Blood Red

The damnedest thing was that he couldn’t. She could be a complete bitch with him when her back was hurting or the bloating she’d been experiencing made her feel like shit, but other than that, Angie was one of the sweetest women he’d ever known.

“No. She has fewer enemies than Santa Claus.”

“How about you, Brian? Have you pissed anyone off lately? I mean bad enough for them to want to get back at you through your wife?”

And there it was: the other big lie. Had he pissed anyone off? Well, there was the guy already doing everything he could to fuck up Brian’s whole universe and about thirty or so women he’d blackmailed into sex that ranged from uncomfortable to borderline rape. Oh, and then there was that little rape and murder a few hours earlier. He couldn’t well forget about that, now could he?

He wanted to tell the truth, he wanted to do anything he could that would help bring his Angie home safely. What he wanted to say and what he finally said had nothing in common; Brian lied through his teeth. “The meanest thing I’ve done to a perp lately was write a ticket for jaywalking, Rich.”

“Why don’t you sit down for a few more minutes, Brian, and we’ll look everything over?”

Brian nodded his thanks and watched the man as he went onto the porch to talk to his partner. They were supposed to be very good detectives. He’d never worked with them, only run across them at the station. He didn’t often run across cases where people were missing. Well, he didn’t normally get assigned to them, being as he was a traffic cop and not a detective.

The two detectives very carefully looked over the area where he’d found Angie’s clothes, not touching anything for several minutes, until finally going back to their car to get cameras and other supplies for their investigation.

The sun finally rose around the time they were bagging her clothes and putting them into an evidence box. The detectives were good guys when he was around them and they were all kidding each other at the office. Hell, half of the practical jokes that were pulled around the department could be traced back to Boyd and Holdstedter.

They weren’t clowning around now, and he doubted they would be comfortable pulling any jokes in the near future.

And that scared him a bit. The detectives were looking into the disappearance of his wife. Everyone knew that in a case like his, he would be one of the prime suspects. And if they started looking too closely at the details of Brian Freemont’s daily activities, he had little doubt that they could come up with a few unusual discrepancies.

The only thing he had going for him was that he’d been on duty for ten hours. Unfortunately, that wasn’t much of an alibi these days.

II

Kelli spent a lot of time going to her classes with a renewed passion for education. Well, perhaps that wasn’t completely accurate: what she had a passion for was not sitting around an empty house.

There was always something she could work on, and she found new and interesting diversions. There were several reports and essays she could lose herself in, and she did, earning extra credits toward a better final grade. Her GPA was always good, but seldom excellent. She intended to rectify that.

Because, really, as long as she was busy, she didn’t focus on the dreams. For the last two nights she’d dreamt of Teddy standing outside her window in the Lister house and asking her to come keep him warm. He was barely even a shape in the darkness, a shadow against the night. But he sounded so cold and so miserable that she almost got out of bed and went to him. There was something frightening about him in the dreams. He wasn’t the little boy she’d helped raise for the last few years, but only something that seemed to look like him.

The first night the dream had been unsettling. The second night it had made her sleepwalk. She didn’t want to know what the third night would bring if she weren’t careful.

So, college work. She was going to study herself into exhaustion and hope that would be enough to keep her from dreaming anything else that disturbing.

Poor Teddy was missing and maybe dead. She knew that. She didn’t need dreams to remind her of the fact. The Listers had become strangers in a lot of ways. Since Teddy’s body had disappeared from the hospital, they’d given up all pretense of civility and gone on the warpath.

Kelli was in mourning. The Listers were on a revenge kick and the target of their collective wrath was the hospital. She could understand their anger, but wanted nothing to do with the couple when they were going into a self-destructive rampage.

Kelli wandered the stacks of the library, her eyes roaming from bookshelf to bookshelf in an effort to find anything that would keep her properly distracted. It was getting harder to focus, but she kept trying.