Page 107 of What She Saw
I reached in my backpack and held up a tracker. “This belong to you?”
He was nonplussed by my discovery. “You’re hard to keep up with otherwise.”
If I cared, I’d be annoyed. Or maybe flattered. But neither registered. “You going to stay out here, or do you want to get coffee?” I asked.
“Coffee.” He rose out of the truck.
I was tall for a woman, but he had me beat by five inches. I slipped the gun into my backpack and moved toward the diner. Inside, the scents of coffee and cinnamon pancakes greeted me. My appetite flickered but didn’t flame.
Callie filled mugs for us. “Toast?”
“Perfect,” I said.
“I’ll take the pancakes,” Grant said.
“Coming right up.”
The diner was too quiet to muffle my conversation with Grant. “What do you want?”
He sipped his coffee. “What did you see in the Fletcher house?”
“Why didn’t you try to stop me? Breaking and entering isn’t legal.”
“As long as you’re not setting fires, better to let your process play out.” He sipped his coffee. He’d been in law enforcement long enough to know how far to bend a rule. “I didn’t see you break into the house. The first time I saw you, you were crossing the front yard and headed to the street. That might be considered trespassing, but I’m not a cop anymore.”
Aware he waited for my answer, I shifted my focus to Callie and asked for a soda. When she set it in front of me, I took a long pull on the straw.
“What did you find?” he asked again.
I wasn’t sure what I’d seen and realized I wanted to talk it through. “I focused on the wall of family photos.”
“And?”
I opened the photos app on my phone. “Tristan’s younger sister, Lannie, was photographed with another woman about twenty years ago. This woman is either a first cousin or Tristan in 2010.”
“Tristan had been dead over fifteen years by 2010.”
“I know. So, a cousin.”
“Do you have a name for this cousin?”
“‘Lannie and Susan’ was written on the back of the image. I don’t have more than that.” I dragged my finger through the condensation on the side of the glass. “Brian Fletcher was the last of the four families to file a missing person report.”
“Lannie didn’t tell her parents that Tristan was at the festival. When Lannie did speak up, Brian filed his missing person report.”
“It makes sense. Kids lie to their parents,” I said. “I did my share.”
He arched a brow. “No. Really?”
“Shocking, I know.”
That teased a smile. “I have a twenty-two-year-old son. There were times when he used disinformation to his advantage.”
Grant was in his early forties. He’d been a young parent like Patty. “I don’t picture you chasing a kid.”
“I did my fair share. So did his mother. For the record, we divorced two years ago.”
I liked that he wasn’t attached. “Sorry to hear that.”
