that.”
Kelly thrust her cigarette into the air. “Zeke!” she exclaimed. “That’s his name.”
Josie’s heart went into overdrive for a few seconds, before settling back down. Quietly, to Gretchen, she said, “Zeke was arrested last night for looting?”
Gretchen frowned. “I don’t know, boss. Noah and Mett handled it.”
Why hadn’t Noah told her? Or perhaps he had tried to tell her, but she’d gotten the call from Alice and hadn’t had a chance to speak privately with him since. Did it matter? she wondered. No, she decided. Nothing that Larry Ezekiel Fox did mattered to her. She cleared all thoughts of him from her mind and focused on Kelly.
Gretchen said, “Kelly, we’re here to talk to you about Beverly Urban.”
Kelly stared at her for a long moment. She took a final drag of her cigarette, tossed it onto the ground, and stepped on it. Then she took out another cigarette and lit it. After a deep inhale, she said, “Beverly Urban. I haven’t thought about her since high school.”
“You were good friends,” Josie said.
Kelly straightened her shoulders and with some pride, said, “I was her best friend.”
Gretchen asked, “When is the last time you spoke to her?”
Kelly’s chin dropped to her chest. She sucked in some more smoke and let it back out. “Why don’t you ask me when she last spoke to me? We were best friends and then one day she just stopped calling and stopped coming around.”
“You didn’t think to check on her?” Josie asked.
Kelly’s brow furrowed. “Check on her? Like what? In case she was sick? She wasn’t sick. I went to her house and she was gone. Her and her mom. They took off. Didn’t tell anyone. Just left.”
“You didn’t find that unusual or suspicious?” Gretchen asked.
“Nah… they said they were going to have to leave. They were broke as hell. No way were they getting out of moving. I just didn’t think they’d leave without saying goodbye or that Beverly wouldn’t ever call me again. But it was probably her mom. She had a real bug up her ass.”
Josie said, “About what?”
Kelly laughed. “You think I don’t remember you? You were there. About what. Please. You knew what Beverly was like. Always getting into trouble.”
“I wasn’t friends with her. I need to know what kind of trouble she was in before she left.”
For the first time, Kelly seemed to realize the significance of two police officers coming to her place of employment to discuss a friend she’d neither seen nor heard from in sixteen years. “Hey, wait a minute,” she said, pointing her cigarette at Josie. “What’s going on here? Did Beverly do something?”
“No,” Gretchen said. “She didn’t do anything. I’m afraid she’s dead, Kelly.”
“Oh shit!” Kelly said. She walked in a small circle, as if she couldn’t contain her shock. “Oh shit, she was in that tarp, wasn’t she? On the TV? She was under the house? She was, like, murdered?”
“Yes,” Josie said. “We’re trying to figure out what happened to her and who might have killed her. Besides you and Lana Rosetti, was there anyone else she hung around with regularly?”
Kelly shook her head but then she said, “No, we were her best friends.”
“Did Beverly use drugs?” Josie asked.
“No, no drugs. She just had her men, you know?”
“Men?” Gretchen prodded.
Kelly rolled her eyes. “That’s what she called them. I don’t even know if they were real. Beverly liked to talk. Thought she was hot shit. I mean, she kind of was. She could get any guy, really, but she also liked to tell stories, exaggerate. Whenever she had a crush on a guy, she’d act like they were seeing each other, even if they weren’t.”
Josie said, “Do you remember the names of any of these men?”
“She never told us their names. That’s why I’m saying it was hard to know if they were real or not. She talked about them all the time, but we never saw any of them or met any of them.”
“What did she tell you about them?” Gretchen asked, pen poised over her notepad. “Particularly in the months leading up to the last time you spoke with her.”
Kelly tapped ash onto the concrete. “She would tell us, like, what they said to her, like how much they complimented her and stuff and what they were like.”
Josie asked, “Was she having sex with any of them?”
Kelly rolled her eyes. “She claimed they all wanted to have sex with her, but I don’t know if she really was. Like I said, Beverly