup as if it might spring twenty leaks at any moment.

  He sat up straighter and rubbed the back of his neck. Slowly he felt his cocksureness returning. “Surely you’ve thought about it.”

  He expected total denial. Ridicule, even. So she surprised him when she said, “Yeah, I’ve thought about it.” At least she’d admitted there was tension between them.

  “I didn’t think I’d imagined...” His voice trailed off.

  “Nevertheless, that was total insanity.”

  “Total,” he agreed, even as his body clamored for more of her. He wondered, not for the first time, what she would look like out of those oversized, shapeless, sex-disguising clothes she wore.

  “We have to work together. We can’t even be thinking about—”

  “Absolutely.”

  Suspicion returned to her eyes. “Are you making fun of me?”

  “No, no.” He shook his head vehemently. “I agree with you one hundred percent. We’ll forget it ever happened.” Fat chance. He knew he would relive that minuscule taste of ecstasy a thousand times over the next twenty-four hours.

  “All right, then.”

  “I’ll go thank Sergeant Wiggs for helping us out. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  She nodded. “Oh, Austin? Thank you.”

  It took a moment for Austin to realize she wasn’t thanking him for the kiss.

  Sergeant Wiggs had left the station, so Austin scribbled a note telling Wiggs that if he ever needed a favor from the DPD, all he had to do was ask. On his way out of the station, as luck would have it, he ran square into Ray Seifert, who apparently had just made bail.

  Austin tried to ignore him. He had about reached his slime tolerance for the day, and it wouldn’t take much to provoke him. But Seifert flagged him down.

  “Hey, you believe me, don’t you?” he asked Austin.

  Austin continued on his path toward the exit. “I don’t know, should I?”

  “You seem like a reasonable guy. Now, that gal who’s with you, she’s another story.”

  Sensing some sort of imminent male bonding, Austin slowed his pace and managed a weak laugh. “She’s tough, all right.”

  “It’s hard to talk about, well, you know, in front of her.”

  Seifert was getting downright chatty, and his lawyer was nowhere around. Austin decided to take advantage of the situation. “Women can be a pain,” he agreed, thinking again of how Caro’s mouth felt against his own, wondering what it would feel like on other parts of his body.

  “Like, I didn’t just get the girl pregnant and drop her. I mean, it takes two, you know? And I tried to do the right thing. I told her not to tell anyone because I thought it would be better for her if no one ever found out. Her parents would have stroked out.”

  They just about did, Austin wanted to say, when they identified her body. But he bit his tongue.

  “And I paid for her to get rid of it. I even found the clinic and made the appointment for her. I did the best I could.”

  Something clicked in Austin’s mind. He thought about another young girl who had missed her appointment at an abortion clinic. “What was the name of the clinic?”

  Caught off guard by the sharpness of the questions, Seifert stopped in his tracks. “Uh, I dunno. Does it matter?”

  Austin stopped, too. “Yes, it matters. Think. What was it called?”

  Seifert screwed up his face in a sincere-appearing attempt to remember. “I think it was the Woman’s Blah-Blah Clinic, something like that. Over on Harry Hines.”

  “Women’s Services Clinic?” Austin corrected him. His skin tingled with anticipation.

  Seifert showed instant recognition. “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Oh, God. That was the same clinic Amanda Arkin had gone to.

  Chapter 10

  “We can’t just charge in there and round everybody up for questioning,” Caro said. She and Austin were back at the station, discussing how to proceed now that they had this new, interesting piece of evidence provided by Ray Seifert. Austin was seated, his feet propped on the edge of his desk. Eating again. At least it was a granola bar this time.

  Caro, too edgy to sit, was pacing the small area in front of his desk, her hands shoved into the pockets of her oversize green cardigan. “It might be pure coincidence that both Marcy and Amanda visited the same clinic. And if it isn’t, a showy display of police authority might drive our suspect underground, or prompt him to cover his tracks. We don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Austin asked, arms crossed, challenging. He was once again cocky and superior, proud of the fact that he had “ferreted out” this piece of information from Seifert.

  Caro suspected Seifert had simply volunteered his juicy tidbit, but she didn’t say so. Let Austin bask in his own glow. He seemed to enjoy it so thoroughly. At least they now had something to occupy their minds besides that stupid, stupid kiss.

  “I think we should approach the owner of the clinic,” she said, “this Dr. Wayrick, gain his cooperation and ask to see personnel records. We can find out which current employees were also on the payroll back when Marcy disappeared–and if they were actually at work that day. If we can discover any mysterious absences that coincide with the dates Marcy and Amanda vanished, we might hav
e a suspect.”

  Austin popped the last bite of his granola bar into his mouth and made a production out of chewing it thoroughly. “Okay. Let’s show up without warning, though. I’ll get a subpoena tonight and we’ll hit the clinic at the crack of dawn tomorrow, so we can catch Wayrick on his way in. I don’t want to take the chance of his being ‘in surgery’ all day. How about if I pick you up at your house about six tomorrow? We can stop and have breakfast.”

  “Six in the morning?” she squeaked. She had visions of herself dragging herself out of bed to answer the door in her bathrobe, complete with morning breath, puffy eyes and Medusa’s hair. And Austin would be standing on her front porch, perfect as usual.

  “What’s wrong, you don’t like getting up early?”

  “Do you?”

  “I get up at four-thirty every morning, run three miles—”

  “Then you stuff your face with sugar doughnuts, I’ll bet.” Three miles? She hadn’t done that since the police academy, and then she’d thought she was going to die. No wonder he looked so good.

  “If I didn’t eat high-calorie foods, I’d waste away to nothing. Fast metabolism.”

  She put her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear it. People with fast metabolisms should be shot. I’ll be ready at six.” She gave him directions to her apartment, which was actually half of a seventy-year-old duplex in East Dallas.

  “The M streets,” Austin commented. “Nice neighborhood.”

  “It’s okay—convenient, relatively safe and kinda pretty.”

  “And let’s not forget, it’s close to Lower Greenville. You do much partying over there?”

  His question caused a flurry of butterflies to attack her stomach. Was he just making idle chitchat, or gearing up to ask her out? “No, I don’t go out much. Look, I gotta go. There are a couple of things I need to check into before I go home tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  She made a hasty escape, but the slightly bewildered expression on Austin’s face stayed with her for a few minutes. As she made a stop at the ladies’ room, she allowed herself the luxury of imagining—just for the heck of it—going out on a date with Austin. Maybe they would go to a movie, some silly action-adventure flick, and they would share popcorn and squeeze hands during the scary parts....