Page 120 of Evil Bones
“She left a note saying she’d be back by nine.”
“Where was she heading?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was she meeting Lester Meloy and that crowd?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did someone pick her up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she go on foot? Call an Uber?”
“Are you listening to me?” I could feel us drifting into that zone of tension that makes every utterance seem confrontational.
“She probably spent the night with friends, right?” Even as the words left my mouth, they sounded lame.
“Probably. But Ruthie’s been good about letting me know her plans. It’s the deal I have with Kit.”
I almost laughed. As if my nephew would be at all diligent concerning his daughter’s whereabouts.
“Did your Ring doorbell catch footage of Ruthie leaving?”
“The battery is dead.”
Biting back the obvious response to that, I asked, “Do you know how to contact Meloy?”
“Yes. But I don’t want to look like I’m helicoptering the kid. I mean, Ruthieisseventeen.”
“Exactly. She’s only seventeen.”
“I’ll give it a bit longer,” Katy said. “If I don’t hear from her soon, I’ll contact Meloy.”
I made a quick phone call, then grabbed my car keys and hurried out.
While Charlotte’s neighborhoods may be village cozy, its Uptown is schizophrenically all about business and good times. Restaurants. Theaters. Stone-and-glass high-rise office towers. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department is housed at the heart of the beast, in the Law Enforcement Center, an enormous concrete structure looming over the intersection of Fourth and McDowell.
The LEC was my destination that weekday afternoon during a heat wave that seemed to be lasting forever. My car’s AC system normally would have kept the oven temps at bay, but today it was either overwhelmed or disinterested in its calling.
Mercifully, traffic was light. Fifteen minutes after leaving the MCME I pulled into the visitors’ lot at the LEC. Sliding from behind the wheel, I crossed asphalt that had to be close to the melting point.
The CMPD employs almost two thousand officers, so a steady flow of cops, each clad in deep blue and displaying a hornet’s nest patch on one shoulder, was entering and exiting the building. Long storyon the bug theme, one involving resistance during the Revolutionary War and a disparaging remark by General Cornwallis. Look it up. Or ask any local.
The CMPD maintains its own crime lab, directed by a man named Ron Gillman. After showing ID, I rode an elevator to the fourth floor, then walked a long and very shiny corridor to his corner office.
Gillman was perusing a file spread out on his blotter. He looked up when I knocked on the open door.
As a tall, silver-haired man with a body suggesting basketball or tennis, the only thing marring Gillman’s leading-man good looks is a Lauren Hutton space between his upper central incisors. A big one. Or maybe that dental quirk contributes to his charm.
“Tempe.” Big gap-toothed smile.
“Ron.”
“Broiler out there, eh?” Perhaps noticing my sweat-soaked bangs and tee.
“It is.”
