And an extra stretcher, in case we come across her and she can’t walk.”
“That’d be a good idea,” Grimaldi agreed. She was sitting behind her desk doing her best to look and sound calm, but one hand was tapping a pencil against the tabletop in an increasingly rapid rhythm. “I’ll go back out there with you and show you the way.”
“I’ve got Collier going back to Daffodil Farm with the crime scene crew and the warrant,” Bob added. “He’ll take care of the RV. The warrant’s limited to that, and to the woods. With what we’ve got, we can’t search the house.”
“There’s not likely to be anything in the house, anyway.”
Grimaldi tapped for another second before she added, “I’ll meet you out there.”
Bob said he’d be on his way in a few minutes, and they both hung up. Grimaldi turned to me. “I don’t have time to take you back to Sweetwater. Can you call someone for a ride?”
“Sure,” I told her, since I could tell she was twitching with nerves and a guilty conscience. “I could call Charlotte, or my mother, or anybody of about a dozen people who’d come pick me up. But you’re not getting rid of me that easily. I feel bad about Yung, too.”
“You weren’t the one who sent her out in the woods by herself.”
“Actually, I was. It was my idea originally. And we sent her toward the road, with instructions on how to get there. She should have found it in five or ten minutes, the direction she was going.” We hadn’t had any problems.
“So why do you think she didn’t?” Grimaldi wanted to know.
“I have no idea. It was a straight shot through the trees to the road. And she had her phone. I spoke to Rafe while we were in the woods, so we know there’s coverage.”
“If something happened to her?”
“What, though? I mean, think about it. It’s a matter of a quarter mile, at most. There aren’t any ravines or waterfalls she could have fallen into. The weather’s good. There wasn’t enough wind for a branch to come loose and hit her on the head, or anything like that. And there aren’t any wild animals to worry about.”
“There are those rattlesnakes,” Grimaldi said.
I felt myself turn pale, until I thought about it. “But if she got bitten, she wouldn’t have passed out immediately. She would have had time to call for help. You, or Bob, or 911. Besides, she would have yelled. And we would have heard her. We weren’t that far away.”
“Maybe she got turned around. Maybe she started off in the wrong direction.”
“How? You told her to keep the sun at the same angle. If she did, she would have hit the road. If she didn’t, she still would have made it to the road, just farther up or down. There was nothing between her and the road that would have been likely to stop her, and if anything had, and she called out, we would have heard her. It was quiet in there.”
Grimaldi nodded. “So let’s say she got to the road. What could have happened once she got there?”
“She got turned around and walked in the wrong direction? Somebody picked her up and gave her a lift?”
“If so,” Grimaldi said, “shouldn’t she have been here by now?”
“If she was headed here. She might have been going to the sheriff’s office or home. Wherever home is while she’s in town.”
“She’s staying at the Hampton Inn by the interstate,” Grimaldi said. “We can run out and check her room before we go out to meet Bob and his team. We have time.”
“Or you can send someone else to check the hotel while we go meet Bob.” She had a whole police department at her disposal. And if Yung wasn’t at the hotel, going there was a huge waste of time. Let someone else waste it, not us.
“Bob might have a deputy out that way.” She reached for her phone again. “Excuse me a minute.”
I nodded, and focused on feeding my daughter while she spoke to Bob and was assured that he would tag the deputy nearest the interstate and have Yung’s hotel room checked. “We’re about to head out,” he told her.
She glanced at me. I held up two fingers. “We need another couple minutes here.”
“It’ll be fifteen before we even get to your neck of the woods,” Bob said comfortably, “so take your time.”
They hung up, and Grimaldi turned back to me. “She would have made it