JUST A GIRL.
The girl answered Jim's knock pretty quickly. But then, calling out, "Sheriff's department. Open up!" usually worked.
She was young, blonde from a bottle, and wearing too much makeup. She wasn't from around here, but Jim already knew that. Because it was the second time he'd been in her apartment.
The girl's eyes darted between Jim, in his gray deputy's uniform, and Tony DeMarco, dark and sharp in detective's plain clothes that might have worked fine in Chicago but made him stick out like a sore thumb in Paradise.
"Cheryl Hendricks?" DeMarco asked.
"Yes?"
"May we come in?"
She hesitated a moment, then she glanced down the hall, and Jim knew why. She didn't want to be seen talking to the cops in the hallway of her apartment building. Either to protect her reputation from her neighbors, or . . . to protect it the other way. Because her neighbors weren't the kind of people who'd take kindly to a resident talking to the cops. It was that kind of building.
Just as Jim had expected, she held the door a fraction wider and said, "OK. But I already told him everything I know." She jerked her head at Jim.
DeMarco moved past her and led the way into a small living room that looked out onto an alley, then asked, "May we sit down?"
"Uh . . . sure."
DeMarco sat on one end of the old flowered couch and Jim took the other, removing a small notebook and pencil from his pocket and preparing to take notes.
"Thanks for contacting us," DeMarco began. "I'm very sorry to tell you, but you were right. Your roommate Heather Jones has been positively identified as the murder victim."
The heavily mascaraed brown eyes blinked twice, and the girl picked up a cushion from beside her and hugged it without seeming to realize what she was doing. "Oh."
"And we'd like to ask you some questions about her," DeMarco said.
"I didn't say you could talk to me anymore," she said. "It was a tip. An anonymous tip, like on TV." She looked accusingly at Jim. And since he was the good cop, he answered.
"We appreciated your call," he said. "Like I told you, that was the first step toward catching whoever did this to her."
And if you want your tips to stay anonymous, he didn't say, move to the big city.
DeMarco spoke up while the girl was off balance. "We just have a few more questions, Cheryl. How long ago did Heather move in with you?"
"Uh . . ." She blinked some more. "Middle of June. Sometime. I can't remember exactly when."
"And when was the last time you saw her?"
"Uh . . . I can't say exactly. Like I told him before." She nodded at Jim.
"Please think," DeMarco said. "It's important."
A pause while she bit her thin lips with their heavy coating of dark pink lipstick. "I remember when she was gone for a while," she said slowly. "And I thought, damn it, she's split on me. Because the September rent was due, and I was pissed."
"Around the first, then?" DeMarco asked. "Or the thirty-first?"
"Yeah. Like I said."
"And how long would you say it took you to decide she'd . . . split?" DeMarco asked.
She put her head on one side and bit her lips some more. "About a week. I had to put up a new sign for a roommate, and I remember thinking, if she hadn't come back in a week, she wouldn't be coming back."
Ah. Jim wrote down, 23rd? 24th? 25th? Closing in.
"How did you arrive at that figure?" DeMarco asked.
"Huh?" Cheryl blinked some more.
"A week. What made that the . . . cutoff date?"
"Oh. If you're with a guy more than a week, it'll be a while," she said matter-of-factly. "Because he wants you to stay. Or he took you somewhere else. Which was fine. I was just pissed she didn't tell me."
"Huh," DeMarco said, and Jim thought for a second about that life, going from one guy to another. "Where had she come from?"
"Seattle. Like I told him. Already," she said with another jerk of her head at Jim. "That was where her mom was, anyway."
Her mom-and her mom's loser boyfriend, who, by all accounts, was the reason Heather had been on her own since she'd been seventeen. Jim had seen her high school yearbook picture. Junior year. Her last year. Dark bangs brushing her eyes, long hair, hopeful smile. Jim hoped her mom was suffering over the choice that had led to her eighteen-year-old daughter lying dead in an Idaho ditch. Mothers who chose their men over their children . . . He knew what a mother was supposed to be, and it wasn't that.
"We know where she was from originally, yes," DeMarco said. "But where did she come to you from?" When Cheryl still looked at him uncomprehendingly, he said, "Where was she living before?"
Cheryl lifted her narrow shoulders. "With some guy, I guess. The guy she came to town with."
"Who was . . ." DeMarco said. "Who?"
Another shrug. "Some guy who was going to North Dakota, I think. For the fracking."
"So she was . . . what? Hitchhiking?"
"You know. Just . . . with him for a while. Then not. Because he left."
"Uh-huh," DeMarco said as Jim made a note. Some chance of finding that guy. "And he didn't come back for her, or contact her that you know of?"
"Um . . . no. I mean, she never mentioned him. She would have said, because she'd have been surprised. It wasn't, like, true love or anything. He was just a guy she was with for a while."
"Right," DeMarco said. "How did you meet her?"
"I had a sign in the Laundromat about the place. She came by. We weren't BFFs or anything. She was just a roommate." She crossed and recrossed her thin legs, shifting restlessly in her chair. "I don't know anything. I told you everything I know. You guys didn't park out front, did you?"
DeMarco ignored that. "Just a few more questions, Cheryl. Where did she get the money to move in with you? I'm guessing there was some money up front, right? How much rent were you charging?"
