All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [78]
“Silly of me, to think of Jake in the middle of all this. I guess seeing that Whitney has an admirer made me wish that Jake felt like that about me still.” And with that, she left the room. Taylor could hear her rummaging around but decided to leave her alone for a while.
Taylor swept through the rest of the house, looking for anything that would give them a clue as to why Whitney Connolly was in such desperate straits to reach her sister. If only the maid hadn’t wiped away any obvious intent by straightening and cleaning. If there were papers left out, notes or the like, there was no way to know. Then she had a thought.
“Quinn?” she called out. “Have the officers from the accident scene given you any of Whitney’s personal effects?”
Quinn came back into the kitchen. “No, I’m supposed to go to the morgue and pick them up. They said there were a few things in the car…Oh, now that was dumb of me, wasn’t it? We should have gone to get her things before we came all the way out here.”
Taylor stifled a laugh, as if Bellevue, a scant five minutes farther out from downtown than Belle Meade, was on the other side of the universe. “It’s really no trouble. We can head over there now if you’d like. I think we need to go through and see if anything in her stuff gives us a better idea than what we’ve gotten here.”
“That’s fine. I can write you a release and you can go through the information on your own, if that’s okay?”
Taylor studied her for a moment. “I can do that, but you may want to be there.” She hesitated, then decided it would be dumb not to ask. “Quinn, you don’t think this has anything to do with Nathan Chase, do you?”
Quinn’s face drained of color. “Oh dear God, you don’t think he’s…? Could he have gotten in touch with Whitney somehow?”
“Well, I don’t know. Has he ever reached out to you or your sister before?”
Quinn started pacing, a pale manicured hand clasped to her throat. She looked as if she might shatter into a million pieces all over the foyer.
“No, we’ve had no contact from him. It was part of his sentence. And he’s still in jail, I know, because I check every so often to make sure he’s not getting out. He’s not due for parole for another fifteen years.”
Taylor digested that for a moment. Kidnapping was one thing, but Chase had been sentenced to at least thirty years. She made a mental note to look up the case and find out what exactly he’d been sentenced for. It probably wasn’t germane to this case, but it wouldn’t hurt to have the whole story.
“Okay, Quinn. I’ll go and sort through Whitney’s things. If I find anything of note, I’ll let you know.”
“Thank you. Tell me, when will her body be released? I need to start making plans for the memorial.”
“Just give the M.E.’s office a call. They’ll be able to give you all of that information. It’ll be soon, I promise.”
As they made their way toward the door, they didn’t hear the chime go off on the computer to announce that Whitney had another new e-mail.
Thirty
Christina Louise Dale, better known as Christy to her family and friends, was a sad case. Nineteen years old, petite and brunette, Christy was always hustling, always looking for a way to get it done. She didn’t have the money to go to college nor the grades to get a scholarship, so she worked hard and associated with the college students around Roanoke as often as possible. She was autodidactic, and when she mentioned that, most of the college kids didn’t even know what it meant. On one hand, it was outrageous that she could be so much smarter than the rest of them and still not have a chance to go to school with them. But on the other hand, she secretly gloated, knowing that no matter what, she was better than all of them.
She continued her quest to educate herself and read everything she could in her spare time. She landed herself a job that would afford her the opportunities that had been denied