a rock on one of the small panes in the door, reached through to the bolt lock. If someone inside was not Coleman the breaking glass would have alerted them, so I stepped in carefully, weapon drawn, and checked the place out.
The house felt warm and a little stuffy, like when someone goes on vacation and leaves the AC on eighty-five. I wandered quickly through the rooms, growing quickly aware that I was alone, and taking just a few minutes to get some sense of her that might help me. Coleman decorated the way she worked, by the book, or in this case, by the catalog. The place was strictly Bed, Bath, and Beyond, white towels, and bed-in-a-bag. Everything except the towels were shades of brown and geometry.
The bedroom was plain and spare, with a window overlooking the front yard. A collection of photographs including one of her family, presumably, hung on the wall. It made me doubt that Coleman brought Royal Hughes to her bedroom. As a rule, people do not have sex in the same room with photos of their mother smiling on them.
The small walk-in closet held two more suits like the ones I’d seen her wear and a dozen long-sleeved silkish blouses that all looked too hot for Arizona. Some casual clothes, too; jeans, cotton blouses, and a raggedy maroon bathrobe with the chenille ridges wearing away.
Nothing but over-the-counter drugs in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and she went for the cheap moisturizer, shampoo, and toothpaste. The shower was very clean, the plastic shower curtain had no water drops, which I found neat to the point of weirdness but that’s just me.
Back in the living room I noticed a put-together desk with a blotter that made me smile despite my concerns. Only Coleman would still use a blotter. On top of it rested a laptop computer and a few black binders whose edges were aligned parallel to the edge of the desk, all the clutter Coleman would allow. I recognized the cardboard box containing Floyd’s reading material that we had brought from the Lynch’s, set neatly beside the desk. Heaven forbid Coleman would fail to bring it in from her trunk.
It should have been pretty easy to find what I was looking for, but I rifled through the two small drawers finding nothing but pens and pencils—oh God, they were lined up side by side by length in descending order. She was more compulsive than I’d thought. Calculator, roll of stamps, a can of compressed air for cleaning her keyboard. I went into the larger file drawers beneath. Tax returns filed by year. They still weren’t paying agents what they were worth. A six-year-old passport, with only one stamp for Cancun five years ago, listed her birthplace as Henderson, North Carolina, and her birth date as May 12, 1979.
I finally found what I was looking for next to the phone in the kitchen, on a small bench at the end of the counter. I flipped through the lime-green leather address book. Like me, she didn’t seem to have any friends. The entries, written in pencil, were few. Her dentist and doctor. Eva’s hair salon. What looked like her brother back in North Carolina. Page after page of blanks. Not even anyone from the office. Except under the Rs, there were the initials RH and a number. Coleman was so afraid of being found out she wouldn’t even write his whole name in her address book.
I used her home phone to call the number. Royal Hughes answered very quickly.
“Yes?”
“When was the last time you saw Laura Coleman?” I asked.
“Who is this?”
“Brigid Quinn.”
“What are you doing…?”
“Where?” I asked.
“There,” he hedged.
So he knew her home number by heart when it appeared on caller ID. “When was the last time you saw Laura Coleman?”
“I don’t want you calling my home, Agent Quinn.”
“I’m getting a little angry here. When was the last time you saw Laura Coleman?” I repeated.
“At the Lynch crime scene. I told you. You shouldn’t call my home. I’m hanging up now.”
I heard a voice in the background, “Honey? Can you do Bill’s piano lesson today?”
I had no idea where he lived, but I pressed my advantage. “You’re a liar, and I’m close enough so if you hang up I’m coming over there to put a tire iron through your double-paned windows before you can call nine-one-one, and let you do the explaining. When was the last time you saw Laura Coleman?”
He paused, must have felt that