ever said. No family ever visited here. Certainly no child.”
“Can we look around her room?” asked Wallis.
“I guess so. It’s right down here.”
Clemmons led them to Rebane’s bedroom, and then walked back down the hall.
The three of them gazed around at the large bedroom with an attached bathroom.
Pine briefly thought of the woman who would never be coming back here and then her focus snapped back to the business at hand.
“Well, let’s get to it.”
Chapter 22
AN HOUR LATER Pine sat on the bed and watched as Blum and Wallis continued their search through the belongings and life of a dead woman named Hanna Rebane.
Wallis came out of the bathroom and shook his head. “Not much here,” he said.
Blum closed the last drawer in the walk-in closet and came back out. “She had some designer clothes, shoes, and purses,” noted Blum. “The real things, no knockoffs.”
“But no phone, although there’s a phone charger over there for it,” said Pine, pointing at a small desk built into the wall by the bed, where a power cord was plugged into the outlet.
“If she took her phone, why not take the charger?” said Wallis.
“Maybe she didn’t think she would be gone long enough to need it,” replied Pine. “If she wasn’t planning to be gone overnight, she wouldn’t take her power cord. There have to be exterior cameras around this place. Let’s have them pull the footage and see if it shows her coming and going and when. And more importantly whether anyone was with her.”
They walked back into the other room, where Clemmons was drinking a cup of tea.
While Wallis went to check with the building security about any surveillance footage, Pine and Blum sat down across from the visibly distraught woman.
“Did Hanna have a car?” asked Pine.
“No. Neither did I. If we needed to go somewhere we’d use Uber or Lyft, or a Zipcar for anything longer than just one ride. We could walk to everything we needed. That’s why we picked this building to live in.”
“The way of the millennials,” noted Blum. “When I got my license at sixteen the first thing I did was start saving for my own car.”
“So if she left here, she would have taken a car ride service?” asked Pine.
“Yes.”
“You haven’t seen her phone?”
“No. She must have taken it with her.”
“Did she have a laptop or an iPad or something like that?”
“No, just her phone. She used that for everything.”
“We can still check into her account to find out if she was picked up by a service,” said Pine while glancing at Blum. “And we can try to track her by her cell phone signal.” She refocused on Clemmons. “Didn’t you worry when your friend didn’t come home? Did you file a missing persons report?”
“No. I mean, Hanna would go off before. Three, four days, and then she’d come back safe and sound.”
“Did she tell you where she was going during these times?”
“Had she been going away the whole time you lived here or was it something recent?”
“It was the last month or so that she started going out and staying somewhere else. Although she was free to bring anybody here. I’ve brought my boyfriends over to stay before. It was no big deal.”
“And she never mentioned a boyfriend? No pictures on her phone?”
“No.”
“Social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any of the others?”
“She used to do that stuff, but not for the last six months or so. Neither one of us do Facebook anymore. She did Instagram, but she hasn’t posted anything for a long time.”
“Did she give a reason for that?”
“No and I never asked. I mean, some people just get sick of doing it all the time. And it’s not like we have a zillion Instagram followers and could make money off it by putting our pictures on there or endorsing some product or other. We’re not like the Kardashians or anything.”
“Do you have any theories for what might have happened to Hanna?”
Her eyes welled with tears. “No, I wish I did. She was really nice. And I can’t understand why anyone would want to hurt her.”
Pine said firmly, “Well, it might be a good thing that you can’t understand people who would do this sort of thing. Because it’s a pretty dark place.”
This comment drew a sharp glance from Blum.
“I…I guess,” said Clemmons, rubbing her eyes.
“So other than her telling you she wanted to leave