The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,84
last time Joy was alive, as far as we know, was Tuesday the seventeenth.”
“And that’s consistent with what Elvira told me. The ME, I mean.”
“Ok.” Jem made a face. “Come on, there’s something else.”
“The car.”
“Damn it. Ok, a bunch of cash—that sounds like hush money. And Joy’s purse.”
“And the Kneaders receipt.”
Jem hesitated. “But it was a different date, right?”
“Monday. The sixteenth.”
“So she was at Kneaders two days in a row?”
“That’s what the manager told us—it was her first-date spot.”
“Oh shit.”
“What?”
Jem shook his head and took out his phone. When he started speaking, his voice was harsh and deeper than usual. “Get Kristine on the phone!” He waited, and then he wrote e mal on the paper and tapped it. “This is Bill Frederickson from corporate legal. Do you want to tell me why I have the prosecutor’s attorney excavating my asshole because you didn’t send them the security video they requested?” Another silent moment passed. “I don’t care what you did. If they say they don’t have it, they don’t have it. You’re going to do it right now. Right fucking now, before we get slapped with obstruction. Do you have something to write with?” Jem nodded at Tean, and as Tean recited an email address, Jem repeated it into the phone. “I don’t care if it doesn’t sound like the same email they told you. Right fucking now, Kristine. Don’t make me call you again.” He disconnected.
“You’re a little bit scary sometimes.”
“That’s not even my mean voice.”
“I’m not talking about your voice.”
Scipio rammed his head into Jem’s leg, and Jem flinched and, after taking a breath, stroked the dog’s ears once. “Yeah, well, just don’t give me any dog-related work.”
Tean’s phone buzzed. “Got it. She sent two files. The sixteenth and the seventeenth.”
“Let’s take a look.”
At the desk, Tean opened his laptop and navigated to his email. He was sitting in the chair. Jem, instead of pulling over one of the dinette chairs, rested his chin on Tean’s shoulder, his arms in a loose hug. Tean tried not to squirm.
“Play the seventeenth first,” Jem said.
“Why?”
“I’ve got a hunch.”
Tean clicked the video and said, “It’s really annoying when you do that, you know.”
“What?”
“Pretty much everything.”
“I know. That’s why I do it.”
After double-checking the time that Joy had arranged to meet her date on the Playmates app, Tean scrubbed forward and then they watched the sped-up video.
“She didn’t show?” Tean said.
“One more time.”
They watched it again, more slowly.
“I knew it,” Jem said.
“But if she didn’t show up for that date, why did the woman, Becca, act so scared when we contacted her?”
“Because Becca had just gotten a phone call from strange men asking about a date she had arranged on a hookup app.”
Tean grimaced. “Hannah’s not even on this video. Why would the police request it?” Then it hit. “Oh.”
“Yep,” Jem said. “Because it’s proof that Joy had plans and she didn’t show up, didn’t respond to messages, didn’t cancel her date.”
“Because she’d been killed.”
Jem let out a soft breath. His cheek was warm where it grazed Tean’s, and his arms tightened slightly, a kind of ghost hug, probably because he knew that Tean would have scrambled away if he’d tried anything more.
“I guess we need to watch the video from the sixteenth.”
Tean opened it and scrubbed forward in bursts, guessing that Joy would have picked approximately the same time for her rendezvous on the sixteenth as she had for the seventeenth. He was wrong, so then he had to scrub back. At 14:41:09, based on the timestamp in the corner of the feed, Joy Erickson walked into Kneaders. She was moving quickly, her head down, but even on the low-quality black-and-white footage, Tean recognized her. He let the video play at normal speed. Joy went straight toward a table and sat. She kept her head down. Her shoulders were curved in. Her hands were hidden below the table, but judging by the way she sat, Tean guessed that she was clasping them in her lap.
“She’s scared,” Jem whispered, and it sounded like he was talking to himself.
Then the door to the Kneaders opened, and Hannah came in. She moved across the dining room in jerky steps. She didn’t look well—her eyes were fixed straight ahead, her face rigid, and if Tean hadn’t known her better, he would have thought she was high or drunk and on a serious tear. When she got to the table, she jabbed a finger at Joy. She was saying something. The security video didn’t have