It had happened on Saturday night; if they were here all weekend, they might not have heard.
Diane was only on the second floor and she was exhausted and depressed. Her back ached. She wanted to sit down and close her eyes, but there were so many rooms to go.
She pushed on, refusing to allow this search to bring the other search, the one for her daughter, Ariel, to the front of her mind. She couldn’t relive that again. Not now. Not while they couldn’t find Star.
She walked into a computer lab. Several students were on computers connected to the Internet. One was playing a game. None knew Star. The next room was a lounge with vending machines. There were only two people—young women who were maybe nineteen, surely not older. They could have been from the same family. Both blond, both much too thin, as seemed to be the style these days. Both were well dressed in expensive jeans and sweaters. They were sitting opposite each other at a snack table. One of them looked as if she was slipping something across the table to the other, who had folded money between her fingers. They stopped talking when they saw Diane. The one without the money held her hand flat on the table, palm down, as if hiding something under it.
“Do either of you know Star Duncan?” asked Diane, pretending to be oblivious to their transaction.
“Star who?”
“Duncan.”
They looked at each other and shook their heads and looked back at Diane.
“No.”
They kept their eyes on her as if suggesting that she should be leaving now.
Diane walked over to the vending machines and looked at the choices—candy, peanuts, snack cakes, beef jerky, popcorn. In the glass reflection she saw them watching her. She lingered over the selections and fished her phone from her pocket, flipped it open, and set it to camera mode.
“I’m not getting a signal,” Diane said as she raised the phone and pointed it in different directions. Pausing toward them, she silently snapped their picture.
“You won’t in here. They blocked the signal when they built the place. Mean of them.”
“Well, damn, how inconvenient,” said Diane, and flipped her phone shut, putting it back in her pocket. She fished change from her pocket, selected a candy bar for herself and a bag a peanuts for Frank, and left the room, noting the name Jessica Davenport written on one of the girl’s notebook as she passed.
Maybe if they were exchanging drugs, particularly methamphetamine, the police could get a line from them on who was behind the meth lab. It was a long shot. They were probably just talking girl stuff. But if they were exchanging drugs, it would be a lead.
Garnett didn’t believe the meth cook, who was probably killed in the explosion, was the only one involved with the lab. Partly, she was sure, because Garnett didn’t want the guilty party to be dead and beyond his grasp. He had told her the firemen found evidence the basement was vented so as not to release the odor of the meth production into the rest of the house. And there were other signs it could have been a high-output operation with a distribution network.
Diane wanted them caught. She wanted them in prison for a long time.
By the third floor Diane was aching all over and feeling nauseated from the worry and an empty stomach. Images of searching the jungle for Ariel came unbidden to her mind—finding the murdered nuns in the mission, hearing Ariel’s music playing on the tape recorder Diane had given her and that had been left along with Ariel’s bloody little shoe for Diane to find.
Oh, God, don’t think about that.
Diane stopped, took a breath, and closed her eyes. No. Go away, she whispered to her brain, not those images now.
She leaned against the wall and unwrapped the candy bar she had bought from the vending machine. It was a Milky Way. It was soft from being in her warm jacket pocket. It tasted sweet and melted in her mouth. She needed the sugar jolt, but not the mess it made. She ate the whole large-sized bar, crumpled up the wrapper, and put it in her pocket. She fished out a Kleenex and wiped her hands and mouth.
Down the hall was a water fountain. Diane walked to it and bent over to take a drink. In the shiny surface of the fountain head, she thought she saw a distorted image of Star.