Missing Persons Read Online Free PDF Page B

husband since the meeting at your lawyer’s office?”
    “I didn’t say I wasn’t in contact with him. I said I hadn’t seen him. He came by the house the other day . . .”
    “The day he died?”
    “I suppose so, yes. He left me a note.”
    “Do you have it?”
    “No.”
    “You got rid of it?”
    “I wouldn’t put it that way. It’s just, why would I keep a note from my estranged husband?”
    “What did it say?”
    “That he stopped by to pick up some of his things.”
    “The divorce, was it amicable?”
    “Are they ever amicable?”
    He smiled a little at that. “No, I guess not,” he conceded. “You weren’t home?”
    “That’s why he left me a note.”
    “Which you don’t have.”
    “No.”
    “But you admit he was here.”
    “Admit? No. I’m telling you he was here. There’s nothing to admit.” I was arguing semantics with a homicide detective. That would look good to a jury.
    Podeski looked around the living room. “Nice little house. Just the two of you?”
    “We don’t have children.”
    “But you had insurance.”
    “Are you asking me if I killed Frank?”
    “I didn’t say that,” he said.
    “You’re a homicide detective. You must think someone killed Frank or you wouldn’t be here.”
    “Not true, actually. The doctor had some concerns. We were called in to ask some questions.”
    “What kind of concerns?”
    Podeski handed me a business card with his name and a phone number imprinted under the logo of the Chicago Police Department. “We’re sorry for your loss, Mrs. Conway.”
    Then he and his silent note-taking partner left.
    I stood at the door, taking it all in. Frank wasn’t just dead. Possibly someone had murdered him. It didn’t make sense. Everyone loved Frank. The only person with even the slightest motive to kill him was me.

Nine
    A fter they left I thought about calling a criminal lawyer, just in case, but I didn’t know one, and anyway, it seemed an overreaction. They had to be wrong. No one had killed Frank. I knew that sometimes the police investigated deaths like Frank’s, ones that were sudden and unexpected. I’d done stories about it. It was routine. I wasn’t going to drive myself crazy imagining otherwise.
    After about ten minutes of standing in my living room, I noticed that I was still holding the package. I went into the kitchen, sat at the small Formica table we had inherited from Frank’s grandmother, and opened it. It was something to do, something that would keep me from thinking about Detective Podeski.
    The package was from Mike, or rather the associate producer who worked for Mike. The associate producer, or A.P., did all the initial legwork: finding stories, conducting pre-interviews, and sending out information to the field producer.
    I was supposed to read through everything and come up with a list of questions for each interview subject. The interviews weren’t designed to find out the truth about the missing woman or get any answers as to why she had disappeared. That really didn’t matter. What mattered was what story we wanted to tell: the one that would interest the viewers. She was a good girl who crossed paths with a killer or a bad girl who brought it on herself. She was a saint or a con artist or a whore. And the people around her were either heartbroken because of her disappearance or they were the cause of it—or, most likely, a combination of both.
    Once I had the story, I would write the questions that would be most likely to get me the answers I needed. Sometimes I wrote questions that could take me in two directions—she was good, she was bad—so I could change my mind in editing.
    I hadn’t accepted the job, but I guess Mike knew I would. He’d included hard copies of e-mail correspondence he and the A.P. had had with each potential interview subject, giving them my name and cellphone number as the person to contact and making ridiculous statements about how we hoped that the show would uncover the truth and