Dear Wife - Kimberly Belle Page 0,76
she got the information. The point is, Jeffrey has an alibi, and it’s not food poisoning but a problem with his plumbing. So why lie? He had to know I’d track down the truth eventually. And didn’t he stop to consider that every minute I’ve spent chasing him down the rabbit hole of this reading-by-the-river bullshit, I could have been out there looking for his wife?
“Have you checked his finances?” Jade says, blowing back a chunk of bang. “Could have used a hired gun.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. I’ll take another look, but the accounts are mostly hers. Her salary is more than double his, and she’s squirreled a lot of it away. With her out of the picture, he’ll be a very wealthy man. Even the house is in her name.”
Jade raises an eyebrow. “Want me to keep digging? I could track his movements since Sabine went missing, see if there’s anything out of the ordinary.”
“There won’t be. He’s been careful, stuck close to home.”
“What about his emails, texts, things like that?”
“I’m going to forget you even suggested it, since we don’t have a warrant. Not yet anyway.” I drum my fingers on the desk, considering my next move. “Actually, I do have something I’d like you to do, and that’s keep a watch on the police department sites for me. The website, Facebook and Twitter pages, log-ins on the scanner and whatever else we’ve got out there. I want to know about any strange hits.”
“Define strange.”
“Clusters of IPs coming from somewhere outside of Pine Bluff, most likely a city in the South.”
She gives me a skeptical look. “You think Sabine is on the run?”
“Maybe. Jeffrey said some things that made her seem like she might be unstable, and—”
“Oh, come on. You don’t believe that bullshit story he fed to Mandy in the Morning, do you?”
“Not necessarily. But the sister confirmed Sabine has tried to leave before, and I have reason to believe she had some medical issues that may have been in play here, as well.”
I don’t mention that last little tip came from Jeffrey, and his carefully placed suggestion that Sabine might not have been pregnant. I found some old medical records on her laptop that indicate a string of failed pregnancies, along with correspondence with a local pharmacy about some prescriptions. All leads I’m still chasing down.
I push up out of the chair. “Just keep a watch on the sites, will you? Let me know if you see a bunch of hits coming from the same location. Call me the second you find something.”
“You got it.” Jade scribbles something on a sticky note, then turns back to the monitors. “Now, get out of here, will you? I got shit to do.”
I slide the map from her desk and duck into the hall, my cell phone buzzing with a message from Charlie. I swipe and read the text, which is terse and to the point: Bingo. Charlie is a man of few words, but it’s one I want to hear. I step into the stairwell and give him a call.
“I found a bank account,” he says by way of hello. “Wells Fargo, opened a little over three weeks ago at a branch in Texarkana. Her first deposit was a thousand dollars, which it looks like she made in cash. Since then, no more money flowing in.”
My throat clenches in excitement, followed by a surge of something a lot less pleasant. A thousand dollars is a hell of a lot of cash. An amount that doesn’t just go missing overnight, not without raising some red flags. An amount she would have to have been squirreling away for months in order to not get noticed.
“And the withdrawals?” I say from between clenched teeth, because for fucking sure there are withdrawals.
“A five hundred withdrawal last week, followed by withdrawals of twenty or thirty bucks a pop, and they’re all over the place. North Platte, Nebraska. Lexington, Kentucky. Amarillo, Texas. Boise, Phoenix, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Colum—”
“She’s trying to throw us off.”
“Sure looks that way,” Charlie confirms. “At this pace, she’s got another three and a half weeks before the account runs dry. You want me to keep following the transactions?”
I drop my head and stare at the stairwell floor, grimy linoleum that looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since the last century, and try not to scream. My pulse jumps, ticking away in my temples. Charlie can follow the transactions, but no way in hell it’s her at the ATM machines. This is