"Two hundred a month," Cheryl said. "How do I know where she got it? She had a job."
"What job was that?"
"Working at Macho Taco. You should ask them when she left. They'd have, like, records. She didn't work every day, but they'd know better than me exactly which days."
"Don't worry," DeMarco said. "We'll be talking to them. How long had she been working there?"
"I don't know. How should I know? Since she came, I guess. Why don't you ask them?"
"We will," DeMarco promised again. "What about a boyfriend? Who was she seeing?"
The heart of the matter. Because the DNA results had come back. Heather hadn't been in the criminal justice system. But she'd sure enough been four weeks pregnant, and the father could sure enough be identified. If they could get a match.
They'd keep the information to themselves for now. If the killer had known Heather was pregnant, and if he was the only one who'd known-that could be very useful indeed.
Especially since "four weeks pregnant" meant that the father wasn't the mysterious fracker. It was somebody Heather had known in Paradise. Who had just jumped up to prime-suspect level.
"I don't think she was seeing anybody in particular," Cheryl said. Which meant that finding him wouldn't be easy. But then, this one hadn't looked easy from the start. "I mean, nobody special."
"Anybody ever come here?" DeMarco asked.
"No. It was a rule. No guys here. Because it's my place, and I don't want some sketchy guy in here stealing my stuff."
"How about when you weren't home?"
"Then I wouldn't know, would I?"
"OK," DeMarco said. They'd ask the neighbors, of course. But the neighbors here? They wouldn't be talking. "Where did she hang out?"
"I saw her sometimes at the Back Alley, maybe," she said reluctantly. "Places like that."
"At bars," DeMarco said.
"Well, yeah. Where else? She wasn't exactly the library type."
"Who with?"
"I don't know. Guys."
"Anonymous guys," DeMarco said flatly. "Come on. Which guys?"
"I don't know, OK? No one guy. Just guys. Sometimes she came home, and sometimes she didn't. You know."
"Cheryl," Jim said. Time for Good Cop again. "One of them may have killed her. If you know, please tell us. Otherwise, you're leaving a guy out there who's willing to kill a girl and dump her like trash. And she wasn't trash."
He could see her swallow. "How do you know she wasn't?"
"Because nobody's trash," he said. "Nobody deserves that."
A moment, and then she answered. "Maybe . . . country guys, some of them."
"Anybody you know?" Jim said, since he was on a roll here. "Anybody you could describe? Please. Think back. It could be important."
"No," she said. "I didn't notice. I'm not from here, and besides, I go for college guys. You know, ones who might actually get you somewhere. Anyway, she was pretty. You don't hang around in bars with girls who are prettier than you."
"So if you didn't notice," Jim pressed, "how do you know they were country guys?"
Her brow knitted, and DeMarco and Jim sat quiet as she thought. "Chew," she finally said. "On the back pocket." She sketched a circle in the air, and Jim made a note. The round tin of chewing tobacco, always carried in that same pocket until it left a white ring on the back of your jeans. Not necessarily country guys. Plenty of college kids chewed. But those college kids were more likely to have come off of farms.
"How old were these guys?" Jim asked. "Older guys? Kids? What?"
"Not older," Cheryl said immediately. "And not kids. Twenties, thirties, maybe. Like that."
"So you did notice them," DeMarco pounced.
"No. Barely. Hardly at all." She was getting agitated again. "I told you. I can't help you. And you can't come back here."
DeMarco ignored that, too. They'd be coming back here. Talking to her neighbors, too. "You called us, what, almost three weeks after she disappeared? A week after the body was found. Why did you wait to report her missing?"
"Because I didn't know she was missing. I mean, I knew she wasn't here, but how was I supposed to know?" And I didn't want to get involved, she didn't have to say. "I thought she'd left with a guy. But then I thought . . ." Something flickered behind the brown eyes. "Maybe it was her. Because I heard, long brown hair and pink shirt. She liked pink. And she left her stuff."
"Could you show us?" DeMarco asked. "Show us her room?"
"It's my room. And I rented her bed already, I told you. Weeks ago. She was gone."
"You didn't keep her things?"
"Well, yeah. Some of them."
To his credit, DeMarco didn't show any impatience. "Can you show us her belongings now? We'll be taking them in any case. They're evidence, and her mother will want them."
Maybe her mother would. And maybe she wouldn't.
Cheryl got up, DeMarco looked at Jim, and Jim followed Cheryl back into a tiny bedroom, filled up fairly completely by two twin beds, neither of which was made. Not much of a place. Not much of a life, but somebody's life all the same.
Cheryl got down on her knees and poked around under the far bed, the one by the window, and finally pulled out a green garbage bag.
"I put her stuff in here," she said. "In case."
"That was kind of you," Jim said, taking the bag from her.
The compliment worked, because her mouth got a tiny tremble to it, and she lost a fraction of her toughness, that shell that was probably the only defense she had. "I thought . . ." she said. "You know. In case she came back. When you don't have much, and what you have isn't that great-some people think you wouldn't care, but it's all you have, you know?"
"Yeah. I know. Come on." Jim gestured toward the door and followed her out.
She sat in her chair again, and Jim sat on the couch and emptied the bag onto the coffee table.
Cheryl said, "Hey!"