Hide (Detective Harriet Foster #1)(10)

“We’ll probably find her clothes and ID in the river too,” Lonergan said when she caught up to him. He snapped his fingers again, getting the attention of the nearest officer, which made Foster cringe. “Hey, you. Take a couple of your buddies and check along the edge there, will ya? See if you see anything floating that could be hers. And do not come back here and tell me you’ve found another body.”

Foster stopped. “Are you always like this?”

“Like what?”

“Condescending. Disrespectful.”

The blank look on his face answered her question. “A by-the-book cop and a bleeding heart? Boy, did I hit the jackpot. Look, Foster, I can take one but not both, all right?”

An officer ran up holding a pink backpack that was dripping wet. “Found this floating a few yards east. It was caught up on debris. Could be hers.”

He handed the bag to Foster, who unzipped it and peered inside, picking through the contents. Lonergan was suddenly interested. “A wallet,” Foster said. “Thank God.” She opened it, finding a driver’s license stuck inside the clear plastic slot, the photograph matching the face under the leaves. “Margaret Ann Birch. Nineteen.” Foster checked everywhere before pulling out a campus ID. “A student at DePaul.” She handed the wallet to Lonergan. “That’s a start.”

She kept looking, rifling through the pack and plucking out a compact paisley umbrella, a handmade accessories pouch with the name Peggy stitched on the outside, and a small handmade sign with the words JUSTICE NOW. The black marker was still legible, though the laminated cardboard it was written on was soaked through and near pulp. Foster also slid out a waterlogged paperback copy of Paradise Lost. “Milton. English major, maybe? And Peggy instead of the formal Margaret.” She gingerly held up the sign. “Looks like she was at yesterday’s march.”

Lonergan searched the wallet. “Besides the license and the school ID, there’s a dorm key card; Social Security card; Starbucks rewards card, two ticks left on; a folded-up dry cleaner’s ticket; and a butt load of quarters in a coin purse.”

“For her laundry,” Foster said. “The machines.”

“Wouldn’t know. Didn’t go to college. I went to the Marines instead. Didn’t need quarters.”

Foster lifted her head out of the backpack. “No cell phone. What nineteen-year-old kid doesn’t have a cell phone?”

“Ainsley probably tossed that too.”

“Maybe it was tossed,” she said, “and maybe it was Ainsley.”

“You’re complicating my life, here.” Lonergan walked away, sliding his phone out of his pocket as he went. “We’re going to find her clothes, her phone, and that knife at the bottom of the river,” he called back to her. “Count on it.”

She stared at the lonely spot where Peggy Birch had been found. They didn’t know much at this point, despite Lonergan’s confident pronouncements, but at least they had her name and a way to contact her people.

She called to a PO. “We need a thorough search all along here, please,” she said, pointing along the riverbank, a quarter mile at least toward the lake. “We’re looking for anything that could be hers. And could someone get me another update on the guy they took to the hospital? Thank you.”

She gripped the pink backpack as though she were keeping it safe for Birch, who’d carried it just a few hours ago, likely giving her bag little thought or care. Just a pack, until it was everything.

Foster tilted her head up past the destruction and the mess and the work to the wide, open autumn sky. “Peggy Birch.”





CHAPTER 5


Amelia breezed into her studio, peeled off her jacket, and flung it on the slouchy, catchall couch pushed against the wall. She had gotten Bodie settled back at his apartment, but that hadn’t settled her. In fact, the opposite was true. Bodie was out of Westhaven and on his own again. As long as he’d been in there, she hadn’t had to worry where he was or what he was doing. He’d been somewhere he couldn’t harm himself or—she loathed to say—anyone else.

She looked around her place at the blank canvases leaning against the walls, the paint-splotched floors, and the unused paint—ready for her brushes—stacked in a corner. Then she stood in front of the large painting that ran almost half the length of the space, floor to ceiling. She approached it almost reverently and took in the swirls of color, the brushstrokes, the smell of the oil paint, and placed her hand on it as though feeling for a heartbeat. Hers. All of it. Bodie needed something that was his.

She rolled her sleeves up, anxious to get started, and slipped into a big shirt that served as a painter’s smock. She felt restless, uneasy for the first time in a month, because Bodie was outside, where anything could happen and where whatever happened, she would have to fix it.

Following women. Stalking. That was what he was into? It was creepy, but she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know when he’d begun to obsess over pretty girls with big blue eyes, though he always seemed to vacillate between wanting them and fearing them. She could pinpoint it to the very day, in fact, the very moment when they discovered at twelve who their father was and what he did in the basement he’d padlocked shut. Until it wasn’t. Until they ventured below . . . and saw. Bodie became awkward and sullen, disconnected afterward. She found art. She discovered that she could pour everything she felt or thought or feared into a canvas and have her world all make sense. She could bring order to chaos, perspective to the incomprehensible. Art, her art, was life and emotion, the air in her lungs, her every breath. It was alive, and it was hers, and no one could take it away.