Finding Sarah Read Online Free PDF Page A

knew which ones were yours and which might
belong to the robber.”
    Randy remembered what Sarah had
said and studied Chris’ reaction. She’d have been disappointed. Calm,
collected, without a hint of indignation. He could usually read his suspects.
Chris’ cool green eyes had no trouble meeting his own, yet they didn’t lock on
the way liars’ often did. Liars either stared you down or never met your gaze.
    “Of course, Detective. Do I go to
the police station?”
    “No, I can do it now.” He pulled
the kit from his briefcase and rolled Chris’ prints onto the ten card. Chris
remained nonchalant, showing little interest in the process until Randy was
done. Then he examined his fingers with some disgust.
    Randy handed him a foil-wrapped
cleansing towel. “This should take it off,” he said.
    While Chris worked on removing
all traces of the ink, Randy packed everything back into his briefcase.
    Chris escorted him to the door,
still wiping his fingers. “Sarah’s a nice woman,” he said. “We go back a long
way. Her husband’s suicide—a real tragedy.”
    “I agree.” Randy pulled himself
up to his full height and smiled at Chris. “It would be a real shame if
anything else happened to her.”
     
    * * * * *
     
    Randy parked his pickup under a
light in the far corner of St. Michael’s parking lot and flipped pages in his
notebook. He asked himself why he hadn’t waited and met Sarah at her apartment
as planned. When he’d decided to give her a ride home from her class, it seemed
logical. But what had possessed him to get here over anhour early? And
at a nursing home, yet. He gave himself an internal kick in the head and
started reviewing his notes. Even in the parking lot, memories of Gram threatened
to overwhelm him. He popped the plastic lid from his takeout coffee and sipped.
    He let his mind float, searching
for connections, but he needed more dots to connect. Eventually, the coffee
made it clear he couldn’t sit out here much longer. He put everything in his
briefcase and quick-stepped across the parking lot to the building’s entrance.
    After a stop in the men’s room,
Randy ambled down the speckled linoleum hall to the recreation center where the
silver-haired receptionist had told him he would find Sarah’s class. At least
the smell of antiseptic wasn’t so strong here. Ten feet from the open door, he
froze. After a deep breath, he found his wall of detachment. At the doorway, he
had to stop again. Gram was gone. It’d been eight years, he reminded himself.
    Sarah’s voice centered him. He
stood to one side, peering through the door. His mouth dropped open and he
clamped it closed. Sarah roamed around a room of a dozen or so elderly men and
women, some in wheelchairs, some sitting at tables, some standing. All worked
with slabs of wet, gray clay. Dumbfounded, he studied Sarah as she moved from
one person to the next, offering encouragement, taking their gnarled hands and
helping them shape the clay into whatever their mind’s eye projected.
    His automatic cop
assessment—white female, late twenties, brown hair, blue eyes, five-four,
one-fifteen—hardly did Sarah justice.
    Deep chestnut hair that shimmered
in the light. Stone blue eyes that reflected every thought in her head. He snorted
as he thought of the way that would go over in a briefing.
    She must have heard him, because
her head snapped toward the door. Wearing a plastic apron, covered to her
elbows in clay, she straightened and raised her eyebrows. And smiled.
    “Keep going everyone,” she said.
She crossed the room, hands raised in front of her like a surgeon after
scrubbing. “Does this visit mean you’ve found something?”
    He hated to erase the look of
hope from her face. “Sorry, not yet. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I
didn’t realize this was the kind of class you meant. That you were the teacher.
I guess I saw you sitting in some boring lecture and we’d sneak away and finish
our business early. But