for him.”
“What about the Plinskis? Didn’t Mary Ann say she was looking for a new tenant?”
Darla nodded. “Actually, I thought about that on the way down here, but no way could he afford the place working part-time hours here and for Putin’s construction business. And I don’t think the Plinskis would be too keen on a whole herd of teenage boys living in their garden apartment, which is what it would take to make the rent.”
Then she brightened. “Maybe James has a spare room, at least temporarily until we figure something out.”
“Yeah, I like how they have that whole father-son look going with the vests these days,” Jake replied with a snicker. “Or maybe Reese would know a place.”
“Reese! That reminds me.”
Darla stood and reached into the pocket of her slacks to pull out the small plastic ziplock bag where, in emulation of Jake, she’d carefully placed the found piece of pink plastic. “When I was helping Barry clean up after Reese dumped all the construction junk onto his lawn, I found this caught in a piece of wood. It must have broken off the plastic case on Tera’s phone. I don’t know if it will do him any good, but I thought I should give it to him.”
“Good work, kid. You never know about stuff like that.”
Turning in her chair, Jake opened one drawer of the file cabinet behind her and pulled out a pair of long curved tweezers. Then, setting a clean sheet of paper on the table, she opened the small plastic bag and carefully shook out the piece of pink plastic onto that page. Putting on her reading glasses again, she used the tweezers to pick up the fragment and studied it with a frown. Finally, she set it down again and gave Darla a sharp look.
“I hate to break it to you, kid, but what you’ve got here isn’t part of a cell phone case. It’s a fingernail.”
SEVENTEEN
“A FINGERNAIL!?”
Darla shoved back away from the table with the same sense of revulsion as if Jake had announced that she’d been carrying around an actual finger in her pocket. Jake, meanwhile, had used the tweezers again to pick up the bit of evidence and reseal it inside the bag.
“Actually, it’s one of those acrylic nail tips,” the ex-cop clarified. “You know, the kind you pay big bucks for at the salon. And once they’re on, they’re on. It takes a lot of work to pry those suckers off again.”
Abruptly, Darla recalled the picture of Tera that Hilda had brought in the day before. A few of the fliers that Jake had made from the photo were still sitting on her table. Hands shaking, she snatched one up.
Jake had printed the poster in color. Despite the photo’s small size, Darla could make out quite clearly the girl’s manicure, her fingernails the same vibrant shade of pink as the nail tip that Darla had found. A sense of foreboding gripped her, and she could almost feel the warm biscuits and gravy that she’d enjoyed less than an hour before congealing into a cold lump in her stomach.
She looked up to see Jake nodding.
“Yeah, I’d put money on it that the nail tip belonged to Tera,” the older woman said in a flat tone. “The question is, how did it—and Tera’s phone, for that matter—get into the Dumpster?”
When Darla waited expectantly for an answer, she sighed and went on, “All right, I can think of a couple of possibilities. Number one: the fingernail fell off when she tossed the phone in there herself.”
“But why would Tera throw her phone away?”
Jake gave her a hard look. “We’ve got to face it, Darla, there’s a chance that she was the one who killed Curt. Maybe she planned it; maybe it happened in the heat of the moment. Either way, she wouldn’t want anyone tracking her down. If she’s like most kids her age, she would know about cell phone pinging from those detective shows on television, or maybe the movies. She runs out of the building, stops to toss her phone into the container, catches one of those fake nails on a piece of lumber, and pops it right off.”
“And if she didn’t kill Curt?”
“Then we move on to possibility number two. Maybe Tera had the bad luck to walk in on the killer as he was whacking her boyfriend, and gets killed, too, but taken elsewhere, and the murderer tosses her phone in the Dumpster.”
Darla sat silent for a moment, grateful