Dust by Patricia Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page B

military-grade. It’s what she and I both have, and the detail might tell me something important about Gail Shipton. The average person doesn’t have a smartphone skin like this.
    “I got her call history.” Marino explains how he extracted the password and other data by utilizing a handheld physical analyzer he’s not supposed to have.
    A Lucy invention. A mobile scanner she modified to do her bidding, which in her case means hacking. Leave my niece alone with your smartphone or computer for five minutes and she’ll own your life.
    “The last call Gail made yesterday afternoon was at five fifty-three.” Marino’s eyes are on the fanny pack strapped around my waist. “Carin Hegel, who’d just texted Gail to call her. When the hell did you start packing heat?”
    “Carin Hegel, as in the attorney?”
    “Do you know her?”
    “Fortunately I’ve not been involved in any big lawsuits, so no. But we’ve met a number of times.” Most recently in Boston’s federal courthouse, and I try to remember when that was.
    Early this month, maybe two weeks ago. We ran into each other in the café on the second floor and she mentioned she was there for a pretrial hearing. The case involved a financial management company she described as a “gang of thugs.”
    “It’s looking pretty certain that Gail left the bar, went out to the parking lot in back, pretty much what her friend Haley Swanson told me,” Marino continues. “Gail answered a call from someone with a blocked number and must have stepped outside so she could hear. In the log it just says
unknown
and
mobile
. If you go to the corresponding info screen, it gives you the date, time, and how long the call was, which was seventeen minutes.”
    He gives Quincy another piece of biscuit.
    “Gail ended that call when the text from Carin Hegel landed,” he says. “She tried to call her and that call lasted only twenty-four seconds. Which is interesting. Either she didn’t get her and left a voice mail or she got interrupted.”
    “We need to get hold of Carin Hegel.” Uneasiness flickers.
    There was something else she told me when we were buying coffee in the courthouse café a few weeks ago. She indicated she wasn’t living at home. I gathered that she’d relocated to an undisclosed place where she planned to stay until the trial was over.
    It wasn’t safe to have her usual routines, she confided in me. How convenient it would be if she were in a car accident right now, she joked, but it was obvious she didn’t think it was a laughing matter. She was giving me fair warning in the event she showed up at my office without an appointment and horizontally, she quipped, and I didn’t think that was funny. None of it was.
    “I already left a message for her to call me ASAP,” Marino says.
    “You mentioned that her client might be missing?”
    “Yeah. Of course she doesn’t know me so I don’t know if she’ll call me back or get her damn secretary to do it. You know how big-shot lawyers are,” Marino says as I put on my coat. “The shoe was close to the phone, rained on but doesn’t look like it was out there all that long. Hours versus days,” he adds. “I’m thinking someone grabbed Gail and she struggled, dropped the phone, and a shoe came off. Why the hell are you wearing a gun?”
    “What does the shoe look like?” I ask.
    He opens another photograph on his phone to show me a green faux-crocodile leather flat upside down on dirty wet pavement.
    “It would come off easily, as opposed to boots or shoes that tie on or zip up,” I observe.
    “Right. Tells us she struggled as someone forced her into his car.”
    “I don’t know what it tells us yet. What about any other personal effects?”
    “It’s possible she had a brown shoulder bag with her. She carried one, and it’s not inside her condo. That’s what her friend Haley said.”
    “Whom you’ve not talked to since one a.m.”
    “There’s only so many minutes in an hour.” Marino