to all orangutans, if you ask me.”
Then another thought occurred to her, and she stared at the pair of them in consternation. “But that’s not all. I just remembered something that Robert said. Apparently, one of his coworkers claimed that Bill once attacked a guy with a hammer as repayment for an insult!”
“Better mention that to Reese, pronto, so he can—” Jake began, only to be cut short by the disco strains of the Bee Gee’s long-ago hit, “Stayin’ Alive,” blasting from her cell phone. “Speaking of Reese,” she said, and punched the “Talk” button. “Martelli here.”
Darla could hear the staccato rhythm of a voice speaking on the other end, though the sound was too faint for her to make out any words. Jake punctuated the one-sided conversation with a few “uh-huhs” before ending with a, “Meet you there in a minute.”
“Did Reese find something?” Darla demanded before the other woman had even pressed the “Off” key on her phone.
Jake tucked the cell back into her pocket. Though the ex-cop’s expression appeared deliberately neutral, Darla felt her stomach knot as she met Jake’s gaze. Finally, Jake nodded.
“You know what I told you about tracking down someone by using the cell tower pings and GPS? Pretty much works every time.”
“I presume that means the police have located Ms. Aguilar?” James asked, sounding almost as apprehensive as Darla abruptly felt.
When Jake replied, however, her answer wasn’t quite what Darla had expected to hear. “No Tera yet. But we’re getting close. Reese has tracked down her cell phone.”
FOURTEEN
DARLA HAD HEARD OF DUMPSTER DIVING, BUT WHAT REESE was doing fell into a potentially far more dangerous category.
Leaving James and Hamlet to mind the shop, Darla had accompanied Jake over to Barry’s brownstone. There, they found the detective, the battered tan four-door that was assigned to him while on duty parked halfway onto the curb. Barry, wearing his usual gray hooded sweatshirt, sat on his stoop, his expression unreadable as Reese stood waist deep in the rented roll-off Dumpster that Barry and Curt had been using for their construction debris. Stripped down to his dress shirt and trousers, he wore leather work gloves and clutched a large black flashlight, which he was using as both a light source and a makeshift pry bar.
Darla stared uneasily at the container and tried to ignore her lurching stomach. Though no one had said anything aloud, Darla realized chances were that wherever Tera’s phone was found, she would be, too. And that did not bode well at all for the girl’s continued welfare.
Shakily, Darla settled onto the stoop beside Barry and wondered what in the heck she was thinking, tagging along with Jake to the scene. Darla had had the noble idea of offering Barry some sort of moral support. But now, given that she might well be about to witness discovery of a second crime, she fervently wished that she’d stayed back at the shop with James and Hamlet.
But finding anything inside the weather-beaten red container might take a while. It was full of broken plywood and plasterboard, all of which stuck out from its open top. Discarded paint rollers and empty plastic and metal buckets, caked with plaster and paint, were sandwiched among the debris, while a pile of filthy pink insulation took up a good-sized section near the rear. A dirty ribbon of fluorescent yellow plastic that Darla recognized as crime scene tape dangled from one corner of the Dumpster and flapped like a discarded party streamer with the slight breeze of the late afternoon.
While Jake went to join Reese, picking her way through the random scattering of two-by-fours the detective had apparently already tossed out of the Dumpster, Darla gave Barry what she hoped was a comforting smile.
“So much for a tidy work site,” she ventured.
She earned a polite, momentary flash of white teeth for her attempt at a joke. Then Barry fixed what appeared to be an angry gaze on the Dumpster again. “I thought the police were finished here, but he had a warrant and everything.”
“I hope he had a tetanus shot, too,” Darla answered, cringing a little as she heard Reese curse and then shake one gloved hand like he’d been injured. “There are probably all kinds of nails and stuff in there.”
“Nails, wire, insulation, linoleum.” Barry shrugged in agreement. “You name it, we tore it out of the place. Any idea what’s he’s looking for?”
Darla glanced at him in surprise. Apparently, despite the warrant, Reese had mentioned nothing to the man